Live data from Hacker News

Vice website is shutting down

writing.exchange

381–390 of 477 posts

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#381

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).

[dead]

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#383
post #183

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.

Agreed. I know they're the minority but I'm regularly astounded by how well researched, produced and informative the videos by many of the channels I follow are (e.g. the retro tech scene). They make it look easy and I'm sure it does get easier once you've got momentum and a process but as someone who has dabbled in such things ... it's anything but.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#384

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)

[deleted]

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that's where things like tip jars work quite well. To reward useful but otherwise niche content.

is tip jars an actual software solutions for tipping? I'm wondering what is most commonly used for tipping websites/content?

> I'm wondering what is most commonly used for tipping websites/content?

Probably something like ko-fi.com. I have it on my sites, but no one has ever tipped (besides my girlfriend, haha). I imagine other people do get tips via kofi, though.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#386

Inside North Korea is a classic: https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/vice-guide-to-north-korea...

> (link to Part 1)

tl;dr = Vice Travel Guide site has a half-hearted vibe going on. The function decay felt like it might have started some years before VC.

I watched Inside NK - it's a good as you say. And then I tried to find the link to Part 2.

'Tried' because the vid doesn't auto-advance to it and pt2 isn't among the handful of videos that can be found thru navigation or searching from that page.

I did find it on Google. Also part 3. Also other offerings that Vice's internal navigation didn't lead me to.

Included in that last was a likable followup series, VG's to NK Labor Camps (in Siberia) https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/north-korean-labor-camps-...

However, I suspect Vice doesn't care if anyone ever finds these classics - and hasn't cared for a while.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#387

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…

> did a giant curl job, recursively regex'd out the login/comment submission fields and dumped them on s3

it's because even this cost outweighs how much they care about the content, which is 0... the people who make decisions like this aren't scrimping pennies or interested in preserving effort... they're looking for the simplest way to get millions of dollars into their pockets

doing the bare minimum to maintain a library of content indefinitely isn't it

these are the kind of people who would happily set fire to a library if they could get away with insurance fraud

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#388

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 the problem with Vice is not that they are moving to just social media / YouTube, it's that the whole segment news publishers is dying. If you are running an org with hundreds of positions, management overhead and other fixed costs that come with operating a traditional company, it's very hard for your to compete with the likes of Substack and other independent journalists. In fact I'd say that there are very few companies these days that can make it work, either you are the New York Times or a similar org in which case you can use your sheer weight in the space to survive, or you're an org like Daily Wire that has a specific angle (conservative news) and then subsidize your standard revenue with products (DW launched a razor company, and a chocolate company, both are billed as the "conservative alternative" to Harry's / Hershey's).

Outside of those groups, everyone else is getting clobbered by Substack and Twitter. 10-15 years ago if you wanted to be a journalist you had to go work for one of the major newspapers, nowdays you can strike out on your own with a Substack and Twitter/X account. Those guy put our news just like they would at the major newspapers, but they have a fraction of the overhead that those guys do.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes no sense, there's someone mean behind it. The deal to work with the media outlets likely dictates they cannot have their own distribution channel even for historical content.

"If it makes no sense, there's someone mean behind it." No idea about this case specifically, but in general this is an assumption that only hurts you in most cases. People have motives and people want to be good. If their "good" is your good is a different question - a question that is often worth figuring out.

“and people want to be good.” I’d even push back on this a bit. Many people do not actually care about being good. A small but significant minority are psychopaths.

But more likely, too your last point, lots of people have a distorted sense of good, in that they can’t separate it from their own self-interest. What is good for them will be justified or reframed to be ’good,’ and this is often unconscious.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.2 efforts which grants you residual revenue for life. Doing it is a no brainer, but some people lack one.

It can be also that some decision makers feel it is too much hassle. Or they don’t even know it is an option. For you and me doing this would be probably an afternoon’s work? (Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less) For someone less technologically inclined it could be seen as a big project. They need to find someone capable of doing it, they need to ask for a quote, they need to supervise the project otherwise the contr…

Up vote from me for very true

> Not to mention they can only think about doing this if they have an inkling that it is possible.

Post reply on HN