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Vice website is shutting down

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Re: Vice website is shutting down

#191

Post by DamnableNook »

dirtybirdnj wrote: post #129
naet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Out of curiosity, what was the argument against it?

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#192

Post by rafark »

jacurtis wrote: post #180

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 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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#194

Post by krisoft »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #171
DennisP wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Usually it is because the rights have reverted to the author and the publisher no longer has rights to publish the book. Meanwhile, the author doesn't own the rights to the cover art/design so they can't just put it up either. I'm not sure how else you'd want to handle it.

> I'm not sure how else you'd want to handle it.

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#195

Post by tivert »

ajmurmann wrote: post #161
jasonfarnon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#196

Post by toomim »

ewalk153 wrote: post #85
naet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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). Everybody wins

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#197

Post by notatoad »

mvdtnz wrote: post #110
ametrau wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#198

Post by RankingMember »

Scoundreller wrote: post #32
nextaccountic wrote: post #21

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…

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#199

Post by drawfloat »

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.

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.
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