It makes no sense to not let the site online in an archived form, for the posterity
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)
> It wouldn't even be a significant cost and ads would recoup it anyway
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.
I did some work for a design agency that got bought by Twitter.... we basically converted all their different sites to full static and put them on ice. It would have been expensive to keep hosting how they had been, but with everything flattened to static it's super cheap to keep up (although no publishing new stuff without some by hand work or restoring the old servers).
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.
Could the internet archive offer this as a paid service?
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).
I've been wondering this too. I've even been considering authoring a web standard to allow hosts to specify how their pages can be archived in a standard way (e.g. which scripts to include, etc.) and then pitch the IA to offer a "pay $X to archive this data forever" deal to the universe.
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.
> 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:
No no, the exact opposite. If this bundle of content is so valuable, then someone can make a business out of buying it. Vice could go to WeBuyOldIntellectualAssets.com and get a flat price for it all, and that company would host it or do whatever with it.
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.
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
Not just brands, but software too. The primary software I support at my day job was acquired by a company that, based on their other assets, can be described as where software goes to die.
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.
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
Could they (or a for-profit company) bid on it? Do liquidators in the US have to consider any offer, even if it was unsolicited? Does it vary from state to state?
That works too, but there is something to be said about a turn key solution friendly to corporations who are willing to just throw some money to make a problem go away. Plus archive will get a bit of extra money for the Wayback machine!
Just pay some donation, redirect your DNS to the way back machine and bingo.
Note that Archive Team and the Internet Archive are separate, unaffiliated entities, though they do often work together.
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:
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:
I think the issue is for the IA that isn't lucrative enough to make it worth there time. Someone already did it for them for free, even if it wasn't 100% as good as they could have done it.
> we basically converted all their different sites to full static and put them on ice. It would have been expensive to keep hosting how they had been, but with everything flattened to static it's super cheap to keep up
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.
I had a proof of concept for us to migrate sites to a static / low / no cost hosting option.
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.
It was not an issue of refining the content on one site, you make a good point though.
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.
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 you don’t have some form of automated throttling, couldn’t that still become costly if a popular webpage started pulling resources from that bucket?
If so, their warning could have been phrased better, but isn’t incorrect.
If they would want to monetise their content in the future, they must keep it private before it's gobbled up by search engines and AI and becomes public domain.
I don't understand why publishers take down Kindle books when the paper book goes out of print. It happened to one of my favorite scifi novels.
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.
It probably has to do with publishing rights. Authors may not want to allow digital publication without an actual print run, and once the initial print run ends they lose the digital rights unless they do another print run. Or the digital publication rights may only be negotiated for a fixed period of time, or else require an ongoing fixed payment to retain, so it costs the publisher money to continue offering a digital version that they may not recoup without sufficient sales.
Halting digital sales might be necessary to declare a write-off and recoup a tax benefit that year. That was happening to some streaming shows, anyway.
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.
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.
Why do you think it's a problem of foresight and not simple motivation? Perhaps none of the parties cares about the availability of a book that doesn't make enough money to stay in print. Perhaps having the book become unavailable for some time is perceived as a benefit to the rights holder, allowing them to do a re-launch.
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?
It can be also that some decision makers feel it is too much hassle. Or they don’t even know it is an option.
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 firmly believe that if they think their only option is to shut down, they aren't fit to do their job. If they don't understand how the internet works they should let someone who does do the work.
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.
The ChatGPTs of this world will solve that. I like to believe that I know a couple of things about a couple of things regarding technology and sometimes I ask ChatGPT or Gemini "how can I do so and so, list/name five pieces of software or technical solutions to do so-and-so".
I use it/them as a search engine on steroids. Maybe it is time more people also do so.
If you're getting residual revenue on a website, at some point someone's going to figure they could get a bit more residual revenue by adding some ad scripts, and pretty soon you've got an entire stack for serving ads that needs maintenance and ROI.
I just let Google do that. Sure it's not max possible value, but return on effort is pretty good. Advertisers can buy through google and target your site. If you get enough traffic, you can probably cut a better deal (ok, that costs negotiating time, but if the ROI is there...)
Those Yahoo Groups could be a trove of niche, otherwise uncollected information, especially with regard to vintage or specialty electronics. Removing them was a huge loss.
> did a giant curl job, recursively regex'd out the login/comment submission fields and dumped them on s3
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
This is why I post on slashdot. They've passed the test of time (but not UIs, fuck beta). Looks like their first posts in '97 start here: https://slashdot.org/?page=8582 dunno what their december 31st, 1969 posts are after that (errors? intentional de-ranking?)
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.
It's very depressing that all the comment sections from the late 2000s to mid 2010s are nowhere to be found. Also a lot of live journal type sites. Comment sections seem omitted from Internet Archive snapshots, but I find them in many ways more worthy of archival than the published articles that make the cut.
> That type of data would be so interesting for things like historical sentiment analysis
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.
They aren't representative of the general public. This can still make it very interesting though. Do trends show up earlier among commentators? If so, has the time it takes for the trends to flow to the mainstream changed over time. Has the likelihood at which online commentator trends flow to the mainstream changed? It's the influence more pronounced for specific subjects?
It is very depressing, but on the other hand you'd have millions of comments written in another era (pre-culture wars, when the Internet was more, let's say, "tolerant") that can be now traced back to the authors to cancel them. With infinite memory you need protection, otherwise it's un-erasable damnation.
The last time I looked at Slashdot comments (2021, give or take) they were low-effort trolls, racist/sexist, or just gibberish. Has moderation improved there or is it still a cesspool?
I scraped a sample of their posts ten years ago and ran a regression on user activity by ID. They have zero significant growth in user base other than mobile users posting more as AC. There was a small core of older active 5-6 digit UIDs doing the bulk of the posting and that was shrinking toward zero around now. Slashdot will die in the near future even if Netcraft can't confirm.
As one of those 6-digit UID posters, /. has been dead for quite some time. Discussions barely breach 50 comments or so now days, for the most part. The firehose sucks. The 'editors' constantly post dupes and the left hand seems to have no clue what the right hand is doing.
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.
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.
It takes continuous effort/money to keep metaphorical company lights on. There is things you need to file periodically, legalities you need to comply with, also when they change in the future, just to exist.
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.
Ever more bummed about Fatwallet as Slickdeals continues to worsen with endless "sponsored deals" and censorship to force people to use their cashback and price tracking products.
Nothing in that post indicates they are taking it offline, the HN headline is just editorializing. It says Vice is no longer making new content for their Web properties and focusing on other platforms instead like YouTube.
There's no way they'd give up the ads dollars they get from he existing stuff... That makes no sense
It's not that expensive to host old blog posts and they already host videos on YouTube... What's expensive in those operations is supporting new content and growth. Now they can wind it down and establish a fixed legacy system and eventually run it on autopilot with a small team in support roles.
And they'll keep updating contracts to sell ads for a defunct site? Seems doubtful. Past experience shows that the site is unlikely to stay up for the long haul.
You don't need to sell ads directly to Nike to make more than enough $$ to incentivize running an existing major content site, let alone pay for a small team to sufficently keep it running tech wise...
People just try and hack it constantly - as in, hundreds of automated hacking attempts per day, and when they succeed, they won't make obvious changes, they'll tweak things gently in a malignant way that won't be noticed for some time.
It's really not that complicated to manage cloudflare type Web app firewalls and shutdown content interfaces, both comment sections and admin panels, so there's no malleable auth areas to breach. And even if that happens a small team could easily handle run of the mill script kiddies and SEO schemes.
I gave up a domain I used to own in the last year or so. It was a mildly popular site that had been around for about a decade.
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?
It happened to the state of Maryland, too: their domain registration for starspangled200.org, featured on their license plates, expired and was picked up by a gambling website in the Philippines. Maryland has since reclaimed the domain.
I had a domain in early smartphone days for a mobile app that served up some Canadian Broadcasting Corporation content. I eventually abandoned the app/domain and the CBC snapped it up - so that's about the best-case scenario.
> It makes no sense to not let the site online in an archived form, for the posterity
>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.
I'm in the "this decision is stupid" camp, but just playing devil's advocate here, they might not want to risk damaging their brand by letting some third party agency mishandle their website
Yeah depends if the Vice brand carries on. If it does then this needs to be managed which gets rid of the “brush soot off hands; not my problem” advantage.
Do investors know that they exist? I feel like this is something that will only happen if the archive-er actively make contact and persuade the current website owner that it's worth it to make the deal.
I’m not sure your premise is correct. This is important here.
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.
Site wipes also disadvantage job-hunting staffers who suddenly don't have a public published portfolio to point potential new employers / clients to. Though enterprising staffers may anticipate such moves and archive content as it's published to head off the inevitable.
(I've seen this issue raised on previous site shutdowns, quite probably Gawker.)
If you care, you should be saving your own stuff in some form. If I counted on people saving what I've written in findable form I'd have very little left. As it is, I have most things I care about.
For public-facing journalism, a public-facing record (Internet Archive, Archive Today, etc.) provides some third-party credibility that what you say you wrote and was published online actually was written when and as claimed.
Keeping your own personal clippings file preserves words but not provenance.
Original photography sometimes has tricky licensing — photos are good for only 5 years, then have to be renewed. That’s what photo editors at these magazines do. The text content itself is usually a one-and-done deal though.
I’d literally love that idea; it’s a really compelling concept but my first concern would be the potential risk licensing/copyright issues that could arise from the original site owners transferring the site to IA. But seriously that would be so cool to see one day.
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
It wasn't in this post, but it was a separate rumor that the site would be deleted. This sounds crazy, but is exactly what other digital publications have done recently.
There can be licensing issues, stuff breaks, stuff gets hacked, most content just gets really stale...
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.
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
"There should be a way to donate a website to the Internet Archive so that they run an online archive on it, basically"
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.
Web archiving is a solved problem, you record the website in an interactive environment [1], and everything what happens on-screen will be saved in a single file in an open [2] and standardized [3] file format authored by Internet Archive and endorsed by Library of Congress for preservation [4].
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..
The technical side is a solved problem, the legal side not so much.
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.
For example a site that I liked called The Outline stopped publishing content in 2020 and they leave the site online at least for now https://theoutline.com/
(One of the original devs for The Outline here) so happy that it is able to live on, frozen in time, although missing a lot of the features that made it cool.
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’ve worked in publishing (engineering and product side mostly) for a long time; reasons not to keep it up:
* 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.
While the site isn't being shut down, who is held responsible for the old content. What if new regulations are introduced? The site is most likely dynamic, so would at least require a full scrape of all content, and then placing all that content somewhere online (and that probably includes large images and video). Keeping the site going is probably not worth it for the ones on top that are set to be the only ones making profit from it.
"If it makes no sense, there's someone mean behind it."
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.
“and people want to be good.”
I’d even push back on this a bit. Many people do not actually care about being good. A small but significant minority are psychopaths.
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.
In instances like this, I find it pays to reserve a little energy toward being open minded and holding a 'trust but verify'. Specifically tho, trusting yourself and past lessons, but verifying, as opposed to trusting others.
People are complicated, and negative interactions do tend to have an outsized influence on molding our behavior
>It makes no sense to not let the site online in an archived form, for the posterity
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.
> It makes no sense to not let the site online in an archived form, for the posterity
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.
>But some time in the last few years something mus have gone broken.
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.
It wouldn't even be a significant cost and ads would recoup it anyway
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.
University libraries can serve a function here. They'll often act as archives for local newspapers and outlets. If a publication is shutting down they should definitely work to transfer their site to some organization that will preserve it.
Business people, who make these decisions, aren’t exactly known for being intelligent or asking intelligent questions of technical people who work for them.
That’s a very broad brush you’re using for a patronising take there.
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.
Its sad that Vice feels like they can only gain value from social media and YouTube.
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).
I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. Perhaps it's just me, but it seriously makes the rest of social media look like an absolute trashfire by comparison.
Sorta. YouTube is kinda anti-monetization of your content unless you get 1000 subscribers, which is kinda hard if you don’t do consistent topic or are entertaining.
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).
I'd imagine there's a lot of undesirable friction in "tipping" online (clicking a link, filling out a credit card form, etc.) that a tip jar in a cash-based society never had.
> I'm wondering what is most commonly used for tipping websites/content?
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.
Youtube is pushing Tik Tok style "shorts" pretty hard. If you ever accidently click on one, the UI makes it very hard to find your way back, and easy just to sit and watch a bunch of 15-second clips.
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.
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.
At least for me, I find Youtube too addictive if it offers me an endless list of vidoes tailored to me. The repulsiveness of the default suggestions means I'm not immediately sucked in.
I’m not sure where TOT sits. He’s not particularly ‘how to do it’ like mrpete222 or maybe Presso, but he’s not trivial dumb stuff either. He’s entertaining and I think YT would be worse without him.
I’m finding ave harder to watch as time goes by. He’s got some conspiracy stuff going on and while he’s clearly intelligent & educated I wonder if he all that much smarter than most of us or if he’s just bluffing sometimes. He’d be fun to be friends with and hang out with for sure but I think a lot of people consider him some sort of know everything genius. He seems to play up to his audience more and more.
I learned a good deal from his earlier work, but you're not wrong about what he's up to these days. He's always been a drunk uncle, but there's a good side and a bad side to those, and since early in the pandemic he hasn't been spending all that much time on the good side.
> I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there.
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.
I feel like the recent AI advancements will ruin that as well - YT will find a way to pull a Quora - extract all that passionately made content, whitelabel it, and sell it back to you.
Agreed. I know they're the minority but I'm regularly astounded by how well researched, produced and informative the videos by many of the channels I follow are (e.g. the retro tech scene). They make it look easy and I'm sure it does get easier once you've got momentum and a process but as someone who has dabbled in such things ... it's anything but.
I typically watch YouTube content once, but I'll likely revisit a webpage many times. But I suppose YouTube returns more potential ad revenue despite lower visits.
It doesn't really compete will well-edited prose, but transcripts are available on youtube and actually often pretty good, despite being auto-generated.
Vice has done lots of investigative reporting. Two weeks ago I brought up one of their years old investigations in a discussion, went and found the article to brush up on the topic, my cousin and I spent about a half hour reading their articles on the topic, then we discussed. Yes, I did learn things from vice. I'm assuming your confusing Vice with a listicle producer or something. Your smug self-assured arrogant pessimism is showing.
I think the problem with Vice is not that they are moving to just social media / YouTube, it's that the whole segment news publishers is dying. If you are running an org with hundreds of positions, management overhead and other fixed costs that come with operating a traditional company, it's very hard for your to compete with the likes of Substack and other independent journalists. In fact I'd say that there are very few companies these days that can make it work, either you are the New York Times or a similar org in which case you can use your sheer weight in the space to survive, or you're an org like Daily Wire that has a specific angle (conservative news) and then subsidize your standard revenue with products (DW launched a razor company, and a chocolate company, both are billed as the "conservative alternative" to Harry's / Hershey's).
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.
> 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.
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.'
I made a similar comment a few weeks ago on another post about another site shutting down. It’s so sad how the internet has less and less “independent” sites and instead more people and organizations are just relying on the big names (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Shopify, Reddit, etc).
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.
> Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper.
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.
Wordpress is kind of forever. I was helping someone with a decade-old managed wordpress a little while ago; it required updating plugins and ditching a few of the old ones, but otherwise a relatively simple process.
> 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.
> 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.
Consolidation on narrow themes is ensured by our reliance on query->answer search engines.
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.
>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.”
>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.
> 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).
Vice did short lived, low quality, clickbaity, dopamine-chasing content outside social media, it's just more profitable to do inside social media.
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 .
>Its sad that Vice feels like they can only gain value from social media and YouTube.
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.
Substack exists. There are places where you can match content with payment. Comparing Medium and Substack, I make money with my Autonomous Agents newsletter on Substack, not so much on Medium. I also used to run a Web3 site where people would be paid good money for good content (paying on avg 25 USD per 5 days), but not many takers for this kind of business model.
I recall watching this series as each episode dropped, truly memorable journalism showing history in the making. Also emailed with Simon Ostrovsky years later, very nice guy.
For a brief time, their HBO series was essentially a blueprint for a 21st-century 60 Minutes (which long ago became a hollow shell of its former self).
I remember when Gavin McInness was still making content for them. Their strength was always to have stories and bits that no where else would. Not sure how much they strayed from that in the last 5-10 years but they almost never showed up on my radar anymore
Yes, he left Vice over "creative differences" a couple of years before he founded Proud Boys. He wasn't as openly fascist while at Vice, though Vice definitely had to do some damage control over his comments.
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.
| 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.
| "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.”
I don't think it was started specifically for that, it was just a boozer group I think. But then Antifa started bashing grandma's and someone had to step up.
I would honestly really like to read a book (or New Yorker article, but I repeat myself) about this period. Was he fascist, just not openly, in the early days of Vice? Or was he radicalized later? If he was radicalized, how did that happen?
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.
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.
Yeah exactly. I think that must be part of the story. I can see how doing, like, countercultural grittiness as an act could lead to cognitive dissonance and a desire to "stop being a poser".
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.
My sense is fewer Zoomers are interested in the grimy/underworld/rave vibe compared to Millennials and Gen X. It’s all the same to them.
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 would just like to point out that members/former of every counterculture back to at least the 50s have said this about the younger generation; it’s almost a cliche.
I'd have to disagree this time.
I'm in nearly early 20's and there's not really a prevailing and counter culture. Just two dozen different intercting culture. The lack of a overbearing monoculture does make it hard to effectively rebel.
Agree, the first few years it was really impressive, with a lot of high quality stuff coming out.
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.
Yeah I was about to say, though I'm getting a bit worried that as Andrew grows more successful and grows his operation, the more it will start to resemble a traditional news outlet (much as Vice did in the later years).
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).
I think he's principled enough to keep creative direction on it. And just like with All Gas No Brakes, if someone else takes ownership and he disagrees with their vision for the content, he'll just move to a different channel or platform. His fans are devoted enough that they'd follow him.
I don't really think that's relevant to the journalism he's doing. If he didn't do it, hopefully the courts will determine his innocence. If he did do it, hopefully the courts will punish him appropriately. But either way the work is good and it's worth one's time to watch it.
Yes, it's nice to get real news after so long dealing with fluff. Peter Santenello and Soft White Underbelly are also good to see what the US actually looks like.
Back in the aughts I thought Vice felt legitimately edgy, surprising, adventurous. Then, they realized they could get boatloads of money from 'traditional' media companies, that desperately wanted to look not-traditional and thats when the character changed IMO. Then numerous sexual misconduct cases, key leaders replaced, and it was dead.
> They ran out of dangerous places to do designer drugs.
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
Vice only survived as long as it did because some MBAs insisted that if they wanted to do cool stuff (documentaries, TV channel) they needed to do something else on the side that actually generated revenue. The majority of Vice's revenue came via highly un-sexy "creative services" (i.e. producing TV commercials) and other advertising media.
I think this is a thing in certain industries. Game development for instance; I feel like the more money a publisher has, the worse the result, and I would argue that one of the factors is an increase in corporate types. There hasnt been so much the implosion of those companies yet, but id wager in the next 5-10 years they will have to majorly trim down or perish.
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.
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.
I spent 2+ hours backing up as much as I could. Most of my pieces were syndication from my newsletter, but I had a number of originals, at least two that I spent 3+ months on.
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
If that wasn't an written by an LLM with a prompt like "please write some generic business pablum justifying the bad action we're about to take" then it really should have been.
People still don't realize how many things from the last fifteen years were LIRPs. Low interest rate phenomena doomed the moment investors can get a halfway-decent yield from fixed-income investments.
I think that's an unfair view of Vice. It got acclaim for its writing and attitude as an independent outlet and seemed to be a legitimately profitable business for the first decade or so. It was only when it decided to become a media giant early/mid 2010s (and ironically people started to like it less and less) that it started hoovering up cheap investor money.
It was only when it decided to become a media giant early/mid 2010s (and ironically people started to like it less and less) that it started hoovering up cheap investor money.
Vice got popular from very early internet videos before YouTube and TikTok kicked off, then it got indoctrinated by political ideas and everybody saw it. It turned trash. What are you on about lol.
It’s also naivety re: the way the internet attention economy would work out. Yahoo and tons of media companies thought the strategy was to pay people to create content, to get eyeballs. The strategy was actually to create a platform for narcissists to create tons of content people want to read for free to get eyeballs.
Meanwhile US housing is politically a zero-risk alternative with costs guaranteed by government subsidy for 30 years. Why innovate when you can own capital?
Its odd to think that both Silicon Valley and Vice were from the same phenomenon, but it does track (radical entrepreneurial libertarian "world-changing" businesses).
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.
Silicon Valley predates low interest rates by decades, and the tsunami of money it generates helped to create an environment where low interest rates for long periods were even possible
This doesn't make sense to me. Low interest rates are possible when inflation is not out of control. Don't you need a money sink instead of a money source to make low interest rates possible for long periods? In a way that could still be SV's doing though. Garbage companies like Juicero were able to absorb capital from the "real" economy to keep inflation from rising.
> Low interest rates are possible when inflation is not out of control.
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.
"While today 'Silly Con Valley' is thought to refer to the prevalent business models, the name was originally derived from the chemical element when people there used to actually make stuff."
The conditions of possibility for Silicon Valley as we know it predate low interest rates, there is always a confluence of forces at work in constructing any economic and social regime. First it goes back to Reagan, then you can go further back to the origins of set theory and phenomenology, then you can go back to Kant, and, if you're so inclined, you can retrogress all the way back to Panini and his systematization of Sanskrit as the first "computer" language.
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.
Well, of course Phenomenology is more important when thinking about computation, but by the time Heidegger was writing about zeros and techne he was already quite old, and computation had developed significantly; the same with Godel, who we consider to be a very important thinker with regard to the theory of computation, but the machinery of the computer was already being put together before the invention of the formal logic that we today consider necessary for computer programming.
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.
The Internet Archive taking over a dead website domains and URL's makes sense to keep them useful to web users (the ongoing fee of the domain name is a pain, but not that expensive)
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.
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.
-In mid-August 2013, Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox invested US$70 million in Vice Media, resulting in a 5% stake.
-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.
Interesting how types like you will never outright say what they mean because they know it sounds bad when you spell it out.
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'm very interested in something like archive box but:
* 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.
I'm currently diving into some fairly fringe and very dead tech so my perspective is a bit skewed but I seem to be relying on the wayback machine an absolutely absurd amount lately.
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.
It's not AI killing the internet, it's the parasitic worms in human suits that run hedge and equity funds. Everything gets converted into "value" which means nothing has value. The end game seems to be one engorged sack of money, and nothing left to buy with it.
It's still early days but things are definitely trending that way. Google Search is significantly worse than it used to be. Twitter is a cesspool of blue checked spam. Reddit is still functioning, but I keep seeing obviously transformer-generated comments more and more often (and I'm sure I'm reading tons more without even realizing). Once Sora and its ilk become widespread Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram are gonna get flooded with entirely synthetic content.
In the case of wayback machine reliance it isn't AI really; that's due to the decline of sectors of the tech industry meaning loads of places are cutting back on hosting old stuff for very slight profit gains.
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.
Vice Media Group is a conglomerate with a bunch of other stuff besides the magazine/website. An ad agency [1], a tv/film studio [2], another film studio [3], etc. It seems like they’ll be keeping a lot of that too. The linked message implies they’re shutting down the ad-supported journalism part of the company and doubling down on contract work.
There are many labels I could apply to Vice, but I'm reasonable sure "propaganda darling" of the "real owners of this country" would not be near the top. Were you thinking of Fox or New York Times or something?
Subscriber counts don't decline, with how old youtube is now, and how little competition there was back in the day, you can have a long running channel (like vice's) with very little active viewership. How are the views on their recent videos?
Looks like they're regularly 100k-500k views with a few outliers every few months in the millions and a couple of times a year hitting 5M. I have no idea how this translates to income.
just anecdotally, among the youtubers i follow those seems like view counts which would allow a solo creator to quit their day job and hire a part-time editor.
As someone who has never even tried to monetize youtube, I am shocked that having that sized audience still can't make a go at it as a FT job. Guess I will stick to programming.
Once YouTube started monetizing videos that weren't in the partner program it was always going to be downhill from there. The supply of ad-eligible videos probably doubled overnight
A thousand dollars a month pays for quite some freelance gigs though.
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.
"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."
This sure feels like another notch in the "the web is fundamentally broken" belt.
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.
How can we solve this if we don't defer this to laziness but try to address it as a very real cost for the owner of the site in terms of
- 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
Vice got super activisty toward the end - obviously there is a place for that sort of content but mainly I watched Vice so I could see nerdy white guys in strange places doing weird shit
I think it’s another victim of YouTube. I liked VICE’s content in the early days but it couldn’t really compete with all the content produced by individuals who were closer to the epicenter of conflict. Let it be.
Hopefully the internet archive can save Vice from itself and archive it for posterity. This sucks. This sucks. I really liked Vice for their journalism. Shame there’s basically no money in it these days. I hope the journalists go somewhere else and are able to do the same awesome work.
Back in the early days, Vice had some really good content - I'll always remember Shane Smith's trip on the Siberian railway on his trip to North Korea. It's a shame the management have decided on the scorched earth approach here.
Bold-ish prediction: by 2040 it will only be individual influencers producing news. Most newsroom outlets are zombies at this point, being kept alive by something outside of their ad revenue
That's NPR/PBS, but they seemed to have fallen off the rails during the Trump administration. They were top notch before Trump though; their coverage of how we got into Iraq, "Bush's War" was phenomenal.
publicly funded meaning that they will only report news that is favorable to whoever happens to be in power at the time and controls the purse strings?
no thanks. The USA does not need state sponsored media.
They’re not stopping producing content, they’re shuttering their own website. I imagine high YouTube viewing figures is exactly the sort of thing that plays into this decision.
Because youtube DOES charge them via adsense, and TOS can change at any moment.
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?"
> Regrettably, this means that we will be reducing our workforce, eliminating several hundred positions.
> […]
> 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.
Not surprising. One of the big changes over the last 10-15 years was the centralization of content onto Social Media Platforms (with textual content being completely sidelined). That coupled with the advent of smartphones, means people don't browse the "open" web as they did pre-2010. This in turn collapsed ad-revenue and companies like Vice are paying the price for that.
I fail to understand how digital content distribution has stopped being efficient. It would probably be more accurate to say "This is not the goldmine we need to feed all our shareholders and the mountain of bureaucracy and inefficiency that we have turned into as a media outlet".
Also, the loss of content that should have been trivial to archive is nearly criminal. Almost like book burning.
Once they got funding and on HBO they rested on their behinds, spent too much money, wasted effort on bullshit while neglecting hard journalism, and believed they "arrived."
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.
Not everything on Vice was great but I will always be grateful for them introducing me to the Joel Golby and his London Rental Opportunity of the Week column[0].
Is this actually as dramatic as the title implies? The email says "we will no longer publish content on vice.com." That doesn't necessarily mean they'll pull vice.com offline.
Either way, between this and Pitchfork winding down, it really feels like we're entering new times culturally.
Yeah -- you're right, this has been a long time coming. I just think the closures and layoffs these past few months have finally closed the chapter on the style of journalism and tastemaking they built.
but there isn't any cohesive, structured, insightful cultural commentary replacing them- we're in murky waters and people i'm sure people will feel the squeeze of an uncreative culture even more than they are already
The post is written by a guy named Ernie that writes a newsletter called Tedium, which I highly recommend.
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.
My guess is they will go AI generated content. Will pull the content of the website to use and style guide for the AI and prevent anyone else from training AI on their past content. Also I wonder if the lawsuit from New York Times against OpenAI has any impact. I could see new Vice owners try the same thing if New York Times were successful. But also, OpenAI defence is that they did not train on NYT archive but content that was quoting NYT. If I remember correctly VICE had a lot of NYT content that was heavily quoted. Maybe pulling all the content saves them from getting into endless wrangles in the future.
Why would anyone want AI generated content from Vice, the brand known for direct, novel, firsthand reporting from relatively unknown/inaccessible places? Why would anyone want to read what an LLM thinks North Korea is like? For that matter why do we think anyone will want to read an LLM’s take on anything that has to be grounded in a reality that wasn’t part of its training data?
Reminder that Vice Media filed for bankruptcy and was acquired by a private equity firm last year. Nothing that is happening now should be surprising. The company's brand and content library are being squeezed for any remaining profits and its carcass will then be tossed away.
I was watching Dark Side of the Ring on Vice TV the other day (a vice of mine by chance), and despite the fact that their eponymous block bold letter design language was intact during the promo commercials for upcoming shows, it was clearly all for Vice-adjacent syndicated TV shows that felt more at home on HGTV or worse. I was pretty shocked and figured they just suffered the same fate of The Learning Channel, may it forever rest in peace.
Following the news from Pitchfork (absorbed by GQ and with layoffs) as well, this doesn't bode well for the future of written journalism and web publications
I liked the magazine-oriented things they did like the fashion do's and don'ts, the music reviews, the johnny ryan comic segments and the richard kern features. Their physical issues were pretty high quality for something that you could grab from yoir local spot for free. That era has been long-gone for a while now though, so this isn't a huge loss in that respect
I personally never visited their website to begin with so this choice makes sense to me. It feels like thats true for most mainstream journalism sites. Very curious if this is a sign of things to come or just unique to Vice.
It takes a while to take down job posts. Everyone likely learned the decision recently. I don’t think the employees who are going to be laid off care about updating the job posts at the moment…
The title is "Vice website is shutting down", and this job page refers to vice.com. It's the screenshotted text that says they will "transition to a studio model" and still exist, but no longer publish on vice.com. It also says they will be eliminating several hundred positions, so the hiring question seems appropriate.
Nowhere near as dramatic as the headline implies. The tl;dr (slightly paraphrased)
> 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.
Yup. The parent comment disambiguates between vice the website and vice generally. Only the website is shutting down; vice the org will still be around.
Was Vice a thing? I only occasionally visited the site, mostly after having link to a presumably interesting story.
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.
They do. But pretending that somehow, a terrorist organisation would allow a bunch of woke leftists into their compounds to film is also equally hilarious.
Not to mention all their so called "reporting" on poor neighbourhoods in LA/Chicago, specifically designed to portray black kids as quasi-animals, but I digress. Good riddance to vice.
In the 1990s, McInnes was hardly a far-right menace.
He was a tree-planting vegetarian, a druggy anarchist, and a self-described “dogmatic feminist.” Some people who knew him then still regard him as one of the funniest people they’ve ever met. He counted comedians such as David Cross and Sarah Silverman as friends, both of whom contributed articles to Vice.
[ ... ] But over time McInnes accelerated his drift to the political fringe.
He was a tree-planting vegetarian, a druggy anarchist, and a self-described “dogmatic feminist ... But over time McInnes accelerated his drift to the political fringe.
Sounds like he just moved from one fringe to another.
Well Vice.com destroyed themselves after the founder left and was taken over.
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.
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)?
Vox is diversified enough across publications (sports, trad media like NY mag, vox.com) and platforms (video, movies, etc) that they will be fine. They may never deliver the multiples they promised investors but their investors don't care -- Accel and Allen & Co types didn't put a ton into them, NBCU and Penske are probably just happy Vox hasn't folded like BF and Vice... Vox is solid in the world of media but certainly failed in what they promised to achieve. Still though, just surviving is a high measure of success in the hellscape that is VC funded online media.
You know, Vice had some genuinely great and groundbreaking journalism when it started out. I don't know if that was pure luck, or whether it started out as its best self and then regressed to the mean. On the other hand, Slate started out mediocre and has butt-scooted along the ground for decades, while Vox and HuffPo were just trash from day one. We lost something that could have been of value with Vice, even if we lost it a long time ago. But with the others, good riddance.
They’ll be fine as long as Trump wins the next election.
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.
I think you were downvoted by people who so viscerally can’t stand the idea of Trump winning they need to silence anyone that might dare to say it… which entirely proves your point market that a media outlet can sustain on.
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.
> 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?
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)