The wrong way to treat your users

Two of the blogs I read the most (here and here), and many of my contacts (here, here, here, here, & here) are complaining about certain policies Flickr has enacted lately in coordination with its process of localisation into different languages.  You can check the whole story at the links but basically that's the problem with sites that rely on user-generated content for their value-added: you as an owner/operator can't decide alone when something is wrong, the community has to be involved.  Furthermore, when you put into action something that hasn't been agreed with said community, you risk alienating exactly the kind of people that made your site successful in the first place.

Whereas I definitely don't agree with the way things have turned lately, I am still in a wait-and-see kind of situation.  I definitely wouldn't like things to turn for the worse, since I really, really like Flickr, and I have a huge amount of my pictures there.