Flickr April Fools

April 1, 2006 11:55 AM

Flickr Interestingness has gone to the cats. It's sort of a joke how many cat photos are "Interesting" on Flickr. It seems for April Fools Day, Flickr has gone to the cats.
posted by eperker (24 comments total)

Do you have to be logged in or something to see the cats? I just see a random assortment of photos.

Anyway, photo.net's most rated are usually an order of magnitude better than flickr's most interesting.
posted by driveler at 12:06 PM on April 1, 2006

Huh. I saw the page earlier today and it was indeed all cats.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 12:08 PM on April 1, 2006

driveler, I'm logged in and I can't see any cats either. Even after a couple of reloads . . . . .

I hate cats anyway.
posted by jamesonandwater at 12:09 PM on April 1, 2006

Where does the line start?
posted by underer at 12:21 PM on April 1, 2006

The random 7-day wasn't all cats when I tried but it did turn up this one, which actually will interest many mefiites.
posted by jfuller at 12:35 PM on April 1, 2006

first time i opened it, every picture was a cat.

when i reloaded it, and every time since, they were all random.
posted by knapah at 12:47 PM on April 1, 2006

workaround?
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 1:16 PM on April 1, 2006

Wait, there are photos on Flickr that aren't of cats?
posted by tiny purple fishes at 1:20 PM on April 1, 2006

Of course there are! Some are hipster self-portraits!
posted by brundlefly at 1:40 PM on April 1, 2006

Guys this is the worst April Fool's Day of all time.
posted by wigu at 2:14 PM on April 1, 2006

It was very weird. I clicked through just now, and I saw images of cats appear -- and then Firefox redrew the screen, and none of them were cats.
posted by dhartung at 2:14 PM on April 1, 2006

dhartung: Same happened here. Now I can't see the cats at all.
posted by jmhodges at 2:16 PM on April 1, 2006

If you scroll down a little on popurls, all cats.
posted by crunchland at 2:28 PM on April 1, 2006

Didn't see no kitties, but sumpin' one mighta drug in ...
posted by rob511 at 3:07 PM on April 1, 2006

Where the hell are the cats?
posted by jefbla at 5:13 PM on April 1, 2006

Someone get those motherfucking cats back on the motherfucking page!
posted by The Monkey at 5:40 PM on April 1, 2006

Okay, so there are no more cats. Jeez. So sue me.
posted by eperker at 6:24 PM on April 1, 2006

Okay. You should be receiving the summons tomorrow.
posted by Justinian at 6:31 PM on April 1, 2006

The Flickr folks bent their Explore and Interestingness algorithm to only include photos with the tag "cat", just for one day, and only in your time zone. First, folks in China and Oz were piping up "WTF" on the boards while typical blinkered USAians said "I don't see anything different". As the globe turned, the cats came and went for everyone. Classic prank, hats off to the Flickr folks.

[explainjoke]see, a lot of people on Flickr complain that the majority of the photos hosted there are of your stupid cat, where's the quality photography yadda yadda[/explainjoke]
posted by sidereal at 7:30 PM on April 1, 2006

sidereal, if that's actually the case, it's probably one of the better internet april fools prank I've seen.
posted by puke & cry at 7:49 PM on April 1, 2006 [1 favorite]

flickr blog
posted by crunchland at 8:09 PM on April 1, 2006

just for one day, and only in your time zone

It's gmt-8 here, April 1st @ 8.22pm .... no cats :(
posted by starscream at 8:24 PM on April 1, 2006

They messed up interestingness so I now have a photo that made the first page for april 1. This makes me temporarily happy and now I can listen to some twee instead of just emo.
posted by srboisvert at 1:54 AM on April 2, 2006

Cat's are just so YUCK. But they make good cookies, don't they, PP? LOL
posted by GoodJob! at 1:52 PM on April 2, 2006