
Flickr Founder Apologizes over Censorship - nostrademons
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/40074/page3/#reply213196
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ralph
Relevancy?

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nostrademons
It's a good example of how to handle a PR crisis. If your site gets popular
enough, you _will_ face one. The natural reaction of an executive is usually
one of two:

1.) Ignore the problem, eg. Intel with the Pentium bug.

2.) Blame the user, eg. most customer service reps nowadays.

Stewart didn't do either of these - he took full responsiblility, explained
why the action was taken (no matter how misguided), and enacted policies to
prevent it from happening again. And you can see that the result is even more
customer loyalty.

We had several of these crises situations when I was at FictionAlley. They're
much more difficult to handle than they seem from the outside, because there
are always considerations that your users don't see (legal issues, other
constituencies, privacy considerations). Users really appreciate you being
honest with them, though, and if you make a good-faith effort to communicate
what you can without defensiveness, you'll usually get their understanding if
not their support.

Also, a random observation - these crises _always_ seem to occur when the
people in charge are away. I remember having one erupt right after my laptop
had died and having to deal with it all from the university computer labs, and
then another blew up while the site owner was returning from her brother-in-
law's funeral.

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ralph
Thanks. It would be nice if the site allowed comments to be submitted along
with a URL so that readers know what they're meant to get from the article.

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nostrademons
Oh, that's my fault: I could've posted a comment on it immediately after
submitting. I've done that with a couple other submissions that weren't
immediately obvious. For this one, it was late at night, I wanted to get some
hacking done on my startup, and I was curious if people would understand the
point without an explanation. Evidently not. Mea culpa.

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ralph
I still think the site should allow a comment with the URL otherwise, with
popular threads, the initial explanatory comment can be pushed down into
obscurity. <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1149>

