Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vice website is shutting down

writing.exchange

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 477 posts

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#101

Post by jasonfarnon »

Scoundreller wrote: post #77
greenknight wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even Digg... Lots of comments and discussions lost.

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…

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#102

Post by sfgunn »

resolutebat wrote: post #78
paxys wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18M YouTube subscribers can sustain a decent business, sure, but not one with 3000+ employees.

What? Why on earth does Vice have 3000 employees? I thought publishing companies long since switched to having all their content creators freelance. Edit: I thought OP was exaggerating, but nope, per this random website they have/had at least 2,300. https://rocketreach.co/vice-media-profile_b5c6f6cef42e0cd9

[flagged]

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#103

Post by [deleted] »

mingus88 wrote: post #90
paxys wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not ambiguous. They are no longer publishing new content. They have not said they will unpublish existing content.

“New” is not in the original post. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#104

Post by quickthrower2 »

shawnz wrote: post #50
quickthrower2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#105

Post by jahlove »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #80
DiscourseFan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems noteworthy to point out there are multiple, credible sexual assault allegations against this man:

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1149748975

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#106

Post by FredPret »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #75
jp57 wrote: post #63

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.

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 ne…

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

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#107

Post by mdavidn »

DennisP wrote: post #73
Scoundreller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

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.

Which sci-fi novel?

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#108

Post by zoky »

DennisP wrote: post #73
Scoundreller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#109

Post by morkalork »

The28thDuck wrote: post #6

They 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.

Didn't run out of sex toys and pizza ovens to make poorly disguised content marketing spots for though.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#110

Post by mvdtnz »

ametrau wrote: post #44
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #28

They 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?

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.
Post reply on HN