The shutdown of dpreview.com lives on. And on.
Given the most recent post by dpreview’s General Manager, one would have to guess that negotiations are going on behind the scenes to in some way keep the site going. Meanwhile, the ads are back (they had been taken off just prior to the “closure”), articles are still being posted, and fora still are seeing posts.
However, the thing I feared has already started happening: bi-furcation of audience. We have two primary groups trying to build a dpreview community from scratch (dprevived and dprforum), other sites (e.g. photographylife) suddenly sprout forums and encourage folk to migrate, and still others (including some former dpreview moderators) attempting to point to a particular forum that already existed. A few folk migrated to existing forums, such as fredmiranda.
I’ll give you one example of how the dissolution is problematic: the dpreview Photographic Science and Technology forum, which is where the nerds hung out, didn’t have a post in five days. Meanwhile, the Photographic Science and Technology forum on dprevived seems to be where most of those folk went, but isn’t very active, either.
The problem as I see it was the dpreview was the “center of things.” Much like a city center, you didn’t always go there, but you knew it was there if you needed something. Now, first you need to lookup on a Google map where something might be, then you have to drive a random direction to get to it.
With AI bots now starting to show up on your screens, often in disguise, one problem is going to be “what data were they fed?” I’ve already received an offer to take all the data on my site and feed it to a dedicated bot I could install on my site. Sure, but I’m not always right, and how is that bot going to distinguish between rumors I might have mentioned, commentary I made about what I think might/should happen, my occasional errors, and actual data from observation and testing?
Having a central, (mostly) trusted repository of useful information that also allows you to type a question and get an answer is a useful thing. That’s essentially what dpreview was providing the photographic community. Dpreview has already hemorrhaged Chris and Jordan, two of their top content creators. It’s unclear who else is still on board as writers and editors. But all the fora proliferation has also depleted some of the activity overall in the community that dpreview spawned, too.
We’re at Day 38 post closure by my count, and dpreview’s status hasn’t really resolved. The longer it takes to resolve, the less likely that it will hold onto its position as a hub for photographic enthusiasts. The community has been leaking away.
More importantly, the quality of the reviews on dpreview had already deteriorated from where it used to be, and needs to be resurrected. So if the site does get a reprieve, it’s still got work to do.
