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DPReview is being shut down by Amazon today
- mg 3y agoSome 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 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/ 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.
- savolai 3y agoThanks. 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.
- dividedbyzero 3y agoThis 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.
- mg 3y agoI'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.
- admash 3y agoI wish there was a Productpedia that would crowdsource structured data about products on a per-category basis. There are isolated instances of this on Wikipedia, i.e. lists of CPUs etc., but not in a queryable form (that I know of). You’d need support for one-off features, probably by using tags. It would be nice if ultimately it gained enough popularity that vendors would self-enter their products specs… I imagine your site could become something like that if there was a means of opening up contributions. Hah! It would be amusing to base it off of git and have people submit pull requests for updates or corrections. (I also feel that’s probably a horrible idea, for reasons I am to lazy to think up.)
- mg 3y agoThe hard part about user generated product data would be to handle trustworthyness. That would involve voting for correct and against wrong data, building user trust points etc. Not a small feat.
- aidog 3y agoJust accessed it 5 minutes ago and now it is gone with a 429 error
- tiernano 3y agohttps://m.dpreview.com/news/0507902613/dpreview-closure-an-update 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 3y agoThe 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 3y agoNot 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-cameras-of-the-dpreview-era-part-1 https://m.dpreview.com/articles/5191963353/most-significant-...
- janeway 3y agoAccording 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?
- darkstar_16 3y agoSad day. Used to love reading their in depth reviews.
- rob74 3y agoSame - 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 3y agoBig 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 3y agoWhen 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 3y agoSelling is very complicated, especially from a data privacy perspective. Often just not worth the risk :/
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoSome 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 3y agoThey bought and ran the site for 16 years. Sounds like a far-fetched plan.
- simon_acca 3y agoAs 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35460375
- jeswin 3y agoFor 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.
- anoncow 3y agoFor 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.
- andybak 3y 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 3y 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.
- born-jre 3y agohttps://youtu.be/lh8Zdyy3zTQ?t=150 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 3y agoApparently 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/DPReview https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPoS https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPoS https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior
- labster 3y agoWith archive.org about to become the private property of book publishers, it seems like all that effort is going to go to waste.
- Krisando 3y agoArchive.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.com/redbook-e/record2/crt.html 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 3y agoArchiveTeam'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.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- acherion 3y agoI'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-update 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 3y agoIt'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 3y agoI can't be the only one thinking that Goodreads is next.
- internetter 3y agoI 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
- smarx007 3y agoWell, https://www.bookdepository.com/closure https://www.bookdepository.com/closure is already next. Maybe Goodreads could go third :sob:
- sacrosancty 3y ago[dead]
- ulfw 3y agoAnd 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 3y agoThis 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 3y agoPrevious discussions: DPReview Will Remain Available as an Archive After It Closes – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394758 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 – 845 points|21 days ago|369 comments