Over the past year, since Yahoo bought Flickr, there seem to be more and more moves to make Flickr a clean (and boring) place, at first they changed their rules as to what's consider a proper image without really letting anyone know, then they changed the filters for searches and came up with the demand for people to moderate their own image - using a "safe, moderate and unsafe" scale (again - without really informing people of it) then they block a whole bunch of users because they didn't follow the new rules. The last step in this that I've heard of was that in 5 countries (Germany, Korea, and 3 others that I can't remember now) people couldn't even choose to set their account as moderate or unsafe and so weren't able to watch any images but the "safe" ones.
From what I've noticed the thing that got them upset up until now is nudity, but I guess it's just a matter of time till they start blocking topics they don't find "safe" such as smoking.
In each of those stages, when the flickrists got upset, flickr used the old "It's not us, it's Yahoo" argument. I guess they are doing it again.
I think that smoking is unhealthy, but I also thing that in recent years, the persecution of smokers really went too far, I don't think any kid would start smoking because he saw another picture of a child smoking. It seem to me that right now, there's a big confusion in our culture between seeing something and doing it, and that Flickr, just like a lot of other manufacturer of content, feel like they can erase social problems by not showing them.
