Vice Media Collapse Entirely Fault of Incompetent, Fail-Upward Brunchlords | Hacker News Reader

Vice Media Collapse Entirely Fault of Incompetent, Fail-Upward Brunchlords

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30 pointsdefrost18 comments

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so far the web site still seems to be online

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak3k34/2200-forgotten-vintag...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3py9j/ai-companion-replika-...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjbped/nintendos-offensive-t...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/78xa99/the-cartel-gunsmiths (from 02015)

That's... that's your take away?

What do you think, the writer is lying to you and the company is fine?

nope, mike is super trustworthy; it would take a lot to convince me that he was lying to me about anything. i'm sure the company is circling the drain. but i'm glad that their past work hasn't been destroyed yet

I see.

i know you were hoping for a knock-down-drag-out fight with an idiot, and i'm sorry to disappoint you. have you thought about going to a bar or a football game instead of posting on hn?

No, I'm just embarrassed to be human, and incredibly sad.

A fantastic, passionate, well written story about the collapse of society, and your take away is... "oh, the site isn't down yet."

I felt I owed you a response. Way to try and start the fight though!

[Edit]

I got my stories mixed up - this is only tangentially related to societal collapse.

oh, well, that makes more sense

what was the societal collapse one? that sounds interesting

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39527477

AI is being pushed by brunchlords to make another buck IMO.

The scariest part is it all looks like universe 25; the haves and the have-nots, and subsequent behavior, including population decline and extinction. We've got front row seats to the human version; I'm praying it turns out differently.

https://www.victorpest.com/articles/what-humans-can-learn-fr...

interesting, thanks. yeah, we're going to see some truly horrific, unprecedented things this decade

> Numerous Vice editors and staff writers were paid salaries as little as $35,000 a year in New York City (you’d find retirement or financing a home purchase easier with a career at fucking Quiznos).

The link to Glassdoor demonstrated that point.

Many such cases, public-facing roles pay in "exposure". Getting your name out there, etc.

I remember a quote from when I was in Amway.

Points can’t be eaten and have no nutritional value.

No wonder those people were so angry and anti-capitalist --their own publication they worked for apparently thought they ran a socialist cooperative news org. where you work for the greater good and not yourself but you're still upset people who chose a different career, even a highschool job like Quiznos would do better.

A publication with an anti-exploration bent exploited its own.

There's a subtext in jobs like this (low-paying entry-to-mid-level, aspirational jobs in high-cost-of-living areas) that the only people who can sustain them are those of independent means (i.e. those who can get by when their salary supplements a paid-off condo, a HEMS trust and $18K/year from their parents).

It's a very common situation in journalism, politics, non-profits and the arts.

it really is amazing how much damage fuckwits appointed to run businesses can do to said businesses and the wider culture.

vice was terrible in some ways and groundbreaking in others, but shutting the entire thing down (and rumours persist, deleting the entire fucking website) is just ridiculous.

> While permalancing at Vice’s tech pub Motherboard I was paid a whopping $300 per story to write 382 articles over five years, covering everything from the death of local journalism and the empty hype surrounding 5G, to regulatory capture and the corrupt mess that is U.S. telecom policy.

I read the linked articles, and honestly $300 seems pretty fair, maybe even a bit much.

> brutal exploitation

Umm, slaves on a sugar plantation were brutally exploited. Kulaks in the gulag were brutally exploited. Folks who sit at their laptops and work indoors are not brutally exploited.

> an extraction class

I don’t carry much water for executive leadership, but I wonder who extracted more money from the revenue of Vice: its executives, or everyone else on its payroll. As a class, do executives in the U.S. make more money than the sum total of welfare, public education and student loan forgiveness? The top 5% of earners pay 63% of taxes; the top 1% 42.3% Who is extracting from whom?

I see more and more question-begging headlines like this. ‘Justice Smith Devastates Liberals!’ ‘Jon Stewart Crushes John Smith!’ ‘Congressman Jones Destroys Crybabies!’ ‘Peter Jones’s Threat to Our Democracy’ They aren’t journalism; at best, they are opinion. Too commonly, they aren’t even carefully considered opinion, just emotive bleating. They are worse than worthless, nothing but ragebait.

Almost as bad are the clickbait title ‘Beloved Hotel Closes Its Doors For The Last Time’ (click and find out that it’s a motel in East Podunk); ‘Plastics Pose Danger To Your Kids’ (click and discover that it’s about infants smothering when given plastic bags to play with — something every knew was a bad idea literally decades ago). I think the ragebait is worse, but all of it is just horrible.

And the rise of AI makes it easier and easier to generate this low-cost, high-noise dreck.

The media landscape is doomed.

> As a class, do executives in the U.S. make more money than the sum total of welfare, public education and student loan forgiveness?

Great example of false equivalence!

> The top 5% of earners pay 63% of taxes; the top 1% 42.3% Who is extracting from whom?

The top is extracting the bottom. The top earners often pay, as a percentage, less than lower earners. But the fact they pay so much in absolute terms is because they have all the f'ing money! How did they get it? Through extraction from all those people who work as hard and likely harder than them, but still earn comparatively nothing.

> Umm, slaves on a sugar plantation were brutally exploited. Kulaks in the gulag were brutally exploited. Folks who sit at their laptops and work indoors are not brutally exploited.

1. You are making a fallacy of relative privation. Problems that aren't as bad as other problems can still be big problems. If you're merely complaining about the semantics of "brutal exploitation", very unfair payment could be considered "brutal exploitation" in the context of treating mildly unfair payment as "[merely] exploitation". (Disclaimer: I have no idea what a fair payment for writing a journalistic article for Vice is, so I don't know how fair or unfair $300 is.)

2. Improvements of working conditions since the past are by themselves a terrible argument against further improvements of working conditions.

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