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.
Vice website is shutting down
41–50 of 477 posts
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#42They ran out of dangerous places to do designer drugs. In all honesty, Vice was a cool outlet for out-there stories for teens and adults alike. Shame it’s shutting down but then again I never supported it.
My thoughts as well. It was pretty strong the first few years and rapidly declined in quality for the last 5 or so.
At some point they stopped being fun and challenging and just became weird and angry.
As much as I hate to say it (millenial), it's probably due to the age of millenials and genx now.
They should have pivoted a different way--more in line with the changing life stage of the readership.
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who said they are not letting the site stay online?
it says "we will no longer publish content on vice.com" which is ambiguous. If I stop posting new content, have I stopped publishing? Or is it if I stop serving, then I've stopped publishing?
It is not ambiguous. They are no longer publishing new content. They have not said they will unpublish existing content.
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#44They have 18,000,000 subscribers on YouTube... how can they not have enough money to host a website and pay some people to create content?... RIP Epicly Later'd?
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?
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#45Just another step in the ongoing collapse of Vice Media
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Media#Bankruptcy_and_sale...
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#46It 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)
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?
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#47Why do executives have to talk like that? It’s so off-putting.
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#48Re: Vice website is shutting down
#49It 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…
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.
Re: Vice website is shutting down
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 hou…
They just sell it for $1m or whatever to some company that specialises in running these kinds of sites. They exist.
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