I mean what is there to say? (says the person who writes half a novel every time ;)

I don’t have any emotional attachment to DPReview in particular other than having read some reviews back in the early days, looking at Kodak point and shoots and such.

It still sucks, and Amazon did it in the most inconvenient and callous way possible. There is a huge amount of accumulated knowledge being lost, not just in the reviews themselves but also the forums. And a huge amount has bit-rotted away already, if it hasn’t been archived already it’s gone.

This is a problem all over the web. Web-1.0 forums are dying, and broadcast-style social media like reddit, twitter, or even HN (to a lesser extent) isn’t conductive to replacing it. Nobody is going to run a bunch of lens tests and then post the results in the HN comments section, and once it’s dropped off the front page it’s largely forgotten. At least usenet was archived, but, web 1.0 is largely not, and it's also more difficult to scrape or to handle after scraping.

Discord has replaced it somewhat in the sense of being smaller interest-focused communities but Discord content is not discoverable, and while that’s a benefit sometimes, it’s not a good model for “original research” and documentation. The people putting wikis in their discords are doing it wrong and that’s bad.

Youtube is also an awful medium for analytical data. Today, people would be putting these resolution tests/etc into vlogs or GN/HUB-style reviews and eventually they get deleted by google or copyright claimed/etc, plus they're low-info-density even when they're online. Video is awful, it's just that we've monetized attention and video keeps people's attention for longer.

I supremely enjoy the threaded/non-tree-based and non-gamified model of web-1.0 forums. Like discord I think it builds communities where you know the people and it’s not just about getting maximum updoots, and the threaded model is a lot easier than discussions that go fractally into tangents and smaller points many of which are repeated.

There are still a number of these interest-forums - Photrio (formerly APUG), LargeFormatForums, probably FredMiranda, MFLenses, PentaxForums, and some others. There are also some major interest forums for other hobbies of mine - HomebrewTalk, RCGroups, and others. The interest forums on SomethingAwful are actually a beacon of decorum and civility, despite the site's reputation.

But every year there’s fewer and fewer, and what is undeniable is the consolidation that is being undergone here. From many web-1.0 forums to a few, from web-1.0 forums to centralized platforms like Reddit. It’s inexorable and depressing.

It’s gonna be a dark dark day when MFLenses and LFF and Photo.Net and a few of the other biggies finally turn off the lights. A lot of content lost. The Internet Archive Project are truly doing god’s work here, they are the Foundation holding off the dark ages that google and reddit are bringing on us all. And someday someone may finally get a crack at them and the library will burn. Copyright holders would love to do it.

The only way content is safe is if you can keep it safe yourself. It's ironic that cloud everything has rotted the foundations away from 50 years of decentralized content.