DPReview is being archived by the Archive Team | Hacker News Reader

DPReview is being archived by the Archive Team

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478 pointsjacooper71 comments

As a photographer I'm livid that Amazon bought DPReview just to run it into the ground. That site was a treasure trove of knowledge and it'll be missed.

I will go out of my way to be sure I never purchase a scrap of camera gear on Amazon again.

> As a photographer I'm livid that Amazon bought DPReview just to run it into the ground.

Amazon ran it for longer (13 years) than it's original owner (12 years). That's not "run it into the ground".

Complaints are more convincing (I don't like dpreview being closed either) when they are reasonable.

Amazon could’ve turned it over to the community, right? Maybe throw in some AWS credits until they could move to a server or two?

Or sold it to someone who wanted to continue to run it. It's value could not have been zero.

Amazon would probably spend more money on lawyers managing the sale than receive from the sale.

And spending some money in order to not destroy an important knowledge resource may be the right choice especially if the alternative means burning some good will.

That's what I've been thinking. Why not make some money by selling it to another company instead of just closing it down?

There seems to be some companies tailored to photography who may be good candidate buyers, like BHPhotovideo.

That party could then remove all the Amazon links and replace them with B&H links out of spite.

Would you like to buy the backing auth system for DPReview? Alternatively, if you auth on there that you haven't used in a few years, how would you feel about that getting sold to some person in the community or an advertiser (maybe Broadway Photo would like to buy it...)?

A decade of some integrations into Amazon - what effort would it take to remove it?

While its a loss (and it is a great loss), the possibilities for things to go horribly awry if someone else was to buy it... and the "this is hosted for perpetuity but all of the information is half a decade out of date and kind of embarrassing now" is also a real risk.

A transition of ownership comes with some risk and cost for Amazon that is more than the loss of the site to Amazon and a transfer of ownership also has some risks to the community.

These are reasonable questions, and as someone who is actively running an M&A infosec due diligence effort on the acquiring side (mentioned to demonstrate I am not naive to the effort involved), I’d be interested if Amazon even asked these questions or just said “fuck it turn it off we’re done squeezing it for what it’s worth.” That last part is what I take issue with, and seeing it happen over and over is getting old.

But I suppose if you mention the word “goodwill” to Amazon proper, the closest you’ll get it someone seeing if it’s something they sell on the retail side.

I suspect they did (note that this layoff / closing was not part of the initial layoff round) and that the between then and now was considering those questions and their impact.

I also suspect that when they got done answering the questions, it came out to be "the cost of trying to sell this to a responsible party and make all the changes to the site to remove integrations (using what is likely a demoralized division of the company) is much more than any possible gains or loss of goodwill."

> the community

Who would that be, exactly?

Hey, stop being mean to Jeff Bezos , Amazon only made $14,600,000,000 last year, how is it possible to feed your kids on that kind on money? Have a heart.There’s just no way he could possibly keep DPReview going.

Someone please think of the tycoons' kids

Amazon exec: "NOPE NOPE! FUCK YOU! Fuck all of you for being part of this community! I want my second yacht and I'm going to fire people and cut services recklessly to get it."

Just remember shit like this if you ever get a recruiter contacting you from amazon.

I can't blame Amazon for stopping production on the site. I can blame them for failing to host the existing content in perpetuity.

>I can’t blame Amazon for stopping production on the site.

But on the other hand, can’t you? Where is the spirit today of someone like Carnegie, who said I’m going to take all this wealth and build thousands of free public libraries?

Digital imagery in various forms is the predominant art form in this era, this site is a hub for many practitioners of digital imagery. Could Amazon not see it in themselves as one of the richest corporations ever to serve a patron role in the preservation and continued operation of this site? At the cost of a mere pittance in terms of their overall resources.

It’s also surprising to me that Amazon wouldn’t see some level of self interest in that. Fewer people are buying these types of cameras, but more people than ever are consuming the media these types of cameras produce, on Amazon’s platforms, platforms hosted on AWS, and elsewhere.

There is definitely a value to the overall media ecosystem in keeping this resource alive. It might not be a highly quantifiable value, but that doesn’t mean it is a low value, quite the opposite I would think.

As others have said it just seems a bizarre, shortsighted action, that misses the big picture, coming out of the recent economic panic in the tech industry.

> Where is the spirit today of someone like Carnegie, who said I’m going to take all this wealth and build thousands of free public libraries?

I'm really annoyed that philanthropy is so applauded. Yes, it's nice that a robber baron decides to give some money back, even all of it, but it would have been better for the economy if he didn't monopolize it in the first place. The giving back does not make up for the cost.

Microsoft held the computer industry back in a way that was very expensive for many many customers not in the computer industry. Bill Gates shouldn't have done that.

Philanthropy is just another way for the ultrarich to bend the world to their will -- they choose where to give money, they nearly always (Mackenzie Scott excluded) choose how the money is spent by recipients.

Sometimes this has positive outcomes, but that doesn't change the fact that someone who gained incredible wealth on the backs of others' labour is then using that same wealth to further their own views.

I agree they didn’t "run it into the ground", however the fact that they apparently didn’t look for someone willing to take it over, requiring volunteers to cumbersomely scrape the site now in the short time it’s still up, demonstrates a lack of caring at this point.

How does length of ownership have any bearing on quality of execution?

tbh I just find myself using amazon less and less. Sure, you can get what you want quickly. But unless I'm buying a name brand thing from the amazon store of that brand exactly I'm likely to get some knock off or deal with a dropshipper. In the case of a camera the warranty also matters and many sellers are grey market.

Worse, when searching for an item without a specific brand (eg; the other day I wanted a drip watering system) I end up with whatever made up chinese company won the SEO fight that day. It'll be something like "JIYANG automatic drip watering system BRIGHT DISPLAY BEST WIFI solar with irrigation hose". Then 90% of the reviews will be for a pillow or some unrelated product because amazon allows changing the item to something totally different to farm good reviews. And the actual item will be some plasticky throwaway garbage.

> I will go out of my way to be sure I never purchase a scrap of camera gear on Amazon again.

If you're still making large-ticket purchases on Amazon and haven't yet gotten ripped off, you're amazingly lucky. I've been applying this rule since 2017, when I paid full retail for what turned out to be a gray-market (thus not covered by warranty) Nikon 200-500mm.

Holy hell, this is true. Amazon is notorious for scammers. It's great if you want to buy a jug of dishwashing gel, but for anything risky like cameras, stick to a specialist. B&H is especially good with their fast and free shipping.

I stopped buying pretty much anything over $50 from Amazon years ago. A few months back I was looking for a B+W lens filter that was discontinued. Couldn’t find it anywhere… except Amazon. They had one. It was about $140. I figured what hell and bought it.

Not only was it a fake, it was a horrible fake. Cheap fake box and the filter itself… it wasn’t even glass. It was a cheap piece of acrylic in a metal ring. It had no use. It was garbage.

Amazon gave me my money back, but I can’t imagine how fakes this bad get into the pipeline. It’s such a joke.

I've stopped buying cameras from Amazon 5y ago, when in Germany I mostly got used stuff (people using something 30 days and then sending it back is "used" to me, just as a car becomes used the first day you drive it, and the used car market shows in a price drop) sold as new. With fingerprints on lenses and all.

I got off prime sometimes later, and now need to jump through hurdles and find the small "No thank you I don't want free shipping" link everytime I buy something.

The title is wrong, Archive Team (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/) is behind these archiving efforts, not The Internet Archive.

The dump will surely end up being stored at the The Internet Archive, but they are two different entities with different collaborators and different goals.

Archive Team describes themselves like this:

> Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage.

If you want to contribute to the efforts, you can join #dprived (on hackint), once the Warrior (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior) project is up and running, it's really easy to contribute. Basically run a VM and you're up and running.

Fixed.

Or a Docker container, if that's easier for you!

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior#I...

Perhaps run it right away even if #dprived isn't ready for the Warrior yet – you'll be helping Archive Team folks save other stuff, like Telegram and Reddit.

Can you select which kinds of sites it touches? Blindly copying/uploading content from e.g. Telegram or Reddit is problematic in various jurisdictions.

Here's the current list of projects I see in the dashboard: URLTeam 2 (URL shorteners), Heroku, Clara.io, issuu, Zhihu, pixiv, Telegram, Reddit, YouTube, Periscope, GitHub (in cooperation with Internet Archive and GitHub), MediaFire, Google Sites Classic, Pastebin, VKontakte, Stack Exchange, and some generic ones grabbing URLs from various sources.

You can choose what project you'd like to work on if you're concerned with legal issues: https://u.ale.sh/warrior-projects.png

Note that some of the listed projects are inactive and are not assigning items at the moment.

You select the project you run at any given moment. You can also select Archiveteam's Choice, which is usually the most urgent or the one with the most IPs needed, but if you do want to select it yourself, you pick the project.

Yes you can select which project to work on. There is a generic URLs project may touch random sites. Note that Archive Team requests that you have a "clean" internet connection that doesn't have site blocks or ISP injected advertising [1].

[1]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior#C...?

> The title is wrong, Archive Team (https://wiki.archiveteam.org/) is behind these archiving efforts, not The Internet Archive.

Doesn't Archive Team upload artifacts to Internet Archive as the output of archiving? What's the practical difference?

Yes, which is what I wrote on the line under the one you quoted...

> The dump will surely end up being stored at the The Internet Archive, but they are two different entities with different collaborators and different goals.

Archive.org is a bit more careful with what they archive, while Archive Team doesn't care about your robots.txt, Terms and Conditions or other things, they simply work around it and try to archive as much as they can, no matter what you think.

Many of the people who contribute to Archive Team are also volunteers/supporters of Archive.org and vice-versa.

Bit more about the philosophy behind Archive Team can be found here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Philosophy

That really just makes it sound like Archive Team is a separate entity to provide plausible deniability for an organization that's already in another major lawsuit for copyright infringement.

That's a pretty bold claim. Just because people from one group are part of the other and vice versa does not in any way mean that the groups themselves are linked.

Especially since a lot of the people at the IA would be proponents of archiving. It would make sense that at least some of them feel like the IA should be doing more and start a rogue group that takes their ideology to the extreme.

If it was a "rogue group", the IA would not agree to host the content. I imagine a good lawyer would shatter any sort of difference between Internet Archive and Archive Team, if there's a large number of common members, and one literally exists to scrape content to feed into the other.

But again, that's just what it sounds like to me.

Ah, another excellent posting and freely-given advice stream from the esteemed law firm of Guy, Guy, Guy, Guy and HackerNews.

Anyway, you nailed it. If you walk into Internet Archive Headquarters and go over to the Jason Scott statue and click his little top hat, a door opens in the floor and you're immediately lifted down 40 stories to a glowing LED-and-pulsating techno music lair containing dozens of Archive Team members, desperately gathering all the data they can from the world because [fill in the blank here, I'm sure you've got something].

Basically, Men in Black but more awesome and with more red bull.

Never change, Hackernews

> Just because people from one group are part of the other and vice versa does not in any way mean that the groups themselves are linked.

No, that's quite literally a link. "Link" is a metaphor for a chain, and that's how a chain looks: interlinked. It be a link if they were even located in the same building.

All it shows is that they both have similar member lists. Which is a given considering how extremely niche the topic of “internet archival” is.

How does that actually link the two organizations?

By your extremely broad definition, every organization in the world is “linked” to every other by the fact that they all are Earth based. That’s technically correct I guess, but not even remotely helpful in actually establishing a connection between two organizations.

this chain of replies has moved me from 'suspecting a link' to 'positive there's a link'

Many folks are justifying this decision on the basis that Amazon might lose some amount of money keeping the site up so of course they are shutting it down. That take isn't wrong, but man it's depressing. The lack of common goods in the digital world bums me out, especially since that world keeps occupying more and more of people's time.

In the physical world there are countless spaces that exist as an open ended resource that people can use in a myriad of ways to enhance their lives and community. Things like city parks, libraries, national parks, blm land, lakes, etc. Places that will likely exist for decades or centuries. But there is almost none of that online. Most things are run by profit maximizing corporations that only look at the world through that one lens.

I don't think it _has_ to be this way, but unfortunately the current culture is too ok with it for much to change in the foreseeable future.

> In the physical world there are countless spaces that exist as an open ended resource that people can use in a myriad of ways to enhance their lives and community. Things like city parks, libraries, national parks, blm land, lakes, etc. Places that will likely exist for decades or centuries. But there is almost none of that online. Most things are run by profit maximizing corporations that only look at the world through that one lens.

And even these need constant upkeep to preserve from the paperclip maximizers we've put in the heart of our economic system. Some of what makes the web so ephemeral is the need to constantly maintain it, even if that maintenance is low, and it's so convenient to just stop that maintenance. I do imagine we'll eventually figure it out -- on the scale of things, we haven't been _doing_ the web for all that long -- but I bet the places that last will start out as long-term concerns with an ethos not unlike a library, an ethos much, much different than you'll find at any place trying to maximize paperclips in a finite world. Wikipedia seems like a lasting public good, Internet Archive (knock on wood) as well.

Wikipedia and Internet Archive and all open source stuff out there makes it a little less depressing.

Chris Niccolls and Jordan Drake have been amazing in terms of producing a huge quantity of high quality reviews and videos over the years. I'm happy that they found new positions at Petapixel: https://petapixel.com/2023/03/21/chris-niccolls-and-jordan-d...

Recent and related:

DPReview.com to close - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248296 - March 2023 (346 comments)

Also:

DPReview Is Shutting Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35258299 - March 2023 (1 comment)

Amazon is shutting down DPReview, the go-to camera reviews website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35257349 - March 2023 (4 comments)

Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35252372 - March 2023 (1 comment)

Dpreview to be shut down in another round of Amazon layoffs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250086 - March 2023 (2 comments)

While it’s heartening to see the preservation community step up like this, I’m still left wondering what Amazon’s alternatives might have been. Granted, finding a buyer would have likely been extremely tough in today’s media landscape, and I have to imagine the site was losing money in recent years, yet I can’t help but imagine some kind of leaner version of it sticking around.

Maybe some of the long-time editors and contributors will still put something together. The hard part might actually be the site itself – something like Substack would be a poor fit compared to the highly-customized, product-centric architecture of DPReview.

Cost of running a website like that is essentially everything but the actual infrastructure of keeping the HTML and data going across the wire. Since Amazon also runs AWS, they can essentially run the website for free (as they surely don't pay for traffic like the normal cloud-pleebs do).

Stop updating the website but still leaving it online would have cost them a minimal amount of money but left them with infinitive amount of goodwill in the community compared to what they ended up doing.

As a photographer that's very sad. I've learned a lot by speaking with people on DPReview forums and seeing the works of others there.

Even the reviews were good enough. I wonder were DPReview regulars will be going to hang on.

I wish Amazon never bought DPReview.

I'm going to miss that site. I'll probably never buy another camera - but still liked reading it. I guess that's why Amazon is shutting it down.

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   <H2>The request could not be satisfied.</H2>
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   Request blocked.
   We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner.
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   If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.

Archive Team hasn't really done much yet - all they've done is an ArchiveBot job, which isn't getting anywhere because of DPReview's ratelimits, and some discovery scrapes. This is probably a different issue.

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

Yes, what is your point?

I liked the site, but...

Final dslr reviews took weeks, sometimes months or longer to be delivered to the people. I mean, when every gungho yt content creator shits out "reviews" on release day 1, what did they expect?

The now we're gonna make video reviews initiative was very, very shallow with lots of fillers.

Their forum was the absolute worst ever conceived.

News and article writing was rooted in the 90s era like content creation.

So in essence zero evolvement in the last 10+ years. All this while sitting in the shadow of a megacorp... well, it was quite a feat.

What this indicates to me is that most websites are in a constant state of breaking and needing maintenance, such that no company wants to have even a small distraction / obligation / annoyance of keeping a site up. Has the feel of like, you inherit a free building that's constantly falling apart, might as well get rid of it, no matter how many people find it useful.

Is that the reality of owning a website?

When you are dealing with UGC, it's moderation that can become costly, depending on the magnitude.

It is, as long as you want to keep the site dynamic. If there’s a CMS for authors and editors or commenting possibilities that you want to keep using. Any form of separation between form content requires external tools that need upkeep.

For example, if you use Wordpress, you’ll have to keep updating WP because of security risks, but then you’ll also have to keep adapting your templates to keep up with the changes in WP.

However, once you no longer need to update the site and simple want to display its contents, you can fix it in time by crawling the website, in much the same way that the Archive team is doing now. You end up with a collection of HTML files that you can host with ease and minimal maintenance. If you do it properly , you turn off commenting beforehand so you don’t end up with non-functioning links, and you create an .htaccess that makes sure the old dynamic urls get correctly mapped to your new static files.

I’ve done this, it’s not rocket science, it’s not unreasonable to ask this from Amazon, and I wish it was standard practice for sunset websites.

It would be hilarious if it was archived on S3

This reminds me of Steve's Digicams shutting down.

I agree, sad to see these two big photography resources disappear. I’ve spent many hours reading and learning many thin*s about cameras, lenses and other photography related stuff from DPreview and Steve’s Digicams.

I’m so glad there are people doing these jobs. True heroes of our time.

This is a bit heartbreaking. So few good sources of info like this.

Just a reminder, you can donate to archive.org. [1]

[1] https://archive.org/donate

Is that the same as these guys?

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page

No, the link above in the parent comment is misleading perhaps due to the misunderstanding about who is doing this - but the data will be stored there so it's a valid link.

The donation link for the people doing the work appears to be:

https://opencollective.com/archiveteam

The get involved link is:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Who_We_Are

Note: I've generally seen Archive Team encourage donations to archive.org [1].

[1]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Donate

> Just a reminder, you can donate to archive.org

I'm all for giving money to make the internet better, but the high profile projects (wikipedia, archive.org, ) are generally extremely well funded already, to the extent that they engage in all sorts of ancillary programs not directly on the main mission. Whereas if you give money to create and sustain more sites, niche sites, struggling sites, that creates more content and communities that archive.org is going to archive anyway.

(web.archive.org WaybackMachine already has dpreview.com archived, how is this project something new? translating all the URLs or something?)

Digital photography is dead

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