I am sorry that you think I am accusing you of being an "evil empire"
As I have said, repeatedly, previously,
I understand the need to upgrade the software. And all of your pluses of the new format
are, indeed, useful, and helpful, going forward. And, I absolutely understand that there are financial and staffing factors that are not insignificant in these decisions.
This is not about change being "hard to embrace".
I am not a wrinkled old lady Luddite, clutching my old Pentax MX, using a tube tv, unrolling and squinting over my daily printed newspaper, and screaming at the neighbor kids to "get off my lawn".
I probably have more new technology in my house right now than you have in your office....And I have used and owned more cameras and lenses over the years than most likely come through your offices per year. (If you want a list of all of this flotsam, I will be happy to send it to you. With photos. And receipts. For proof). I was also one of the first M43 forum Mods here for a couple of years, back when they first started with moderation. And, heck, given all of this, I should even be doing reviews on gear for you at this point....
No, my frustration is about the
fundamental character of the usability of the site for half the users, many of whom are also pretty darn passionate about photography and have an irreplaceable wellspring of knowledge about it. And, yes, many of us are Boomers and older. And, we are not the target audience you are trying to reach, for sure. But losing the encyclopedic store of info in this group would utterly change DPR into just another glossy magazine site, with nothing really differentiating it from others.
I know you do not see it this way. And THAT is where the frustration comes in.
Look, DPR cut its nose off to spite its face once already, when it announced its closure, before you stepped in to rescue it. Unfortunately, during that interlude, a large number of its really valuable contributing forum members looked for alternatives, and a number of sites came up to fill in, and they left. And many, many, of those folks have not come back.
Those of us who did come back, came back, in large part, because the formats of the new fora that had started were not easily navigable without threading.
So, to have DPR now migrate to a new format that ALSO has no threading, removes the very thing that retained the folks that previously did come back when DPR was brought back from the brink. And it removes a major draw to it over other existing sites for a good number of them now, going forward.
The elephant in the room:
There's another factor here at play, about the site popularity, that is based on external market forces that require more of a fundamental refocus than just a site update, to increase eyes on the site. And I haven't seen anything addressed about that.
Photography is now, and has been for some years, on the down end of the massive bubble that happened when affordable digital photo technology burst onto the scene about 25 years ago. It's leveled off some after its exponential decline caused by the smartphone effect, but what you have left here now are the current
equivalent group of photographic hobbyists to what/who were the core users/buyers of photographic gear 50 years ago. (If you look at the relative percentages of photo gear sold then vs now, they are roughly comparable. The boom of the early 2000's was actually the aberration.)
The people who frequent this site, now, are thus the equivalent of the folks back then who had a monthly subscription to Photography Review, and would eagerly peruse the latest and greatest, along with the huge number of ads for cheap prices for mail order from the NYC photo stores
, trying to figure out what they wanted and what they could afford. And, no, there are not enough of this current, equivalent, user group out there now, young OR old, to drive growth in this site.
So, where can you get new eyes from? Revising the site will give you a little bump from the youthful crowd. But it's not what you are going to need to succeed. And you will lose a chunk of the old group, which won't help things any, either. And with the photo draw being now flat, I think you need to think about what the up and coming eyes are using to record their lives, and focus on that, as well as keeping the dinosaur photographers happy.
DPR did see this in past, and introduced some mobile photography/phone/action camera forums. But they are/were an afterthought. They shouldn't be. Nor should the video/hybrid component of modern cameras be thought of as a background addendum to the existing camera technology or the site coverage of the gear.
Please note: I am not a videographer. I am, indeed, an old school stills photographer. But, it is the future of the technology, and DPR needs a dedicated, perhaps adjunct, site to draw those young, active, spending, users in.
I would even suggest that you leave this site alone for the moment, and focus on bringing on board a robust video/smartphone/action camera equivalent site instead (not just a few categories here, but a whole site)...and then linking the two up once that was up and running. That is where the growth is, the excitement is, and the younger users are. And if DPR wants growth, that's where it's happening, so that's what should be tapped into.
So, that's my take on it. And my frustration is that you are trying to squeeze the existing setup into a smaller box, rather than adding what the market really wants IN ADDITION to the old stuff we geeky, cranky, dudes and dudettes are so devoted to. And strongly suspecting that the result will be what nobody wants, which is to lose the whole kit and kaboodle going forward.
With regards,
-Janet
I appreciate your continued engagement in this thread.
But it also seems like you're relatively pot committed to a narrative in which management is the evil empire, somehow bent to destroy DPReview.
It's disappointing to lose the faith of a prolific community contributor
I know change is hard to embrace, and unwelcome change doubly so.
So I can understand your concerns and frustrations.
Out of respect for your tenure, I will respond to the questions you raised here, but I'm not sure what else we can say to your other posts that continue to make unfounded claims and speculate about our intentions or interests.
What core aspects of the forum referenced in my earlier messages do we believe are contributing to the community's decline? Here's a list of some of them, in no particular order.
- A lack of common forum features that make it easier to see recent activity and trending activity at a global level
- A lack of basic features for better organizing and showcasing related threads and conversations
- A lack of ability to pin essential threads or messages on the page to increase exposure/visibility
- Limited moderation tools that make it difficult to track what actions/comments prompted moderation in the first place.
- Limited moderation response and case tracking tools for users seeking clarity on why moderation action was taken on their comments
- Difficulty keeping our forum technology up to date with rapidly evolving modern web standards, such as mobile viewing best practices, search engine optimizations, and AI scraping prevention.
- There is no external pool of developers with experience working on the platform who can provide critical support when issues arise (e.g., our in-house staff is sleeping or on vacation).
- There is no external pool of developers with experience building or enhancing our forum technologies.
How are our other websites doing?
- Great, actually. Their growth is what is allowing us to continue investing in DPReview to strengthen its position as the best online resource for authoritative camera reviews and camera gear discussion. What do I mean by investment? The editorial team is now larger than when we took over stewardship from Amazon. We've hired a full-time community manager in Mathew Anderson. And we're pouring time, effort, and resources into getting the brand's core forum technology onto a more stable, sustainable footing.
Is DPReview the only site struggling? And isn't that clearly due to advertising?
- Yes, DPReview is the only site that is steadily losing audience and engagement.
Is the source of DPReview's trouble advertising?
- It feels like you've already made up your mind about this explanation, so I'm not sure how many facts conteracting this narrative will matter...but here goes:
DPReview's audience declines have persisted under management from both Amazon and us, so any changes we've made to advertising on the site don't appear to be a smoking gun.
DPReview's current advertising implementation and setup mirror industry standards. So, under this logic, all forum communities should be in states of decline and decay if they have an advertising system like ours. But there's no evidence to suggest this is a universal problem.
In response to your supposition that moving to a pre-fab solution is driven by advertising goals:
- This is where things really break down in your current narrative theory.
- The current system's threaded view is a tremendous boon from an advertising POV. Every click a user makes on a new thread triggers a new ad load for us. Moving to a solution lacking this feature will probably reduce the advertising revenue we can generate per user.
So if our primary motivation behind switching systems revolved around squeezing every last dollar out of our community, which, to be clear for the nth time, it does not, then maintaining threaded view would be one of, if not the highest single feature for us to prioritize as an organization hell-bent on maximum monetization at the expense of the user experience.
Again, I'm sorry that we couldn't find a way to preserve everything from the existing system as part of this change.
It's not what we wanted either.
