When a community-focused website gets taken offline for cold, calculated, corporate reasons, it leaves usable information inaccessible to the very communities that relied on them, whether that information came in the form of old webpages, mailing lists, or answers.
Despite the corporate housing, these websites are filled to the brim with crowdsourced information—not simply developed in-house by the owners of the website, but built by its users, whether in the form of user-generated databases or community-rich forums. But what should one make of the shuttering of a site like DPReview, a photography website which has both significant editorial archives and massive amounts of user-generated content?
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In the roughly two weeks since Amazon announced it was shuttering the site, the community of digital photography fans that made up the DPReview website and forums haven’t focused on the what-ifs. Instead, they’ve gotten straight to action. Case in point is the creation of Digicam Finder, an archive of photography information generated by the community. The site first emerged online in a basic form that includes more than 2,500 cameras in a fully searchable database, with specific information on technical features such as weight, sensor size, optical zoom, shutter speed, and USB capabilities.
Peter Green, one of the creators of the website (and a decades-long reader of DPReview), was in disbelief that, in an era when cloud hosting is plentiful, a bedrock resource could shut down seemingly overnight.
“And then I saw the community outcry,” Green said. ”It became clear that it would be a huge loss not just for me, but for hundreds of thousands of photography enthusiasts or those looking to get into photography as a hobby.”
Fortunately, as a cofounder of the startup investment firm Republic, Green was well-positioned to build quickly. Joining forces with Daniel Hochman, a software engineer at Lyft, the duo led the creation of not only a new website, but a community-maintained database, called Open Product Data (OPD), that could digest the literal decades of crowdsourced technical data included on DPReview, with the hopes of building upon what was there in an easily accessible way.
“The idea was to take the tools we knew people used, and improve on them in key ways. Load times, simple UX, and responsiveness on mobile devices were our top priority,” Green said. “We wanted as few ‘clicks to value’ as possible, because we needed to quickly demonstrate that all the data is preserved, safe, and easy to access.”
While representing a new community resource, Digicam Finder is starting with a masterful scrape job of DPReview’s archive, utilizing work conducted by the Archive Team and others to put the website onto the Internet Archive. The site actually links to the Wayback Machine versions of many vintage DPReview articles, particularly reviews of featured cameras, making it possible to access both the open-source camera information and the still-copyrighted source material. But in the long term, Green says that the goal is to take this information and improve both its resourcing and presentation—and the OPD project is already seeing support from hundreds of fans and even outside data-collection efforts.
“They are reaching out and offering to contribute their data to the Open Product Data repository,” Green said. “That’s validation, and encourages us further that the data can live on beyond one single project.”
The end goal? To keep the camera data alive, build on it over time, and maybe even leverage new technologies like ChatGPT to make it more useful to digital camera researchers in the long run.
Moving Out of Corporate Housing
Ultimately, Digicam Finder represents a new strategy in the periodic conflict between culture and commerce that has become one of the internet’s defining stories. It is the latest piece of evidence that, if you want a community to last forever, you might not want to build that community on corporate land—but if it’s already there, you might need to act fast to save it.
Amazon—while perhaps not as high-profile a killer of historic information as, say, Yahoo or Google—has had its part in the shuttering or significantly changing of important resources. In 2019, for example, the company’s IMDb division gave the movie-data resource BoxOfficeMojo a controversial redesign that put some of its information behind a paywall. The web analytics tool Alexa.com, which was actually cofounded by Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle in 1996, shuttered in 2022. And Goodreads, a popular book-sharing service that Amazon acquired in 2013, has gained a reputation of stagnation among readers.
But even in that context, the DPReview shuttering stands out because of its nature as both a data-rich resource and a publicly facing community of members, and the fact that the closure was seemingly out of left field. And that means there’s a community willing to fight to keep its spirit alive, both in the form of data and successor forums like DPRevived, which has taken in more than 2,000 DPReview forum members since last month’s announcement.
“There is clearly risk in any centralized model over the long term. DPReview is a great example of that,” Green said. “Amazon is so big, that to them a community of thousands doesn’t register enough to guarantee investment and resources when belts are being tightened, even though from our perspective they should easily be able to keep it online. Whereas, if DPReview was owned by its members, and the data was open-source, this could never happen.”
A Model Worth Replicating?
It’s hard to disagree with Green’s ultimate thesis: “I believe communities need to take matters in their own hands.”
Of course, that’s easier said than done, something reflected by the fact that moderators on the old DPReview forums have discouraged heavily linking to replacement resources out of concerns that it might degrade the experience in the platform’s final days. There’s an inherent tension between protecting the thing that mattered and finding a path forward to the future.
Certainly, the Internet Archive and Digicam Finder will go a long way to keep the information alive, but communities are more fickle; maintaining the spirit of what was lost will prove a bit harder. But the success of the quick action makes it more likely that some semblance of DPReview will survive, even if the website itself does not.
Green says that he has learned a lot about this process in recent days, and thinks that this strategy of data transfer and modernization can be replicated for other communities at risk of closure. (He encourages those looking for help in similar situations to reach out to him on Twitter.)
“Unfortunately, some residual damage is inevitable as these ancient web properties become defunct, and the community scatters initially,” Green added. “In the end, though, I think we have a chance to build something even better.”
