picdig

» see picdig.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

This one is recent enough and Japanese enough that I had never heard of it until a register of dead projects put the name in front of me. picdig ran for under three years, in a language I do not read, serving a profession I am not in. Everything below comes from its own press release and its own goodbye email.

Kasudaya Co., Ltd., a company in Koga, a city in Ibaraki prefecture an hour north of Tokyo, launched picdig on 2 August 2021. The product was a portfolio site for commercial illustrators and the people who hire them, built around the claim that the hard part of hiring an artist is the sorting. Work was presented as projects rather than as a wall of images, so a client could see what the brief had been and what came back.

The filter was the feature. Registration was reviewed, and the company's own launch wording is that only quality creators could register, which is a thing you can say in a press release in Japan without it reading as an insult to everyone rejected. In the month before it opened, more than 250 professional creators had signed up through word of mouth. It cost nothing on either side at launch.

~ the record ~

~ the gate ~

Every portfolio platform eventually picks a side on this. Open the doors and you get volume, along with a client base that cannot tell a professional from a student. Keep them narrow and you get a credible roster that grows slowly, with the review work landing on whoever is running the company.

picdig picked narrow and marketed it, which worked well enough that by its final years it was selling annual contracts rather than running free. That is the normal arc and it is usually a good sign. Here it meant more obligation arriving at a company that had not grown to meet it.

~ the shutdown email ~

The notice went out by email rather than as a banner on the site, and somebody who got it sent a screenshot to Archive Team, which is the only reason the wording survives. It opens with two lines of thanks for continued patronage, then: the service will end on June 30, 2024.

The reason is given plainly. The company had built something to let creators make a portfolio site cheaply and easily, and it was closing due to a lack of management capacity. Then the part that most shutdown emails skip. Users on annual contracts would be refunded for the remaining period, and if you wanted that money you were to reply with your bank account details and the person in charge would arrange it, named in the signature with a direct email address. For a service dying of not enough hands, hand-processing refunds one bank account at a time is a strange and decent way to go out.

~ the javascript problem ~

picdig was an Angular application. Its final capture in the Wayback Machine, from 24 June 2024, is a 1,063-byte page whose entire body is an empty app-root element waiting for scripts that will never run again. The Wayback Machine has the shell and none of the art.

Archive Team saw that coming and ran a distributed project against the site on 25 June, five days before the deadline, finishing the next day. The site's Twitter account went unarchived because of API restrictions, and its YouTube channel was swept up by a separate effort. Those two days of volunteer work are the only reason a platform built to hold the professional record of several hundred working artists left behind something other than an empty div.

@}-->--

              )
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            .-'-.
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          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

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