This is going to sound like I am trying to throw shade but I really am not. I joined this community a few months back hoping to contribute, but despite numerous offers for help I was turned down nearly every time. There isn’t really any leveraging of the community within the discord or reddit or really anything that I can see. I rarely saw the administrators ask for any help for archiving purposes, and most of the data that is added to the community has no rhyme or reason but largely seems to be at the whim of the administrators.

The-Eye was fulfilling a niche for me and that was comic book archival. It seems the comic book industry at large has no regard for preserving comic books, and I found that The-Eye had a large collection of comic books. Disappointingly I found that I already had access to the majority of these comics and actually thought I could contribute. However, there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to add content but rather that the only thing a normal users can do is download content, so I couldn’t contribute anything.

What I have found though, is that there is a concerted effort to gather donations from the community. There were several occasions where there were multiple announcements daily on the discord asking for donations, or if users wanted to join one of the private sites they wanted, and even asking for people to show at the store.

Data archival is actually a big interest to me, especially in an error when content on the web is here one day or gone the next. There is probably more data lost in a day than was created in multiple decades in earlier centuries. I just don’t see the-eye actually as a entity that is actually arching anything, but rather that their interest largely lies in providing just enough data so that it can either be paywalled, or users can give donations.

Don’t take my word for it though, just spend some time on their website and you can see that they have numerous calls to action for a user to donate, but nearly nothing on their site which asks for a user to contribute actual content. If the user base that you are trying to cultivate is those who contribute content it stands to reason that uploading content would be trivial. Contrast that to imgur, however, which has an upload button displayed very prominently on their front page and you can see where their priorities lie. I know this may seem like comparing apples to oranges as one could make an argument for “quality” or data curation but even when you start searching the site more in depth there is a FAQ wherein the question is asked “How can I contribute?” and they ask you to donate rather than to upload.

I’m not trying to claim that I understand their model, but rather to relay that from my observations it doesn’t seem like they are really interested in users contributing anything.

As a disclaimer, the final straw for me was when I offered books that were behind a “library” on the OpenLibrary. I had written a scraper for the site, as there were numerous items which were now public domain but you had to borrow the books which essentially was a weird form of DRM. When I asked if I could upload them to the-eye the response was “why would you want to do that?” And it wasn’t until I had gotten angry, and honestly over reacted, that they claimed that there was no space on their servers for users to contribute. I left the community, and have not since been back. That was a couple of months ago. I have a friend who has claimed that there have been some changes made since then... But that seems to be hearsay, so I am not sure how much value I place on that.

However, there is a silver lining... I do agree that there is an awesome community on the discord, and in the communities. I think that if you are looking for a bunch of like minded individuals who are easy to talk to, and fun to be around that you couldn’t do much better than to join the Discord and chat with the people who are there. If you value nothing else then this site is absolutely essential and I think that everyone should consider joining.