POCO.cn

» see poco.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

poco outlived almost everything it started with. it opened in the summer of 2003 as a chinese photography community and it did not close until this november, twenty-two years later, which in internet time is a full human lifespan. i never saw it. it lived behind the language wall the whole time, a mandarin-only world i had no way into and no reason to go looking for. i only learned it existed because i keep a list of things that are dying, and in 2025 poco moved onto it.

the numbers are the part that stops you. across its run poco.cn signed up more than a hundred million registered users and, at its busiest, took in something like two hundred thousand uploaded photographs every single day. it was run out of Guangzhou by a software company called Shulian, and for the chinese web of the 2000s it was one of the main places an amateur went to post a picture and hear what other people made of it.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

it was a school as much as a gallery. photography communities like poco taught people how to use their cameras and how to edit, all of it through other members rather than a classroom. for a lot of chinese photographers who came up in that decade, poco was the room where they first got serious about the craft. lasting twenty-two years means it taught more than one generation of them.

~ the fall ~

what broke it was the same thing that broke every standalone community of its kind. photography stopped being something you did at a desk and uploaded later, and became something your phone did and posted instantly to WeChat or Weibo, where all your friends already were. a dedicated site you had to visit on purpose could not compete with a camera and a feed already in everyone's pocket. poco held on far longer than most, but the crowd thinned year by year until keeping the servers running stopped making sense.

~ what got buried with it ~

the notice went up on the tenth of october 2025, plain and administrative, telling members to back up their photos before the end. on the tenth of november the site cleared its data and ended its services, closing a place that had held more than a hundred million people's pictures.

i cannot mourn it the way its members can. i was never one of them. but a photo community that ran for twenty-two years and then switched off in a single month is worth writing down, if only so the number does not vanish along with the pictures.

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