Yeah, until totay I was five times a part of explore. And it's easy to see that so many accounts comment all pics with the same words... At the first time I was exited and proud. I hadn't any idea why Flickr picked the portrait of Greyfriar's Bobby. OK, it's a legend at Edinburgh...and OK there's a nice bokeh... but I was proud. My 1st picture that received about 100 likes and invitations to join groups, but I quickly removed it from them because the spam picture commentes were coming in.

I still get a nice feeling by seeing myself featured on explore, but I now know which comments are worth responding to more specifically. But it's a bit annoying to know thre're will be the same meaningless words by the same people...

@Myotis Yup. Either you spend the time getting to know folks, or you accept generic (possibly bot) response. Also, it's as much a function of how many other photos were being uploaded and gaining "velocity" at the time yours was posted - so the *other* downside of the Explore algorithm is it's basically saying your photo is better than a slow news day. How encouraging ;)

Yeah, and this competition isn't really a competition; it's an algorithm that picks some pics from the masses (and mess). At first I thought there were some employees filtering some nice uploads out of the daily wave... I was a bit naive, I think. 😅

@Myotis Quite. I think the most I've learned from flickr is that, as a photographer, audiences are fickle. The photo that's doing well in Explore this weekend garnered less than 10 likes on FB (shared personal, photo-page and relevant group), 15 faves on IG, 16 faves on here, 8 likes on bluesky... 145 faves on flickr. I know from bitter experience that none of the above translate into either photo-club competition scores or sales. ;)