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.