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Vice website is shutting down

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Re: Vice website is shutting down

#221

Post by lsde »

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)

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..

[1] https://webrecorder.net/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARC_(file_format)

[3] https://www.iso.org/standard/68004.html

[4] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0002...

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#222

Post by grepfru_it »

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

https://archivebox.io/

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#223

Post by fjfkjfdljkfd »

arsome wrote: post #183
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 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.

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#225

Post by afterburner »

mooreds wrote: post #46
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)

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…

I guess the lesson is, never give up a domain.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#227

Post by w0z_ »

drawfloat wrote: post #199
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.

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.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#228

Post by vesinisa »

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)

If you read the announcement it seems they're actually not shutting the website down, jusy stopping publishing new content.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#230

Post by simonjgreen »

irrational wrote: post #91
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)

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.

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