Some History of photopigs

This community is a "reboot" of one originally founded on newsvine.com. It's still in existence (rebranded) but the platform degraded heavily and the redesign didn't go over well with long-time users. In fact, the overall resistance to any change was pretty ridiculous. The site-wide environment was far too negative for a community to progress and remain productive, so a concession was made and it was placed into the hands of new owners.

We were founded on [what was supposed to be] a platform aimed at engaging citizens in journalism so its original purpose was to serve as a directory of photographers willing to contribute stock photos and collaborate with citizen journalists. The site's Flickr functionality broke and quietly disappeared so the pool was out. There wasn't much interest in collaborating with photographers either - most people want the immediate gratification of publishing their content right away.

Photographers, and wanna-be photographers, however, were still eager, so we developd a weekly feature called Foto Friday to develop that community. The activity became popular throughout the site. Monthly challenges were added. Eventually, we raised money to purchase a subscription to GoToMeeting where there was meta discussion, show and tell and one-on-one processing software tutorials (alcohol + Photoshop + screen sharing + random collaboration = side-splitting laughter).

It was successful because it was all-inclusive. Ability and equipment did not matter. The community worked very hard to encourage others to continue shooting and offer any possible advice so we were all working to improve. It became the site's respite from political garbage and was extremely diverse as a result.

Many passionate people worked hard for multiple years to make the community great. There were many long discussions but it seemed the only choice was to let it go. It was collectively difficult because of the history and the need for meaningful discourse.

It seems there may be another hope, though.