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CollegeHumor shuts down

washingtonpost.com

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Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#141

Post by xamuel »

Shish2k wrote: post #134
xamuel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was growing up, I played on MUD games, which were text-based massively multiplayer games 100% free to play, with no ads or any other kind of monetization, with full staffs of admins, programmers (!!), level designers, and moderators, all 100% volunteers. Reading that now, it sounds like I'm describing some kind of crazy sci-fi utopia that couldn't even get published because it's too unbelievable.

Realms Of Despair ( http://www.smaug.org/ ) is still running - last major update 2002, last update at all 2010 :P `nc realmsofdespair.com 4000` A CLI interface with no readline support; an MMO where you need to manually save your game to avoid losing progress whenever the network glitches for a second; very nostalgic :D

Ah, that's one of the main MUDs I played. I even built an area there. I did tons of runs there (even participated in successful runs on Hastur and Divine Retribution) until I got balzhur'd for cheating :P (I was just a high school kid back then).

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#142

Post by munk-a »

shadowgovt wrote: post #108
echelon wrote: post #24

CollegeHumor is blaming this on Facebook for faking viewership numbers. This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture, and it won't be the last. We really need to de-platform or find a way Facebook can't steal value.

I'm extremely torn between "This is an outrage" and "Buyer beware." Nobody forced College Humor, Funny or Die, or any of the other companies that shifted resources to believe Facebook. They took a calculated market risk and the gamble didn't pay off (and they don't have enough reserve capital to survive a failed gamble). In an ideal market, the back-stop on this behavior would be "Nobody trusts Facebook's self-report…

Nope nobody forced them to compete on FB. They would've been quite silly had they not at least tried to capture the FB market - but I think the false reporting of views is something that really shocked the folks trying to balance the books - their videos still seemed to be performing great while the revenue was slowing down. FB isn't responsible for tempting CH over (and CH made the right choice giving it a try) but FB is responsible for viewership reporting that borders on fraudulent as they try to boost their own overall numbers.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#143

Post by vmchale »

40four wrote: post #36

Unrelated... but on the Washington Post I clicked through to the page that sells subscriptions, only to find that they hijack you back button and do not allow you to go back in your browser history. What a joke. Makes me want to never visit their site again. That is unacceptable.

It's so massively user-hostile. Why would I buy a subscription at a site like that?

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#144

Post by munk-a »

tracker1 wrote: post #111
echelon wrote: post #24

CollegeHumor is blaming this on Facebook for faking viewership numbers. This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture, and it won't be the last. We really need to de-platform or find a way Facebook can't steal value.

Even then, it's not like they've been doing that well on YouTube... I mean, you can only do the same tired millennial jokes so many times, as much as I like bashing millennial culture, it's tired and played out. Aside: If Google Was a Guy series is one of the funniest things online. A lot of their efforts just don't land very well. Compare this to say RoosterTeeth (Red vs. Blue, RWBY and others) has done very well in…

This is going more toward critiquing the content rather than the business which I think is less interesting to discuss on HN, but I wanted to voice that they've put out a lot of interesting stuff - a quite high quality RPG series in Dimension20 along with both short form videos (like A message from the CEO of _____) and longer form vignettes like their summercamp series - I have been pretty appreciative with just how experimental they've gotten lately and I would disagree strongly that they painted themselves into a single formula.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#145

Post by munk-a »

macspoofing wrote: post #94
neaden wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. If someone commits fraud and you believe them that is their fault, not yours for being a victim.

I'm not saying you don't hold FB responsible for lying. If they made false promises they should be sued and the courts should make a proper judgement. Having said that, if you're CollegeHumor, what you can't do is abrogate responsibility for your business decisions, one of which is risking your entire business on an unproven video platform based on the promises of FB salespeople. You still have a responsibility to va…

I am sure CH had some serious numbers people watching FB as they initially tried it out and then over the longer term - the issue is that FB outright lied about numbers in a very misleading manner that has been found to have been fraudulent. It's quite possible CH could discover this via revenue attribution but you need to be paranoid enough to do a deep dive into the numbers to actually confirm that and, TBH, it's generally irresponsible for businesses to invest that heavily into revenue auditing when they don't have strong suspicions about their revenue stability.

It's likely that CH specifically erred in acting overly bullish on early numbers back from FB, seeing the view trend they wanted to capitalize on what seemed to be a very strong market and be an early entrant - FB vastly inflated their numbers but even without that aiming to dominate an early market is always quite risky due to the lack of proof around the long term stability of the market... that sort of over-investment would usually result in a contraction to appropriate size along with a loss of fluidity for a company, it's only game ending when the market is committing outright fraud.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#146

Post by ergothus »

Groxx wrote: post #129
vkou wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a better business model that has been proven to work for monetizing the kind of content CH made? People won't pay for a subscription for that, people won't donate enough to keep the business afloat, and people don't actually want to use attention tokens/microtransactions. A lot of people claimed that these alternatives work, but I've yet to see a business prove that they actually work.

Dropout, the CH thing that will keep running for 6 months or more despite all this, is subscription-based.

When I saw this article, I checked out. Sadly it was a mess that made it hard to find the CH content liked (such as the messages from CEOs skits). That may have been their roku app though.

Still, since that is how I consume content, and since they already laid everyone off, I cancelled my trial.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#147

Post by munk-a »

40four wrote: post #36

Unrelated... but on the Washington Post I clicked through to the page that sells subscriptions, only to find that they hijack you back button and do not allow you to go back in your browser history. What a joke. Makes me want to never visit their site again. That is unacceptable.

I've seen history manipulation used really well to emulate page navigation on an SPA... which is why it's always disappointing to see it abused.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#148

Post by bpt3 »

bordercases wrote: post #70
ConsiderCrying wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Patreon is that it's also getting quite bad for content creators (at least there were a lot of complaints about half a year ago) with the cut they take, the money transfers, and the fact that they've tried to ban adult content creators. It would have been fine if this was all stated/implemented right away but, much like many other platforms, they're doing this at a slow creep. There are alternatives…

Does this make an argument for crypto?

No, it does not in my opinion. What problem described above would crypto solve?

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#149

Post by Zak »

geddy wrote: post #99
echelon wrote: post #24

CollegeHumor is blaming this on Facebook for faking viewership numbers. This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture, and it won't be the last. We really need to de-platform or find a way Facebook can't steal value.

> This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture You know, I never really thought about it this way, but the way you worded it is perfect. I talk about the "good old days" of the Internet, and it always comes down to Facebook ruining everything. I'd pin it around 2012. You're spot on though - Facebook outright murders internet culture. God, I despise that company and what it stands for so much.

One of the things I miss that Facebook killed is... Facebook.

Prior to its attempt to dominate media sharing on the internet, most of the content I saw on Facebook was created by people I know, about their personal lives. People share far less content of that sort now, and the algorithm doesn't prioritize it when they do. Personal updates from people I actually know are probably reduced by an order of magnitude from a decade ago.

If I want to see funny stuff, cat videos, news, political memes, pictures of food, or anything else of that sort, reddit serves much better than Facebook. Nothing has come along to fill the gap for many-to-many personal updates though, and I miss that. There's a startup opportunity here. The hard part isn't technical - something resembling the Facebook of a decade ago wouldn't be hard to build - but attracting a critical mass of users would be a significant challenge.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#150

Post by yardie »

echelon wrote: post #24

CollegeHumor is blaming this on Facebook for faking viewership numbers. This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture, and it won't be the last. We really need to de-platform or find a way Facebook can't steal value.

> CollegeHumor is blaming this on Facebook for faking viewership numbers.

This is fraud and Facebook employees should feel threatened about going to jail. This was not a sleazy sales pitch. This was outright fraud to convince content producers that they were making more money than they actually were.

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