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Vice website is shutting down

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Re: Vice website is shutting down

#321
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. This has downsides on its own. Nowadays there are tons of YT videos that convey useful info in which the same useful info could be conveyed in a 200 words written piece. But no, you have to skip through a 20 minutes video where the signal to noise ratio is extremely low to get the really usefu…

That is true and it can also be said about a lot of long form written content.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there's liability, copyright, and trademark concerns as well.

If they would want to monetise their content in the future, they must keep it private before it's gobbled up by search engines and AI and becomes public domain.

Search engines have already gobbled it up the moment it was published. And it is probably in the training dataset of many AIs.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. This has downsides on its own. Nowadays there are tons of YT videos that convey useful info in which the same useful info could be conveyed in a 200 words written piece. But no, you have to skip through a 20 minutes video where the signal to noise ratio is extremely low to get the really usefu…

That is true and it can also be said about a lot of long form written content.

At least, skimming a long text is easier.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#324
post #302
post #294

Bold-ish prediction: by 2040 it will only be individual influencers producing news. Most newsroom outlets are zombies at this point, being kept alive by something outside of their ad revenue

that's why some kind of news should be publicly funded. otherwise only people with financial means will be able to produce news.

That's NPR/PBS, but they seemed to have fallen off the rails during the Trump administration. They were top notch before Trump though; their coverage of how we got into Iraq, "Bush's War" was phenomenal.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/bushswar/

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#325
post #192

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 an…

Consolidation on narrow themes is ensured by our reliance on query->answer search engines.

If you think about the shape of the web at the time Google introduced PageRank, It was a huge graph of content connected by fine-grained related interests. It got that way by people doing the work of drawing those relations; and it's a lot of work, given that the number of potential relations is essentially proportional to the square of all existing content. All of the interesting information is in the edges of that graph.

Who's doing that work now? PageRank incentivized people to trade links for the purpose of ranking higher on Google. People became reliant on the convenience of Google to find anything to the point that if you don't rank on Google, you don't exist. People who created content for the sake of the content, and interacting for the sake of interaction, stopped doing it because why waste time yelling into the void? People who felt like they were providing for the community by hosting these sites had no reason to continue. Without people creating, exploring, interacting, and relating content based on pure interests, there's nobody doing the hard work to organize the web in a way that makes it traversable.

We're entirely reliant on platforms showing us the content they want us to see, and what they want above all else is for users to be predictable. If your interests and behaviors are too nuanced for the algorithms to get a handle on, you can't be categorized, packaged, and sold to advertisers with some expected conversion rate.

At this point in time, most of the people who spend time on the internet have never even experienced anything different, and those who have barely remember. If your business relies on their attention, what good is a website going to do you? Your income relies on appealing to social media algorithms, not gaining the trust of the people who used to shape the web.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#326
post #61

I'm thankful for the Russian roulette series. Showed the brutality of war in Ukraine in 2014. Some scenes I won't forget. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw613M86o5o7a0FGlPRdt47xi...

The old documentaries where Shane Smith himself went down to all kinds of dangerous places were really sick.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#327
post #303
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's why some kind of news should be publicly funded. otherwise only people with financial means will be able to produce news.

publicly funded meaning that they will only report news that is favorable to whoever happens to be in power at the time and controls the purse strings? no thanks. The USA does not need state sponsored media.

[deleted]

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#328
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ar…

the best part is to block all of that short jazz with a firefox extension (also don't use youtube logged in) > is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), a Where would you place "This Old Tony" in that regard?

> also don't use youtube logged in

I find YouTube to be a much better experience when logged in. There is targeting in both cases, but it tends to be better aligned with what I want when I am logged in.

And I second the extension, I use "Youtube-shorts block" which also exists for Chrome. On the topic of YouTube specific extensions, I also recommend SponsorBlock.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#329
post #294

Bold-ish prediction: by 2040 it will only be individual influencers producing news. Most newsroom outlets are zombies at this point, being kept alive by something outside of their ad revenue

> being kept alive by something outside of their ad revenue

I believe this might already have been the case for a while actually.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#330

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 makes no sense to not let the site online in an archived form, for the posterity

I wanted to say, that Dr. Dobb's did that. https://drdobbs.com/ But some time in the last few years something mus have gone broken. You can't open the article links anymore.

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