Beware! Beware! Beware the mocking laughter of the Master Sword!
Okay, so everyone knows Flickr, right? Site whose main purpose is to give people a place to go "OMFG GUYZ LOOK AT MY PITURZ!" and whore for comments?

Well, the latest iteration of that is the development of these invited-pictures-only groups (groups being sort of like communities on LJ, but where the point is to win the "hey everyone, look at me!" game by spamming one's picture across the highest possible number of groups) that invite pictures by leaving a comment with a copy and pasted icon. Usually these icons have a cute little picture and some text to the effect of "I saw this picture first! Put it in my group!" Sometimes people leave further comments, sometimes they don't. This is mild example of what I'm talking about.

Flickr also has a certain subset of users who are mortally offended by the fact that not all of Flickr's users are photography students. They expect people to leave book-length comments analyzing every aspect of every pixel in a picture or not comment at all. They tend to leave comments containing "constructive" criticism that can come across harshly to people who are just messing around with cat pictures and things, and to spend a lot of time bitching to each other in their critique groups about getting lame comments or having someone get offended by their blunt comment. This type of user also tends to dislike the invite-only pools, because it leads to "pointless" comments.



This time, to continue the LJ analogy, there's something like that "best dumb blonde joke ever" meme going around, except not meant to be funny. You know, everyone throws up some vaguely worded link and doesn't say much else about it. I first found out about it on lol_cats, where everyone is pretty low-key about the whole thing.

It turns out that some people who don't like icon invite groups started an arguably mean-spirited parody of one called Master Sword of Greatness.

A Member Who Cares demonstrates the depth of his or her caring by spamming dozens of invite only groups. This is seriously only a fraction of the posts he/she made; there used to be a two-column list of invite-only communities that this caring member had joined on its profile page, but s/h/it's either dropped them all or made its profile page private. Doesn't really matter, they were all the same post anyway.

To spare you wading through all that, the best wank is in A Big Fave. Here A Member Who Cares opens with his/her dire warning of a group that lures people in just to say mean things to them. But you know that if you say the name of a bad Flickr group it comes out of the mirror and smashes your camera, so s/he won't give any specifics. Most people are confused by this. Mackenz brings up an entirely different wank. Whether it's her guess as to what's going on or just something she thinks needs attention, I have no idea. One of the mods elaborates but won't name names either. It is not until nineteen comments into the thread that someone actually names the group.

Once the truth comes out, public opinions tends to fall along the lines of:
1)Oh, thanks. Will watch out for them.
2)Dude, it's just a bunch of trolls. Ignore them.
3) Hah, that looks sort of fun.
4) How dare you think that's fun?!
5) Reporting endless feedback loops in other posts by A Member Who Cares
6) Reporting batshit inspired by this circus

Then Superchou, one of the mods (I think) from Master Sword of Greatness shows up and seems quite reasonable. Reactions to her are also pretty mild until A Member Who Cares comes back to beat her with a wall of text. Superchou links to her answer in another group, which is basically just "repeat to yourself 'it's just a joke, I should really just relax'". dbcoopersson, who may or may not be a troll, disagrees vehemently. They fight for a while about whether or not Master Sword of Greatness is hijacking invites from other communities.

Then everyone else tells them to shut up, the mod declines to lock the thread, and it keeps limping along at slightly lower volume.