DPReview is being shut down by Amazon today
digitalcameraworld.com
digitalcameraworld.com
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
As soon as there was an alternative, everyone piled on.
There was an army trying to passively-aggressively harm Microsoft in everything it did, and it mattered. If there was ever a gray area where Microsoft wasn't the obvious choice, people decided the opposite way.
Google is gradually becoming the next Microsoft.
It's not even dislike, so much as well-founded distrust. Each time I've done business with Google, I came out behind for it at the end, because I was treated as a statistic. Google would gladly take out my business for their convenience if it didn't impact their bottom line. It wasn't malicious, like Microsoft, but just apathetic.
At this point, it's left behind enough victims among decision-makers that GCP is permanently kneecapped in the race with AWS, Azure, etc.
Microsoft was the butt of the joke of literally everyone that had every used a computer. There were countless memes about how bad Windows was, made by people with 0 technical literacy. Your grandma had probably heard about Windows Vista sucking, despite not knowing what it was.
Almost nobody outside of HN has a similar experience with Google products.
You are in the same echo-chamber as the original commenter.
YouTube's algorithm and recommendations are both memes and well analyzed in popular media, and people who have only ever used phones and iPads know to add "reddit" to their search terms to sort through the garbage Google would show them otherwise.
There are also office workers and consumers who have been burned by adopting Google services, like workplaces that adopted Google products for chat and voice/video, or by buying Nest products or investing in Stadia.
This statement is imprecise. Youtube creators, for example, hold a similar view.
Grandma doesn't make decisions about what cloud platform to use, or where to host content. Among key decision-makers, distrust of Google is widespread.
Google will do fine in search (at least until / unless it's disrupted by Bing or DDG), Android, email, and in other consumer products. Where this will eventually kill Google is in B2B: GCP, Google Workspace, etc.
I think the fact that they are called "Youtube creators" and not "Video creators" highlights how weak the argument is.
But there's no single problem that's a trigger for all, not everyone is upset about the same thing and I don't agree that Reader, or the NSA, or any other single issue singlehandedly turned everyone against Google or other tech companies. It's the whole environment, and different straws broke different camels' backs.
Doesn't matter. An echo-chamber that your target demographic frequents can be just as damaging to your overall reputation if not more.
Source: Someone currently working in government IT procurement who is literally in charge of evaluating cloud-based products (hi, google!).
Also funny you mention Paypal and Stripe: At my last job, we chose to go with traditional payment processors in large part because of how frequent stories about Paypal and Stripe screwing legitimate companies pop up.
Even popular science and tech press is highly critical of Google, and no longer just publishes the company's press releases with gushing endorsement.
Back in like 2014, I agreed with your sentiment and even said the same thing myself. Back then, popular sentiment towards Google was very positive and there was a lot of excitement, but generally, the nerdier someone was when it came to computers, the more likely they were to be at least critical of Google if not hostile towards them.
Now it's different and people are looking at Google like they look at Facebook or Comcast.
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.
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.
The Samsung thing was indeed ridiculous yeah :) but again a pro camera wouldn't do this.
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.)
So sad to read this about a company that started its empire by selling 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".
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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
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.
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/...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Have you seen that you can hightlight one camera and then compare it to another?
Not sure is labeling the highlight button "Highlight/Compare" is the way to go. Feels a bit cluttered. Maybe "Select"?
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.
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.)
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPReview https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/DPoS https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some people from DPReview were in WAN show in Linus Tech Tips channel if someone prefers video summary.
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
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.
I thought I read something on HN that Amazon had agreed to keep the existing content available?
https://m.dpreview.com/articles/5191963353/most-significant-...