DPReview is being shut down by Amazon today

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/dpreview-is-being-shut-down-by-amazon-today-what-a-waste-says-founder

by elijahparker • 3 years ago

128 72 3 years ago

digitalcameraworld.com

mg5• 3 years ago

Some years ago, I accidentally got into the camera comparison game.

It started with this Show HN about a weekend project which displays flashdrives on a scatterplot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980

Over time, I made the chart interactive (so one can filter by specs) and extended it to phones, monitors, tablets, 3D-Printers, MP3-Players, SSDs and also cameras:

https://www.productchart.com/cameras/

Not sure how much it can be a replacement for DPReview, which had much more in depth reviews. Open for feedback.

savolai3• 3 years ago

Thanks. I really liked the ux here and got lost exploring. Flipping from browsing mode to conparison chart table mode between multiple cameras would be great.

mg5• 3 years ago

Glad you like it.

Have you seen that you can hightlight one camera and then compare it to another?

dividedbyzero• 3 years ago

This is neat! I would love something like this for camera lenses. Seeing everything available for Fujifilm at a glance like your cameras view, that would be so handy.

mg5• 3 years ago

I'm a bit hesitant to add more product categories at the moment.

All the data is manually researched, which takes about 1h per day, 7 days a week. There are a surprisingly large number of new products and product variations coming out on a constant basis. So a new category would increase the time to research the data further.

janeway• 3 years ago

According to wikipedia it had 14 employees, and in 2007 had 7 million viewers per month. I wonder if Amazon wants to repurpose somehow or just jettison its less profitable arms?

aidog• 3 years ago

Just accessed it 5 minutes ago and now it is gone with a 429 error

tiernano• 3 years ago

https://m.dpreview.com/news/0507902613/dpreview-closure-an-u... has an update. Looks like the site will stay online for the foreseeable future in read only mode...

andyjohnson0• 3 years ago

The site is still up for me in the UK at 07:30 UTC.

I thought I read something on HN that Amazon had agreed to keep the existing content available?

dan1234• 3 years ago

Not only is it still working for me (12:29 UK time), but their most recent article (published today) is titled “Most significant cameras of the DPReview era: Part 1”, implying more content to come!

https://m.dpreview.com/articles/5191963353/most-significant-...

darkstar_16• 3 years ago

Sad day. Used to love reading their in depth reviews.

rob74• 3 years ago

Same - actually I based my decision of buying my last two cameras almost solely on their reviews. Not sure what I'll do for the next one (which I will probably only buy when/if the current one breaks) - read Amazon reviews (I'm joking of course)?

10729287• 3 years ago

Big loss and very sad news for the photo industry. Here in France there's only one website dedicated to photography remaining : phototrend.fr. Other ones are either dead, general tech mags not caring that much for photography, or paper mag lacking online presence.

zone411• 3 years ago

When Amazon shut down IMDb's film forums, I contacted them to see if they were interested in selling them to at least archive the content. They were not interested. It's sad to see them kill off another Internet fixture.

my123• 3 years ago

Selling is very complicated, especially from a data privacy perspective. Often just not worth the risk :/

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

Some may disagree, but to me, it feels much like Google's acquisition of DejaNews.

Not sure how anyone can see these so-called "tech" companies as being on the side of users. Why acquire and shut down a website full of user comments, whether it's archives of Usenet forums, IMDb forums or DPReview forums. As if these user comments are either some sort of commercial opportunity, e.g., personal data mining, or some sort of competitive threat. Then eventually kill them off (absent user protest) as if they are worth nothing or a liability.

Why interfere with these websites. It makes no sense unless the goal is contrary to user interests.

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

They bought and ran the site for 16 years. Sounds like a far-fetched plan.

simon_acca• 3 years ago

As an example that it is indeed possible for a big co. to care enough to do the right thing, Stripe acquired Indie Hackers and then sold it back to the founders: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35460375

jeswin• 3 years ago

For a $1T org like Amazon, these are distractions. Even trying to transfer it is a distraction; it wouldn't move the revenue needle. It makes sense.

I mean, it makes a lot of sense when one doesn't value the importance of preserving culture. DP Review forums were the entire history of Digital Photography - millions of posts from the early days when everyone was skeptical of digital cameras, to the modern age when film is somewhat a niche hobby. The suits who made the decision to pull the plug probably never participated in communities.

It makes me sad to see a part of our shared culture destroyed like this. Reminds of me of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban; this time because some people have no taste.

andybak• 3 years ago

For a $1T org like Amazon, these are distractions.

Until it creates enough bad press that it does move the dial.

That might sound unlikely but it can be death by 1000 cuts. I believe the groundswell of dislike for Google among the tech literate had it's roots in the Reader shutdown.

The tech literate advise friends and family - so their influence is higher than the raw numbers suggest.

You can burn good will but it's very difficult to get it back. Amazon are being criticized from multiple angles and it all adds up.

sneak• 3 years ago

I believe the groundswell of dislike for Google among the tech literate had it's roots in the Reader shutdown.

I disagree. I believe it was the "SSL added and removed here" NSA slide that showed that nothing stored with cloud providers is safe from government snooping without a warrant. It's not so much directed at Google as it is everything that is big enough to be on the tip of the surveillance state's tongue.

Nothing we store non-e2ee in the big public cloud services is safe from illegal warrantless wiretapping. It's not strictly Google's fault per se.

iLoveOncall3• 3 years ago

I believe the groundswell of dislike for Google among the tech literate

You are in an echo-chamber.

There isn't much negative opinion of Google, Paypal, Stripe and other companies hated by HN commenters outside of HN, even in technical communities.

thaumasiotes• 3 years ago

from the early days when everyone was skeptical of digital cameras, to the modern age when film is somewhat a niche hobby

Maybe film will come back. Digital cameras used to be a great idea. Now they get mainstream press coverage for things like

"California residents struggle to photograph the orange sky because their digital cameras won't allow the sky to be orange."

"Samsung will locate the moon in your pictures and replace it with stored stock photography of the moon."

"Samsung will add teeth to photographs of your infant."

I'd like it if my digital cameras wouldn't add information to the photo that wasn't present in the sensors. I don't think that's actually a minority view.

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

Maybe film will come back.

It's already been gaining popularity for years. I've read consumer[0] sales of instant film are the highest they've ever been.

Hell, digital cameras from 10-20 years ago are starting to be considered "retro", and zoomers are buying them.

[0] historically the majority of sales were apparently for professional/commercial purposes.

wkat4242• 3 years ago

Of course any pro camera allows manual white balance.

The Samsung thing was indeed ridiculous yeah :) but again a pro camera wouldn't do this.

throw0101c3• 3 years ago

Maybe film will come back.

Only with retro-hipsters and perhaps some niche applications. Digital is just more convenient and practical for 99.99999% of situations. (I say this as someone that worked at a photolab as a student.)

petemir• 3 years ago

I mean, it makes a lot of sense when one doesn't value the importance of preserving culture

So sad to read this about a company that started its empire by selling books.

capableweb• 3 years ago

Jeff Bezos didn't start Amazon because of his love for books and wanting more people to read, he started Amazon because he didn't want to regret not trying to start a internet business when he was older. He went out looking for business opportunities, and saw books as one that could potentially work, so that's why he started with books.

In his typically analytic way, Bezos cast his decision in what he calls the "regret-minimization framework." He imagined that he was 80 years old and looking back at his life. And suddenly everything became clear to him. When he was 80, he'd never regret having missed out on a six-figure Christmas bonus; he wouldn't even regret having tried to build an online business and failed. "In fact, I'd have been proud of that, proud of myself for having taken that risk and tried to participate in that thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be such a big deal. It was like the wild, wild West, a new frontier. And I knew that if I didn't try this, I would regret it. And that would be inescapable."

https://web.archive.org/web/20000408032804/http://www.time.c...

Knowing the motivations behind Amazon in that light, makes everything they are doing today makes much more sense, rather than trying to understand it from a perspective of "a guy who wanted to sell books".

muyuu• 3 years ago

It makes me sad to see a part of our shared culture destroyed like this. Reminds of me of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban; this time because some people have no taste.

like that, if those Buddhas had been privately owned all along, and they were sold to some large corporation, and then that corporation just decided not to maintain them anymore because it made no business sense for them

so, not a lot like the Buddhas of Bamiyan

michelb• 3 years ago

Why did Bezos buy it then? Pretty sure there was at least an idea to have it add value. Getting sick and tired of billionaires destroying the internet.

Destroying communities and history isn't a great look. I'd like corps to be held to some sort of clause where they have to do something with their acquisitions or give it back to the people that are actively using it. Imagine someone bought Craigslist or Wikipedia and just shut it down.

It's so much effort to get a community like DPreview back, it's probably not going to happen. Some are trying and it's just not it.

helsinkiandrew• 3 years ago

Why did Bezos buy it then?

When Amazon bought it 16 years ago it had a lot more visitors and Cameras and Lenses were some of their biggest sellers. As discussed [1] previously Lenses and Camera sales have dropped by 66% and 50% respectively since then and (however sad) the smaller community isn't probably producing enough sales leads to Amazon sites anymore (you have to go a long way down the best Camera & Photo Products best sellers list [2] to find any cameras that are on DPReview). If I were Amazon I can see why they would do this, it's a shame they couldn't sell the site to a third party though - I'm sure it could still survive financially.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296

[2] https://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-camera-photo/zgbs/photo/...

anoncow2• 3 years ago

For a $1T organisation, there should be better ways to handle and channel distractions. For e.g. Goodreads, acquired by Amazon in 2013. Otherwise this is a “failed” aquisition. The failure is from the society’s perspective.

throw0101c3• 3 years ago

For a $1T org like Amazon, these are distractions. Even trying to transfer it is a distraction; it wouldn't move the revenue needle. It makes sense.

Not wrong, but on the flip side how much of a financial drag is operating it really? Are they that hard up for cash that the low margins (or even loss) of this property makes a meaningful difference?

gjm11• 3 years ago

I don't think I buy any argument of the form "X is small, company Y is big, therefore company Y should not bother with X".

I appreciate that you may not actually believe this, given your second and third paragraphs. But even from a business-business-business point of view I don't buy it.

Big companies are made of smaller pieces. Those smaller pieces are made of smaller smaller pieces. Etc. If running DPReview makes sense for some sub-sub-component of Amazon, then it doesn't make any less sense just because that sub-sub-component is a part of Amazon and Amazon is very large. It's not like it has to be a distraction from the people trying to run a trillion-dollar company; they can ignore it, just like they ignore lots of other things at lower levels.

It may in fact be the case that (in business-business-business terms) running DPReview doesn't make sense for whatever sub-sub-component of Amazon it's part of; in that case, maybe (again, from the culture-ignoring profit-centric viewpoint) it's right for Amazon to shut it down. But that isn't because DPReview is small and Amazon is very large, it's because DPReview is (hypothetically) unprofitable, or not a good fit for whatever bit of Amazon it fits best with. Those are good business-centric reasons for closing something down. "It's small and we're large" is not.

lr1970• 3 years ago

For a $1T org like Amazon, these are distractions.

A $1T company is spending multiple millions left and right on useless virtue signaling trying to show how good a corporate citizen it is. Even a fraction of that money could have saved dpreview.

born-jre• 3 years ago

https://youtu.be/lh8Zdyy3zTQ?t=150

Some people from DPReview were in WAN show in Linus Tech Tips channel if someone prefers video summary.

pabs3• 3 years ago

Apparently ArchiveTeam's Distributed Preservation of Service efforts downloaded 123 GB from this site, all of it will be going to archive.org.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPReview https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPoS https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior

labster• 3 years ago

With archive.org about to become the private property of book publishers, it seems like all that effort is going to go to waste.

mordae• 3 years ago

Maybe do something about that?

smarx0072• 3 years ago

AT != archive.org. Also, archive.org web archive and its digital library with a lending feature are two different things.

Krisando• 3 years ago

Archive.org will make it useless. Try searching for anything in the web.archive.org search and it barely returns anything.

Try "CRT Nikkor", won't turn up anything relevant, yet within their dataset:

http://web.archive.org/web/20230316105926/https://redbook-jp...

dpreview results turn up in Google, web archive does not. This isn't really preserved in a usable way at all.

TheTechRobo• 3 years ago

ArchiveTeam's general idea is to archive it first, and make it usable later. Wayback Machine is generally how stuff is "made usable", but in cases like this, a searchable index might need to made. (That's been done before, though - it's not like it's never happened.)

acherion• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why digitalcameraworld.com has published this news. If you go to the DPreview home page, there is an article – https://www.dpreview.com/news/0507902613/dpreview-closure-an... – that the site will stay in archive mode (ie. read only mode).

I've noticed, as an amateur photographer and a subscriber to a photography magazine masthead that Future Publishing produces (who are also the owners of digitalcameraworld.com) that the editors and storywriters there are really behind the 8-ball when it comes to timings of their "news" articles. Many of the things that they write are simply out of date by the time it's published on the site. This is just a classic example of that.

cbeach• 3 years ago

It's a sad day. I used to be an avid reader when I was into DSLRs ten years ago.

My camera gear (Canon 5D Mk4, loads of lenses) has sat in a cupboard for years now.

The iPhone is a decent replacement in most scenarios - lightweight, easy to use, waterproof and can instantly share to the cloud.

I miss the DSLR for its telephoto and low-light capability, but the gear is too cumbersome to take with me, day-to-day.

FeistySkink• 3 years ago

I can't be the only one thinking that Goodreads is next.

internetter• 3 years ago

I don't think so. Goodreads both drives traffic to kindle, and is part of kindle's value proposition itself.

Still, they've been driving the site into the ground for years, like when they deleted their fully functional API, or the god awful redesign

smarx0072• 3 years ago

Well, https://www.bookdepository.com/closure is already next. Maybe Goodreads could go third :sob:

ulfw2• 3 years ago

And I will stop all camera, lens and accessories purchases from amazon from today. Very simple. No problemo. Shutting down a website I literally grew up with over 25 years to save a buck from a handful or two of salaries is ridiculous for a company with 1.6 Million employees.

anuraaga• 3 years ago

This article seems to not include the update, that it will remain as an archive (content is not lost forever) and there seems to still be some updates still coming (who knows, maybe the close will be reverted).

It's unfortunate that this news seems to be captured only for bashing on Amazon or big tech, when it seems to be more interesting as the end of an era - cameras have been eaten by smartphones for almost all non-professionals, and this seems like a capstone to the camera era. Sad in terms of nostalgia but happy in terms of a reflection that tech advances forward. Pros should still do fine, an alternative will come, and maybe use newer tech like Discord or something. Seems like a great opportunity.

merricksb• 3 years ago

Previous discussions:

DPReview Will Remain Available as an Archive After It Closes – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394758 – 124 points|4 days ago|8 comments

DPReview’s Founder Blasts Amazon’s CEO: ‘What a Waste’ – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35455797 – 208 points|6 days ago|123 comments

DPReview is being archived by the Archive Team – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35263635 – 478 points|20 days ago|71 comments

DPReview.com to close – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 – 845 points|21 days ago|369 comments

DPReview is being shut down by Amazon today

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