Leaving a Hobby Community: Why I Stopped Participating in 52Frames

For the past three years and sixteen weeks, I’ve been participating in the weekly photo challenges at 52Frames.

Earlier this week, I made what will be my last submission to the project and walked away.

Leaving a hobby community is never an easy thing, but sometimes it becomes necessary. This post is my attempt to put my reasons why down in a semi-coherent form, both to get my own thoughts in order and for me to point to for anyone asking why.

The Project

For anyone not familiar with the 52Frames project, the basic structure is that each week, at midnight Eastern time on Sunday evening, a photography challenge is posted and the participants have until the following Sunday midnight to take and submit a photo that answers the challenge. The challenges can range from subjects like “Food Photography” or specific techniques like “Triangular Composition” or “Macro” to more abstract ideas like “Time” or “Soundtrack.” Each challenge also has an additional, optional, Extra Challenge for people that want to attempt a more difficult prompt for the week.

Participants (called “Framers”) are strongly encouraged to keep their streak of weekly submissions going as long as possible, with the updated streak being displayed after each submission. Completing 52 weeks overall (consecutive streak not required) got you an additional badge on the site for being a “Weekly Warrior” and a shout-out in the weekly social media posts. Displayed streaks reset at 52, but you could track yourself across multiple streaks of 52 if you wanted to.

Since the first week of 2023, I’ve been trying to complete as many of the challenges as I can, using a Game Boy Camera. Other than the one challenge that mandated using a cell phone camera, I managed to pull off almost all of them, only missing one week in each of 2023 and 2024, and five in 2025 (illness and scheduling issues, mostly).

The Problem Challenge

I actually very nearly stopped participating after only a few weeks when in just Week 4, the Portrait of a Stranger challenge came up.

Like many people, I deal with some pretty serious anxiety issues, and one of my huge triggers is the feeling of Imposing on Other People. Trying to do this challenge was pure hell - I tried on multiple occasions to work up the courage to ask someone, but the roiling stomach and nausea I got even coming close stopped me every time. These were people going about their own business, or even more upsetting to me, were at work doing their job, and I was about to Be an Imposition to try and convince them to let me take their picture with this weird camera and then post it on the Internet for the world to see. I couldn’t do it, and was making myself sick to my stomach trying.

I eventually gave up and submitted a portrait-style photo of a statue. I felt like I had cheated the challenge and was miserable and disappointed in myself for days afterward.

In the weekly challenge discussion thread on Facebook for the challenge, quite a few people spoke out about how difficult and triggering the challenge was, including a clinical psychologist. Several people clearly had even worse anxiety issues than I did, and I added a comment to share my experience. A common sentiment was that Portrait was a fine challenge, the issue was the Of A Stranger part, and many suggested moving the problematic part to being the Extra Challenge. To be fair to everyone, though, a few self-described extroverts did say that they enjoyed the challenge and there were also a few “I was really nervous, but managed to do it” comments as well. The group administrators seemed receptive to the feedback, and (grudgingly, in some cases) said they’d look at revising it for future years.

For 2024, the challenge was indeed revised to be “Portrait,” with the Extra Challenge being the “Of a Stranger” part that so many people had an issue with. The weekly thread on Facebook largely praised the change, though as with any large group of people, there were a few contrarians saying they missed the adrenaline rush or social interaction the old challenge provided. But for the most part as far as I could see, it was good - the admins had listened to the problems people had with a challenge that was harmful to them, and had revised the challenge in a way that mitigated the harm but still offered the difficulty for the people that wanted to attempt it.

The Portrait challenge wasn’t included in the 2025 cycle, but that was hardly unusual. Some challenges get rotated in or out, new ones are added to the pool, and some old ones get retired during every yearly cycle. However, Involve a Stranger was included as the Extra Challenge on Week 3: Leading Lines that year.

It Comes Back, Backlash, and Admin Reaction

I need to preface this section with a note that none of this is intended to be a personal judgement or attack on any of the project admins. Moderating a multi-thousand-person global online community is a difficult, draining, and often thankless task filled with judgment calls that are impossible to get completely correct or please everyone. As Mike Massnik of TechDirt has repeatedly stated, moderation at scale is fundamentally impossible to get 100% right.

However, that’s not a magic “get out of criticism free” card. When the inevitable mistakes happen, acknowledging the issue and taking action to correct both the immediate problem and avoid a repeat of it are important factors to retaining the trust of your community.

For the 2026 cycle, Portrait of a Stranger returned as the Week 16 challenge, with the subject being a Stranger back to being an integral part of the primary challenge, not the Extra Challenge as was suggested after 2023 and implemented in 2024.

To make matters worse, the challenge text opened with the dismissive phrasing “Take a deep breath. This is NOT as difficult as it seems in your head.” It then listed several things as “easy wins:” a barista, your mail carrier, a cashier, and your Uber driver - exactly the people who are at work and that imposing on for a picture I most would have a problem with.

All through the challenge text and the weekly email expounding on it, the message felt repeated: the interaction with the Stranger was the important part of the challenge. Acknowledgement of people that have problems with it was always phrased in a way that implied that any other option was lesser: “can’t bring themselves to speak to a stranger,” “cheat,” “work around,” “cannot even achieve the ‘low hanging fruit’ ideas,” and so on.

The backlash was swift. A normal week’s challenge discussion thread on Facebook rarely gets beyond 20 comments; this one generated more than 150 on Monday alone, and there are nearly 300 on the various posts addressing the challenge as I write this on Friday. The sentiment was largely negative, with several people explicitly saying that they viewed the backtracking on Stranger being only an Extra Challenge being a broken promise to Framers with anxiety issues. Several more Framers also added comments about the actual legality of performing the stated challenge, especially in the EU in general and Germany in particular where privacy laws and cultural norms strongly cut against it. More than one stated they had cancelled their Patreon subscriptions and others announced their intention to leave the project. I also posted a comment describing my issues with and hatred of the challenge, but hadn’t fully decided whether to leave or not at that point yet.

On Tuesday morning, the challenge was updated to be titled “Portrait (Of a Stranger)” and some minor changes to the challenge text were made to indicate that just a portrait would fulfil the challenge, but a Stranger was still strongly encouraged. Some of the dismissive phrasing was removed, but the overall tone remained one of non-Stranger submissions being lesser. Of particular note, the opening text was updated to read “Take a deep breath. We hope this is NOT as difficult as it seems in your head” (emphasis added).

Around the same time, an admin made a post in the Facebook group about the change and defending the intent of the original challenge, quoting Marcus Aurelius (“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”) and Seneca (“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.”) about how discomfort could lead to creative solutions. The post did address how growth can’t be imposed and acknowledged the issues many people have with the challenge, honestly quite understandingly and empathetically and without any of the diminishing or dismissive language in the original challenge and email. It also included a call for understanding for the admins, who did not intend to be unempathetic or not understanding of the issues.

However, a section of one comment in particular from the same admin in the original thread the day before also caught my eye. Responding to a commenter that made note of what they saw as a “lack of empathy,” the admin said “[T]he fact that we cared enough to adjust the title last time suddenly gave everyone the right to decide what we must do always? The fact that we listened and made the swap this time means nothing?”

I sincerely doubt that how I took that comment was how it was intended to come across, but I had a very difficult time reading that as anything but “We threw you a bone last time, and changed it this time because of the backlash. Why aren’t you being more grateful we’re being accommodating?”

And that was the point where the scales tipped for me and I made my decision to leave.

It’s not about the community dictating to the admins.

The admins have been told repeatedly that this one specific part of one challenge is actively harmful to a not-insignificant portion of the community. It generates more than ten times as much controversy as any other challenge the rest of the year, and that’s just within the segment of the community that’s still on Facebook (a dwindling number as time passes). The admins have acknowledged (even if only begrudgingly) that it’s a problem, and there was a perfectly workable solution in place that allowed people that wanted the additional difficulty to attempt it.

And yet, the harmful part of the challenge was reinstated as a requirement because some subset of the admin team felt that removing the harm made the challenge too “watered-down.” Anyone that can’t handle the harm needs to either suck it up and find a “creative solution” to not break their streak that they’re so heavily encouraged to maintain, or lose the streak and take the attendant feeling of failure.

And that’s something I can’t accept or continue in cooperation with.

The challenge was only softened this time because of the amount of backlash. There’s no guarantee that it won’t be back again in the future.

The trust is broken, and I don’t see any easy way to restore it.

What now?

I’ve posted a final farewell photo for the week. Ironically, it’s the earliest in the week I’ve ever posted a submission. The caption includes a deep thank you to the people who have looked at, liked, and commented on my photos, who I am truly grateful for and deeply appreciate. There’s one particular Framer who’s regularly made a comment on my photo every week for more than two years and they got a specific call out thanking them.

I’ll leave email notifications on for another week or two, so I can at least read the responses. I’ll unsubscribe from the main mailing list probably on Monday and leave the Facebook group and Discord sometime during the week.

And then I’m going to take a break for a bit. I’ll still take my Game Boy Camera with me on vacations, but between trips, it’ll get put away for now.

Once I’m in a better mindset, I’ll start looking for other weekly photo challenge options. Despite how my time with 52Frames is ending, I did enjoy having that weekly goal of taking an interesting photo on a specific theme. It built a habit of looking around and seeing what might make a decent photograph.

I know there are a number of photography sites that post lists of weekly themes, some with communities to post the photos in, some without.

But when I do go looking, my ironclad rule is going to be that in order for me to consider it a photography challenge, it has to be at least achievable by a solo photographer with no involvement from any other person. The photographer can choose to include as many other people as they like, but once another person’s presence is required, it’s no longer just a photography challenge, but a social challenge as well.

I don’t want social challenges. I just want to take silly tiny photos on a ridiculous camera.

And someday, I’ll get back to doing just that, on the terms and in the mindset I’ve decided for myself. But until then, it’s time to put the camera away for a bit.