Vice website is shutting down
writing.exchange
writing.exchange
It wouldn't even be a significant cost and ads would recoup it anyway
There should be a way to donate a website to the Internet Archive so that they run an online archive on it, basically keeping the site frozen forever (rather than relying on the Wayback Machine which has worse UX)
If I stop posting new content, have I stopped publishing? Or is it if I stop serving, then I've stopped publishing?
Saying “we will no longer publish content” could very well mean they are taking down the site; thus it is no longer published
I think it’s very likely that this is what’s going to happen because even a static archive site is going to cost money and dilute their new social brand
Perhaps they’ll repost their old stuff on their new channels but it will nevertheless suck for old timers like me that refuse to use social media
I was involved with some sites recently that stopped publishing new content. The plan is to keep most of it around for now. But I have no illusions that if it becomes a "project" for some reason or another in a few years, it will just be turned off.
I 100% don't get it when websites with lots of content and good SEO just delete everything. Fatwallet (fuck you Rakuten). Yahoo Answers (hey, I didn't say good content).
Even on my own Drupal blogs that I didn't want to maintain/update anymore, I did a giant curl job, recursively regex'd out the login/comment submission fields and dumped them on s3. Voila. And I'm someone that would take 9 attempts to do FizzBuzz.
A bookmark you had to it 20 years ago still works and I still get some Adsense cheque residuals from it for zero effort.
All the good articles and design samples stay online, and maybe the original authors can get a little credit or name recognition from any search traffic that finds it.
The one "liability" to doing this would be for visitors to not realize the site isn't being updated anymore. If vice is still publishing content outside their website they'd have to make it clear that the site is archived and new content is elsewhere, or people might get the wrong idea and assume nothing new is coming.
For a reasonable fee, we'll archive your site, and give you back a copy of the assets you can turnkey host on the original domain for cheap with a static hosting solution (s3, cloudflare, etc).
Everybody wins
I'm really curious what the cost per byte would be to make it worthwhile to offer a "host this byte forever, for one up-front fee" service.
https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/
> *What are your fees?*
> At this time we have no fees for uploading and preserving materials. We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. While there are no fees we always appreciate donations to offset these costs.
There's some discussion about this idea on this thread, including comments by ?id=markjgraham, who manages the Wayback Machine, thoughts from John Carmack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1473327982605385735
Just pay some donation, redirect your DNS to the way back machine and bingo.
However, the footer of that website says 2014 and the about page is broken, so not sure if it's still supported.
Also, Cloudflare has a partnership with Web Archive and they offer something similar, but I think it's only made for temporary outages and only archives the most popular pages on your site
The same thing happens with brands - someone bought the Montgomery Ward brand at a bankruptcy auction or something - and with store inventory: once the store goes bankrupt, they just sell the entire store contents, right down to the fixtures, to a liquidator who brings in the "Going out of business! Everything must go!" signs.
We’re migrating away but they’ll squeeze out what they can from those that don’t/can’t/won’t.
But they still have to provide continuous support, some amount of updates to keep customers functioning, and maybe even get some new customers as a “value” option (that’s barely functional).
Happens to forums all the time (fuck you Internet Brands and Vertical Scope).
100000x easier to do all this with static web content.
That's too attractive to malware peddlers. It's not particularly widespread currently, mainly because most of the content has been centralized into the same big silos... But what you're envisioning here is just going to get abused by abusers
Archive Team is a loosely organised group of individual volunteers that share a common interest in Internet preservation, and develop tools and share notes to serve that goal. They're basically one of your old-school Mediawiki communities, with very little budget:
Internet Archive is a full-blown multimillion dollar `501(c)(3)` nonprofit, which functions as more of a general-purpose library. They maintain physical offices and datacentres in multiple countries, host many petabytes of data, do activism, run conferences, and when they develop custom tools it tends to be somewhat more advanced than the Archive Team's decentralized web scrapers, like custom book scanning hardware:
https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107
A lot of the information in the Wayback Machine, which is run by the Internet Archive, was saved and contributed by Archive Team. For example, as of writing this comment, that is true of the latest snapshot of `https://www.vice.com/en`. You can see this with the "About this capture" button on a Wayback Machine capture.
Both groups have ways to receive monetary donations.
For Archive Team though, I wonder if it would be more useful to donate compute by running their Warrior archiving VM/container, or contributing code to their GitHub:
Only skip-a-heartbeat moment was when aws sent me an email saying that you I have “one or more S3 buckets that allow read or write access from any user on the Internet”
But none of my containers had write access. All of them had public read, but yeah, it’s a website and they know this: their own route53 DNS points to the containers.
They just sent the same generic mass email to everyone with any public container.
If so, their warning could have been phrased better, but isn’t incorrect.
I got absolutely tarred and feathered at an agency for suggesting this strategy and I just want to say thank you for validating what I wanted to do.
It was more of an issue that they had a bunch of clients on an old CMS system, and they did not want to make any changes the way that the sites were built or hosted.
I can make arguments for and against either side of this idea, it all depends how you want to run your business.
They were unwilling to spend time "training" the team to learn react (in 2020).
They were unwilling to let their senior FE dev spend any time with me to correct the CSS issues I was struggling with.
They used this deception and dishonesty to say "it didn't work" and wasn't worth any more time. I build a prototype in a week. It's not like I spent month(s) on it without any ROI. They just wouldn't look at it because that would mean acknowledging I and or / my ideas had value.
The closest thing I got to an answer is that the CMS they preferred, which was chosen 10 years ago by people no longer working there... was the only way they could support client sites. Because that's what they've been using. Turnover means it's so hard for us to support anything new because we have no time...
Basically they Brawndo'd me.
It was hard to stomach getting fired by the incompetent people driving the business into the ground when I was literally pleading with them to implement money saving measures.
The horse sometimes would rather kill itself than drink the clean water you've found... that's just life. It's hard to accept.
Nothing a simple notification bar can't solve
Newspapers have a bad history of "experimenting" with enabling online comments and then deciding the experiment failed and delete them all. You're a newspaper, you're not supposed to delete history when you don't like it!!!
And then they complain when people use social media as their newspaper.
Except that internet commenters are very weird, and like the least representative sample ever. Not quite as weird as Wikipedia editors, but still really weird.
Unixtime is the number of seconds since 1/1/1970. Subtract a few hours for timezone post processing and you get 12/31/1969 as a date. Indicated time zero or null or missing value trying to get formatted as a date.
This is Dec 31 1969 at 7:00 PM in Eastern Standard Time.
It takes zero effort to keep the book available (I know, I self-published a silly little one), and zero effort to include it in your accounting as long as there's a data feed and a computer.
Which sci-fi novel?
I read one of his later works and it was horrid, but Golden Age was incredible. The first several chapters were hard to get into, I quit several times and the people I loaned it to never got past that. But after that it takes off like a rocket. On a reread I found that the difficulty at first was just from so much being unfamiliar.
It's in a distant future with superintelligent AI, immortality, physical abundance and pervasive virtual reality. And in that setting he finds a deeply human tale of epic heroism.
Meanwhile, the author doesn't own the rights to the cover art/design so they can't just put it up either.
I'm not sure how else you'd want to handle it.
By having a minimum amount of foresight and putting into the initial contract an agreement which lets the parties maintain the online availability in a mutualy agreeable way.
It's just us as fans who are not happy.
It isn’t about the effort. This is the same thing people say about out of print video games, too.
It isn’t about difficulty, it is about incentives. They want you to buy new books and video games, and if you are reading/playing old free ones, that is reduced demand for what they are selling. Why would they want to help you satisfy your need for free?
That is not zero effort. That is at least 1.2 efforts.
For you and me doing this would be probably an afternoon’s work? (Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less)
For someone less technologically inclined it could be seen as a big project. They need to find someone capable of doing it, they need to ask for a quote, they need to supervise the project otherwise the contractor doing it might just do a half assed job or none at all.
Not to mention they can only think about doing this if they have an inkling that it is possible. They might be operating in a mindspace where “maintaining the servers” is a large monthly expense. For example if years ago they were sold a CMS with all the bells and wistles for some $bigbucks recurring cost. If they are savvy business people they might have done their research to figure out if “this” can be done cheaper or not. But they might not realise that it is possible to change the requirements such to achieve a massive reduction in cost. This is especially true if they treat the cost of servers as a kind of black box.
And very often the people who are providing them with IT services are not incentivised to tell about this option. Will they tell the business owner that oh by the by for half the monthly recurring cost they are paid the business could find someone who puts the page on ice and for the other half runs it for the next decade? Of course not! Doing so would under cut their income stream. That would be crazy. In fact they might spread all kind of FUD and sabotage attempts at scraping the site.
I use it/them as a search engine on steroids. Maybe it is time more people also do so.
If you are a business built on top of the web you need someone who's tech savvy in-house.
Maybe they deserve their faith. But it's sad that the next generation will miss this insightful content because they gave up.
> Not to mention they can only think about doing this if they have an inkling that it is possible.
There was some effort done with public groups by the ArchiveTeam, but I know they didn't get everything as there was no good way to find all groups.
I wish I was joking, but reducing the amount of stuff that is owned/managed for the sake of it is a common philosophy. Another way to put it: they're focusing.
We think it would have been extremely low effort to keep a static site running, they probably thought not having to think about it at all was worth the loss.
Hehe
So if the website shutdown coincides with the shutdown of a company or a division within the company, that might be why. And since a website will usually not shut down if it's turning a considerable profit to begin with, just deleting everything can often look like the best option.
it's because even this cost outweighs how much they care about the content, which is 0... the people who make decisions like this aren't scrimping pennies or interested in preserving effort... they're looking for the simplest way to get millions of dollars into their pockets
doing the bare minimum to maintain a library of content indefinitely isn't it
these are the kind of people who would happily set fire to a library if they could get away with insurance fraud
OMG I haven't thought about the site in a number of years.
Used to be such a common thing to see in google search results.
>It wouldn't even be a significant cost and ads would recoup it anyway
Just so you know... investors would probably think it's just a waste of time, which means a waste of money as they (or their financial handlers) would have to keep an eye on this website. Remember, if they think this website is going to make them under $XX an hour they will just nuke it, they are not attached emotionally or otherwise to this "product", exception being shareholder founders but e.g. Steve Jobs.
Within a few months someone else had snapped it up, created a site, used the same content (I assume from the Internet archive), and was using it to link farm.
At least that's what I thought when I saw the new site with a few links that were not there before.
I only discovered it because they also left the Gmail address that I was using for the site. So I got a couple of emails from folks wanting to update info on the site.
Feels a bit weird, tbh.
No way to determine who is behind it, and what would I do anyway?
https://jalopnik.com/maryland-license-plate-url-directs-gamb...
I guess using subdomains of a main site isn't that bad an alternative.
I came across this thread on DataHoarders before seeing it here and was glad to see so many jump at the opportunity to help archive it on our own ends. In case anyone may be interested to jump in, here’s the link to that thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/fnY46CuYOq
The deal to work with the media outlets likely dictates they cannot have their own distribution channel even for historical content.
No idea about this case specifically, but in general this is an assumption that only hurts you in most cases. People have motives and people want to be good. If their "good" is your good is a different question - a question that is often worth figuring out.
But more likely, too your last point, lots of people have a distorted sense of good, in that they can’t separate it from their own self-interest. What is good for them will be justified or reframed to be ’good,’ and this is often unconscious.
People are complicated, and negative interactions do tend to have an outsized influence on molding our behavior
There's no way they'd give up the ads dollars they get from he existing stuff... That makes no sense
Way to jump out of the boiling pot and immediately place your head in the lion's jaws...
Google "ad networks"
It won't be enough to run a big media company but more than enough to keep old content around
Technical people, who look at these decisions from across the Internet, aren’t exactly known for their humility, or assuming that non business people may have perfectly valid reasons for their decisions.
A lot of the cool things we were doing at the outline were on the CMS side of things, its a shame we were never able to share it
I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a similar answer.
Can't you?
I thought everyone with an account could upload. If it'd stay, is another question and they'd definitely not archive against the expressed will of copyright holder, but you could give it a try.
You can store the resulting WARC file wherever, be it on S3 or under your pillow.
As an archivist, I urge everybody here to not reinvent the wheel, please..
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARC_(file_format)
[3] https://www.iso.org/standard/68004.html
[4] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0002...
You practically cannot preserve and make available something if the copyright holders don't want you to. If the copyright situation is complicated you bear the risk.
You can say, that this is how it is supposed to be, but it is not like it works in the non-digital realm. You could argue that we'd need something like digital monument protection, where artifacts can be preserved against the copyright holders will.
You'd need a corp to deal with the money, people to handle things like takedown requests and expired copyrights, maybe some IT functions to keep things up when suppliers change stuff. It wouldn't be that straightforward.
(I've seen this issue raised on previous site shutdowns, quite probably Gawker.)
Keeping your own personal clippings file preserves words but not provenance.
I wanted to say, that Dr. Dobb's did that. https://drdobbs.com/ But some time in the last few years something mus have gone broken. You can't open the article links anymore.
Which tends to be what happens. Something breaks. No one can be bothered to fix it. And at some point they don't renew a domain and take the content offline.
So do you believe this is an action taken out of spite, or that there may be circumstances that a bunch of hackers aren't taking into account?
I'm genuinely curious, because I don't believe it's spite, but can't think of the reason. Outside of some long-tail potential liability for which the value of maintaining the site doesn't overcome.
* Potentially expensive licensing fees for the CMS, depending what it is, and migration costs to something “free” if not. * Ongoing costs to maintain the site (security updates etc). * Of course, hosting costs.
I agree in this case it would be smarter to keep it running in a stripped-down form since there’s still value there, then work to find buyers or someone who has an interest in keeping it running.
You start off by saying: it costs nothing to keep this site up. No downside.
But there may be some downside from an SEO perspective, which the minuscule ad revenue would not offset.
Even brands with good SEO, with pages which are making money, take some of them down occasionally. They idea is that you want to refocus all your SEO on the pages that matter most - which means pulling others.
Here, you may want all the SEO “juice” to go to your videos, to push the maximum number of users there. If some of them are getting diverted to the website, and that pays less per click, you may in fact be losing money on it vs. having no website.
https://thedissolve.com/ is still up, and it's been eight years, and I'm really glad they didn't take it down. It's still a useful resource.
I feel like the best part of the internet is dying (good written detailed content), but the worst part of it is surviving and thriving: social media (short lived, low quality, clickbaity, dopamine chasing content).
If you’re a grouchy mechanic and do boring videos of exactly how to do brakes on every car, that’s incredibly useful, but not subscribeable (unless your grouchiness becomes a meme).
I feel bad for the one guy that did 1 perfect video on how to fix&overhaul my garage door opener. But he won’t see a cent even as YouTube puts ads on it anyway and takes 100%.
Meanwhile on blogs etc with Adsense, you could monetize immediately. That’s how i started out and figured out what worked. Went from $2/month, to 20 to 200 to 2000 for a while. Lots of random articles. Didn’t care to become a “platform” (new users that visit and never come back are the best ad-clickers).
Probably something like ko-fi.com. I have it on my sites, but no one has ever tipped (besides my girlfriend, haha). I imagine other people do get tips via kofi, though.
Even the long-form content is a minefield. The line between educational, informative long-form content (Clickspring, Tech Ingredients, Ox Tools, Matthias Wendel, Alan Millyard, etc) and "lifestyle entertainment" (Matt Armstrong, Cleetus McFarland, Matt's Offroad Recovery, etc) is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), and you might not notice you've crossed it until too late.
Don't even get me started on the videos that contain a vital piece of information that could be written in one paragraph, but spread it over 10 minutes. A lot like the online recipe site disasters.
> is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), a
Where would you place "This Old Tony" in that regard?
I find YouTube to be a much better experience when logged in. There is targeting in both cases, but it tends to be better aligned with what I want when I am logged in.
And I second the extension, I use "Youtube-shorts block" which also exists for Chrome. On the topic of YouTube specific extensions, I also recommend SponsorBlock.
This has downsides on its own. Nowadays there are tons of YT videos that convey useful info in which the same useful info could be conveyed in a 200 words written piece. But no, you have to skip through a 20 minutes video where the signal to noise ratio is extremely low to get the really useful bits.
Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. Yet for some reason the big companies are dominating more and more. It could be my perception because I was just a kid back then, but there seemed to be more independent sites in the 2000s than now, despite then being harder and more expensive to host a site. It doesn’t make sense to me.
The thing that's really, really important to understand is that lowering barriers to entry leads to more consolidation, not less, because any products that are even of slightly better quality/service/price whatever end up taking nearly all the market.
Yes, in the late 90s and early 00s there were tons of independent sites (if you're too young to be familiar with it, look at the Wikipedia page for GeoCities). And while we may have some nostalgia for that now, the fact is that 95% (I'd probably say 99.9%) of the sites were total crap. Probably over half of them were "Under Construction" banners, but even the ones with actual content were usually pretty atrocious even if you ignore the "murder on the eyes" visual design.
With so much content but limited time and attention, most people don't actually want to wade through the 95%+ of crap - they just want to see the best stuff. So they go to the "market leaders", which can attract more eyeballs and, importantly, more funding to ensure people creating these sites are highly paid to attract the best people.
I wish that were true. The desktop site editors (Frontpage, Dreamweaver) are long dead. There are barriers to My First PHP Site that just weren’t there before: you can’t put up a site without https (unless you want scary browser warnings and no Google coverage), you can’t send mail without a whole bunch of complex server headers and expect it to be delivered, you can’t make a simple mistake in your code without the server being compromised by constantly scanning nefarious bots. And that’s even before you get on to the insane complexity of the frontend tech and tooling if you want to make anything look vaguely contemporary.
Discovery is broken - check out the story posted here the other day about Google ranking SEO review churn above independent sites. Facebook and Twitter will randomly bury your promo work because they don’t like the links in it for some reason. And if your independent site is in the same area as a VC-funded one, you’ll be buried by the sheer weight of their marketing paid by the free VC money.
You can still build a site with Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix. It won’t do much but it’ll exist. But no one will find it.
> But no one will find it.
The spam problem. This destroyed USENET, and has now destroyed blogs. People retreat to the half-dozen sites that have half-effective spam fighting. Twitter has abandoned spam fighting and is slowly sinking as a result.
If you think about the shape of the web at the time Google introduced PageRank, It was a huge graph of content connected by fine-grained related interests. It got that way by people doing the work of drawing those relations; and it's a lot of work, given that the number of potential relations is essentially proportional to the square of all existing content. All of the interesting information is in the edges of that graph.
Who's doing that work now? PageRank incentivized people to trade links for the purpose of ranking higher on Google. People became reliant on the convenience of Google to find anything to the point that if you don't rank on Google, you don't exist. People who created content for the sake of the content, and interacting for the sake of interaction, stopped doing it because why waste time yelling into the void? People who felt like they were providing for the community by hosting these sites had no reason to continue. Without people creating, exploring, interacting, and relating content based on pure interests, there's nobody doing the hard work to organize the web in a way that makes it traversable.
We're entirely reliant on platforms showing us the content they want us to see, and what they want above all else is for users to be predictable. If your interests and behaviors are too nuanced for the algorithms to get a handle on, you can't be categorized, packaged, and sold to advertisers with some expected conversion rate.
At this point in time, most of the people who spend time on the internet have never even experienced anything different, and those who have barely remember. If your business relies on their attention, what good is a website going to do you? Your income relies on appealing to social media algorithms, not gaining the trust of the people who used to shape the web.
Become more popular with short form content, re-specialize getting better with that, slowly move in long form content, and partially return to where we were.
Some of the content creators I watch say they get click conversions to longer content or streaming via shorts, TikTok, and very short videos. The algorithm seems to be boosting shorter videos .
Outside of those groups, everyone else is getting clobbered by Substack and Twitter. 10-15 years ago if you wanted to be a journalist you had to go work for one of the major newspapers, nowdays you can strike out on your own with a Substack and Twitter/X account. Those guy put our news just like they would at the major newspapers, but they have a fraction of the overhead that those guys do.
That's not journalism, that's punditry.
What's new is considering people that professionally flap their lips about anything that comes into their head - no matter how removed from reality - 'journalists' when 10-15 years ago the term would have been 'outspoken lunatics.'
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/vice-media-sec...
>One employee claimed Vice executives were acutely aware of the potential reputational damage that could be caused if Vice’s western audience became aware of the extent to which it was working with the Saudi state, saying: “It is astounding that – despite ongoing opposition from staff – Vice is still happy to take money from a country that was literally responsible for the state-sanctioned murder of a journalist.”
https://theintercept.com/2023/09/09/vice-deleted-documentary...
>In the past, Vice has documented the history of censorship on YouTube. More recently, since the company’s near implosion, it became an active participant in making things disappear.
It's not that they 'feel' this - this is a fact. You cannot survive on ad revenue running a web magazine anymore. Also, people don't browse the web anymore the way they used to. Everyone hangs out on social media platforms on their phones.
Vice did short lived, low quality, clickbaity, dopamine-chasing content outside social media, it's just more profitable to do inside social media.
In all honesty, Vice was a cool outlet for out-there stories for teens and adults alike. Shame it’s shutting down but then again I never supported it.
It was pretty strong the first few years and rapidly declined in quality for the last 5 or so.
As much as I hate to say it (millenial), it's probably due to the age of millenials and genx now.
They should have pivoted a different way--more in line with the changing life stage of the readership.
My theory is that when Millennials were growing up there was still a strong ‘default culture’ that helped sustain a thriving counter-culture. One could move decisively between the two when bored/frazzled. Zoomers have grown up flailing around in a devolved soup of ideas. Everything’s edgy so nothing is.
I go to underground parties all the time and I actually don't see many people that seem younger than mid to late 20's.
Mostly late 20's early 30's millennials, and the crust punks of the 70's and 80's/
At the time I had the sense that they were burning money on very high quality (read: expensive) reporting in an effort to build up the brand, all while hoping to figure out how to make the financials work "later."
For some reason I had kind of assumed the strategy had succeeded, seeing as how they stuck around for so long. I guess in reality they just never figured out how to make it sustainable.
In any case, I'm hoping once Channel 5 grows big enough they can relaunch Hamilton's Pharmacopeia (though by a different name, of course).
This is important to know because with cancel culture and even that previous comment, it seems people have this relationship inverted.
(I love the Patreon tiers.)
They really screwed up by trying to become some kind of media empire. Was a bad sign when they made a cable channel.
As loathsome as I find him, he also started two well-known organizations, with very different vibes, but also a through-line you can see if you squint. It must be an interesting story, maybe even an enlightening one.
This is why I'm skeptical of dismissing radical rhetoric as "oh that's just talk". A lot of people have a strong desire to be "real", which will drive some of them to put their money where their mouth is, even if they started out with just some "harmless" rhetoric because it seemed fun to say edgy stuff.
Another interesting example if you're into that sort of thing is Baked Alaska, coincidentally also from Canada, that went from being a Bernie bro working for Buzzfeed to livestreaming Jan 6th inside the Capitol.
I disagree with you here. Proud boys was originally created out of the need to protect people from the likes of Antifa, which is a facist group.
Most activists/hacktivists are fascists. If you don't agree with them, they cause issue, violence, and/or destruction until they get their way. Opposing groups like this does not make one fascist.
Lots of what Gavin does is satire...which many people apparently don't get or understand.
Even Gavin McInness says you're wrong here.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-secret-history-o...
| McInnes, an avid boozer, has consistently maintained that he started the Proud Boys as an outlet for harmless fun: an Animal House-style drinking club for male buddies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190209020443/https://bedfordan...
| "It’s a men’s organization, sort of like the Odd Fellows,” McInnes explained. “It mirrors the Knights of Columbus in many ways”–another organization that he belongs to. Only in this case,the Proud Boys subscribe to an ideology of “anti racial guilt,” that, to me, seemed to evoke white pride.
| Actually, McInnes wouldn’t describe it in explicit terms like “white pride” or “white supremacy.”
| “Our motto is that, we’re Western Chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s really the only tenet.”
Could you link to the quote where he says this? The article claims he said it, but I couldn’t find the quote.
Yesterday on mastodon I saw a link to the vice piece about mushrooms: "Magic Mushroom Edibles: Everything to Know, from Chocolates to Drops". Their situation is dire indeed /s
The corporate influence is too constricting for creative works. I imagine there are many businesses where MBAs make sense, and that any large company needs them.
While the story is still online (hopefully it stays there), I’d like to point out this piece in particular: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvg5z3/what-if-we-treated-we...
Also posted at Tedium: https://tedium.co/2019/10/17/historic-websites-preservation/
Too many good websites just get steamrolled out of nowhere. It would be deeply ironic if I spent a good chunk of my career writing pieces for a site that deleted its archive.
See: https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.vice.com/en/articl...
I'm going to repost them on my site if the archive goes down.
Dear Vice Team, As we navigate the ever-evolving business landscape, we need to adapt and best align our strategies to be more competitive in the long term. After careful consideration and discussion with the board, we have decided to make some fundamental changes to our strategic vision at Vice. We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously. Moving forward, we will look to partner with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as we fully transition to a studio model. As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com, instead putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly. Separately, Refinery 29 will continue to operate as a standalone diversified digital publishing business, creating engaging, social first content. As you know, we are in advanced discussions to sell this business, and we are continuing with that process. We expect to announce more on that in the coming weeks. With this strategic shift comes the need to realign our resources and streamline our overall operations at Vice. Regrettably, this means that we will be reducing our workforce, eliminating several hundred positions. This decision was not made lightly, and I understand the significant impact it will have on those affected. Employees who will be affected will notified about next steps early next week, consistent with local laws and practices. I know that saying goodbye to our valued colleagues is difficult and feels overwhelming, but this is the best path forward for Vice as we position the company for long-term creative and financial success. Our financial partners are supportive and have agreed to invest in this operating model going forward. We will emerge stronger and more resilient as we embark on this new phase of our journey. Thank you for your continued dedication to Vice and support during this time of transition. Together, I am confident that we will overcome any challenges and achieve our shared goals. Bruce
> As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com
@dang can we change the headline to "Vice will no longer publish content on vice.com" instead of implying the website is shutting down?
They will obviously keep it around for existing SEO ads and as a brand to sell ads for their other content on other platforms.
I agree with the title you proposed.
> They will obviously keep it around for existing SEO ads and as a brand to sell ads for their other content on other platforms.
Not obvious to me. "publish content on vice.com" can mean "continue serving the existing articles".
"Vice will stop publishing on vice.com, sell Refinery 29, reduce our workforce, and publish on other platforms instead."
But yeah, the whole neoliberal environment just produced a lot of bullshit in the end (in the developed countries). But I don't think, fortunately, the reaction to neoliberalism is going to stymy creativity at all, I think many are ready to embrace a new kind of economy.
Not to be pedantic, but it really depends on what you mean by inflation. If you only consider CPI then sure - maybe you're right - but in my opinion we've had out of control asset price inflation together with falling interest rates since around the time of the GFC. I'd go so far as to say it's been the defining feature of western economies over that period. Basically badly implemented quantitative easing.
Juicero is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
And in any case "money," is not the most important thing in an economy--monetary and fiscal policy are only relevant with respect to the operations of capital, and neoliberalism was always primarily ideological; Thatcher herself said that it was a moral mission. But Thatcher and Reagan duped themselves, or they didn't realize precisely what they were releasing, the unbounded power of computation, with the creation of neoliberal capitalism.
The environment which you refer to is nothing but the social conditions whereby the power of the market was fused with the power of nature in the form of the "genius" innovater, the "disruptor," the brilliant artist-engineer, which came to develop itself as the total ideology of the state, and only intensified in the wake of the 08' recession--reaching its apotheosis with today's so-called "AI," which (supposedly) is the technology which has the power of the super rationality of nature, Absolute Mimesis. And all that it needs to do to fulfill its holy mission is destroy the world, and humanity with it...
No! We can't be, we cannot remain merely human...but why submit to the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who have tricked you with talk of the "market"? Who hates the world so much they would let a machine destroy humanity; no, no...we cannot destroy the world, we can't destroy man, we must go beyond! We must overcome the whole world.
I say Kant because I suppose Kant was the first thinker to suggest (after Aristotle) that logic always has an existential import, that it only appears to us in the world and its not really certain if it exists in and of itself--at least, that's how Hegel reads him. And in any case Kant's philosophy is the beginning of modern western society from science to law to aesthetics, and, of course, philosophy.
SV is not a product of low interest rates though. it's the natural order of things
What is natural about computation? I've never seen writing in nature.
Yes. This is the LIRP part.
we have taken over other people's systems with mechanism (like purl.org ) but a static website would be even easier--
redirects galore (20 million broken links fixed in wikipedia) or give us the domain name. We even had a 404 handler people could put on their website, but that may be out of date-- if others want to put it on their website (please vice!) we would bring it up to date.
We also have a 404 service in the Brave browswer (go Brave!). Please communicate to Chrome folks, Mozilla, others how awesome it would be for them to build this into their browser.
info@archive.org if you would like to do something like this.
-brewster Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
tl;dr = Vice Travel Guide site has a half-hearted vibe going on. The function decay felt like it might have started some years before VC.
I watched Inside NK - it's a good as you say. And then I tried to find the link to Part 2.
'Tried' because the vid doesn't auto-advance to it and pt2 isn't among the handful of videos that can be found thru navigation or searching from that page.
I did find it on Google. Also part 3. Also other offerings that Vice's internal navigation didn't lead me to.
Included in that last was a likable followup series, VG's to NK Labor Camps (in Siberia) https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/north-korean-labor-camps-...
However, I suspect Vice doesn't care if anyone ever finds these classics - and hasn't cared for a while.
-In August 2014, A&E Networks, a television group jointly owned by The Walt Disney Company and Hearst Corporation, made a US$250-million investment in Vice Media for an ownership stake of 10%.
-In November and December 2015, Disney made two additional individual investments of US$200 million totalling $400 million.
-In June 2017, Vice secured a $450 million investment from private-equity firm TPG Capital to increase spending on scripted programming and ongoing international expansion.
-Disney acquired Fox's stake in Vice when its acquisition of 21st Century Fox completed in March 2019.
-On 3 May 2019, Vice Media announced that it raised $250 million in debt from George Soros and other investors.
-Vice Media formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as part of a possible sale to a consortium of lenders including Fortress Investment Group, which will, alongside Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital, invest $225 million as a credit bid for nearly all of its assets.
Ok so they used to be honest, then got investments from big media companies, hedge funds and banks, and they stopped being honest, then were driven to bankrupcy and acquired by the usual hedge funds who will probably just turn them into another propaganda (which they had already become a decade ago) cog in the media machine.
For example, how is it relevant that my bio includes pronouns and why do you insist on calling me "pronouns bio" because of it? What do you want to say?
I've been running a local instance for a few years now and download/save tech articles all time. I can search and find them as needed.
* Can also download Internet Archive snapshots
* Suitable for (read only) exposure to the open Internet, or saves sites as static content that you could host easily by slapping it into an Nginx or Apache directory.
Is it the tool for the job?
Everyone though it would take at least some time before AI generated content kind of started stifling the internet, making it hard to find things, hard to figure out what is real. But, its already ramped up.
I at least thought it would be a few more months and more focused on election. But at least me, I seem to see its impact in every YouTube video, generated content is appearing everywhere already.
There's an argument the way AI is getting so much focus has resulted in a neglect of this kind of stuff after years/decades of it sticking around at mostly fairly low cost.
I'd say a bigger source of harm has been the endless iteration in agile practices meaning old stuff is treated as low priority because the business focus is always on adding new stuff. It's a lot harder to argue up the management chain that making something more stable will have longer term gains than A/B testing several new designs. The amount of sites that repeatedly destroyed their old content with a redesign is a bit absurd. A LOT of websites feel like they could benefit from improving their fundamental experiences and it's been so long since that was a priority that it's virtually an impossibility to untangle it at this point.
RIP Epicly Later'd?
Ironic, considering the ad blocker ban was supposed to fix this.
Edit: I thought OP was exaggerating, but nope, per this random website they have/had at least 2,300.
The would have to charge a lot more than that to pay anyone anything.
The Upwork/fiverrr economy is brutal.
Also, go ask a freelance writer how much they make. Or the girl in your coffeeshop or the guy behind the bar. There are many jobs that pay peanuts in Europe or America.
Google search continues to get worse, I can't find a recipe without diving past a few dozen ads, and now content creation sites are abandoning their own domains in favor of posting their new content direct to social media.
It really is starting to feel like the web will be nearly useless in the next year or two.
- Brand damage (content), e.g. Cancel culture, etc when old articles are discovered later or seen in new light - Brand damage (privacy/user base), e.g. Assumed to protect identity of all old users, risk of exposing secrets, offering old user-generated content as training data to ML not wanted - IT security, potential attack surface or exposes info to use when designing attacks - Lawsuits (content), e.g copyright/DMCA or content that is deemed illegal/not properly licensed
I guess the list could be made longer.
I have yet to see any major such instances, especially to brands. PR firms can do quite a lot for the right money.
The general “victims” I have seen are individuals post varying criminal charges (eg R Kelly).
no thanks. The USA does not need state sponsored media.
Also, the US military is a big sponsor of Hollywood related content as long as they don't put the military in bad light.
I believe this might already have been the case for a while actually.
I guess they were really a product of a different time.
Eventually, that TOS can change and they can delist old content, reneg on ad terms, force new editing/censoring on old videos etc. All within their right as platform holder.
Sort of like saying "I haven't been in an accident. Why would I need insurance?"
> […]
> Together, I am confident that we will overcome any challenges and achieve our shared goals.
By firing several hundred people, you just created new challenges for them. Their goal now is to find a new source of income to pay rent and eat.
Are you doing anything to mitigate that, or does the “together” only apply for people who help you on your goals? What exactly are this shared unspecified goals you’ll all overcome?
Pretty dry and soulless letter. Perhaps next time consider having one of the good writers go over it.
it will probably be 50% ai generated garbage and 50% social rants in 10 years
Also, the loss of content that should have been trivial to archive is nearly criminal. Almost like book burning.
Paper billionaires checked out, some sold out, and their value slowly went to zero because the owners failed to insist on leadership and culture continuity.
Sad af and a total waste.
Never get complacent.
“our employee spent 3 weeks alone filming inside the islamic state”
to
“what’s up with taylor swift fans and cowboy hats?”
… it might be time to jump ship before the layoffs.
Either way, between this and Pitchfork winding down, it really feels like we're entering new times culturally.
(It’s my toot.)
Today’s newsletter about BuzzFeed, which came out earlier this afternoon, alluded to big news coming out of Vice soon. Didn’t know it was gonna be this big, but in any case he called it.
“Meaner, faster, and more dynamic.” Ha!
David Carr had their number off the bat: https://youtu.be/iLmkec_4Rfo?si=ZlXSnFajg81RNcRM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/02/22/vice-m...
Former digital-media darling Vice to end website, lay off hundreds
Ah, ok.
curl -si40A "" -o 1.json https://writing.exchange/api/v1/statuses/111977450241144169/context
cat > 777.l
/*
mastodon
*/
int fileno (FILE *);
#define jmp (yy_start) = 1 + 2 *
int x,y=1,z=1;
#define echo(y) {for(x=y;x<yyleng;x++)putc(yytext[x],yyout);fwrite("<br>",1,4,yyout);}
%s M0
%option nounput noinput noyywrap
%%
\"poll\":(null|[^\"]+) z++;
\"id\":\"[^\"]+ if(z){fwrite("<br>",1,4,yyout);y++;echo(6); z=0;}
\"group\":(false|true) y=0;
\"created_at\":\"[^\"]+ if(y)echo(14);
\"acct\":\"[^\"]+ echo(8);
\"content\":\" jmp M0;
<M0>\", fwrite("<br>",1,4,yyout);putc(10,yyout);jmp 0;
<M0>\\
<M0>\\u003c putc(60,yyout);
<M0>\\u003e putc(62,yyout);
<M0>\\u0026 putc(38,yyout);
<M0>[^,] putc(yytext[0],yyout);
.|\n
%%
int main(){
fwrite("<meta charset=utf-8>\n",1,21,stdout);
yylex();
exit(0);
}
^D
flex -8Cem 777.l
cc -O3 -std=c89 -W -Wall -pedantic -pipe lex.yy.c -static -o yy777
strip -s yy777
yy777 < 1.json > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links 1.htmhttps://vice.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Vice_External_Caree...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Media#Bankruptcy_and_sale...
> It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute content the way we've done previously. Moving forward we will partner with established media companies to distribute our content as we fully transition to a studio model. As part of this we will no longer publish content on vice.com, putting more emphasis on our social channels
Vice is still in business, but its content distribution is changing from website to a combination of publishing via larger media companies and social media.
Most of the content I found mildly interesting at best, but my major criticism is everything is stretched in overly long narratives. TLDR in almost all cases I visited the site.
Such a sad regression for web applications. It seriously blows my mind supporters of open source software and "freedom" put up with this stupid shit.
Any official source on this yet? Guess not since they won't post it on their website /s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39475405
Ever since, they ran themselves into the ground and raised so much money all for what? Only for their website to be shut down after being bankrupt. All faster than their own deranged Twitter / X collapse predictions.
Nothing of value was lost.
Place your bets on what will die next. HuffPo? Vox? Salon (which I know had a near-death experience a few years ago; I doubt its financial health is any better now)?
The ad revenue from having even one of your daily “orange man bad” articles hit the top of a dozen massive subreddits a few times a week can sustain any business.
The next one is Huffington Post (owned by Buzzfeed) then Buzzfeed itself.
Either they need to be bought out or they will need to do more layoffs to increase their runway and make sure that they meet the stock price requirement of >$1.00 to avoid being delisted by May 2024.
I think this was the "near-death experience" I was thinking of regarding Salon. Didn't Salon do a reverse stock split to meet the price requirement? Can Buzzfeed do this too?
Please elaborate.