Amazon To Shut Down DPReview.com

DPReview.com is closing very soon:

After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year.

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The site will be locked, with no further updates made after April 10th 2023. The site will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards.

This shutdown feels petty—it probably cost Amazon very little (in relative terms to their other products/services) to keep the site going, and from the statement it’s unclear how long “limited period” will be.

I haven’t been on there much since my photography kit reached a steady state with the Fuji X-T30 I’ve used the last five years. But there was a good decade or so where I was constantly checking the site as DSLRs gave way to an explosion of smaller, lighter cameras and lenses.

Losing the reviews database feels like a huge loss in its own right. But there is also a large community attached to the site, and this all makes me think of Catherynne M. Valente’s post connecting the rapid decline of Twitter with a moment in the history of early internet service Prodigy,¹ “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things”:

Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things.