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CollegeHumor shuts down

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Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#201

Post by endothrowho333 »

bpt3 wrote: post #195
endothrowho333 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon taking a cut and not allowing adult content. Payment processing and facilitating has tangible expenses (cost) and payment processors do not want to get involved with any companies involved with sordid industries (higher fraud). Patreon adopting crypto cuts out the middleman processor and solves both problems. But crypto ia too user-unfriendly at the moment, so usage would be very limited.

> Patreon taking a cut and not allowing adult content. That's an issue with the payment manager, not the currency used for payment. > Payment processing and facilitating has tangible expenses (cost) and payment processors do not want to get involved with any companies involved with sordid industries (higher fraud). I agree completely. > Patreon adopting crypto cuts out the middleman processor and solves both problems…

From my experience with setting up payment processing for white, grey, and very grey (legal) projects, processing fees are a given. They're actually very reasonable for anything white, and downright -- pun intended -- criminal if you want anything more discrete.

You will have fees no matter the payment processor, but crypto has the lowest if you don't need speed. Cutting out the processor achieves this first aim, even though fees are still necessary to run Patreon. Whether or not they're too high after this is another matter.

Adult content is primarily high risk because of credit card charge backs -- it's very rampant. Being illegal operations is another matter that concerns wire fraud and may cause uneccesary burden on the payment processor were it invovled in a criminal investigation.

The chargebacks, higher risk, and threat of investigation are all priced into more "lax" payment processor's fees. Crypto doesn't need to price this in because: it's practically non-reversible and there is no centralized body fronting the risk, i.e decentralized operations.

The blockchain network fronts the risk for wire fraud, so that no other entity, f.e Patreon or PayPal, need to.

I have no stance or argument, these are just some musings I wrote from my observations in the "industry."

Crypto is the preferred payment processor of high risk businesses. Everything else that caters to it is downright garbage in comparison.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#202

Post by endothrowho333 »

ConsiderCrying wrote: post #168
endothrowho333 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patreon taking a cut and not allowing adult content. Payment processing and facilitating has tangible expenses (cost) and payment processors do not want to get involved with any companies involved with sordid industries (higher fraud). Patreon adopting crypto cuts out the middleman processor and solves both problems. But crypto ia too user-unfriendly at the moment, so usage would be very limited.

A more approachable solution (for the general public, at least) would be a payment processing service that takes the risk of working with adult content creators. But that seems like a tall ask, especially for a problem that's pretty niche. Porn makes a lot of money, but not for the people who're just handling the payments. Or, rather, it might make them a good amount but it's probably the same as the profit from othe…

They exist and already make a killing.

The problem is that when Patreon allows high risk activities, those activities poison the well, and all "legit" processors must stop offering their services. Thereby, Patreon is now left with using more high-risk-tolerant processors, but paying the same high fees for all activities regardless of its actual risk.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#203

Post by echelon »

manigandham wrote: post #197
jjeaff wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and google aren't ad supported in the sense that many content creators are. They are ad platform providers which gives them a totally different position of power than 99% of companies out there trying to live on ad revenue.

They're exactly the same. They sell advertising space on their own websites and get attention by giving away free content and services. Publishers also buy each others tech and advertise on each others sites. The business models are identical, just with vastly different scales.

They are platforms and content marketplaces (where the currency is attention). This is entirely different than run of the mill publishers that can't drive attention at scale.

Google and Facebook can leverage their power to put entire industries out of business.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#204

Post by hnick »

geddy wrote: post #99
echelon wrote: post #24

CollegeHumor is blaming this on Facebook for faking viewership numbers. This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture, and it won't be the last. We really need to de-platform or find a way Facebook can't steal value.

> This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture You know, I never really thought about it this way, but the way you worded it is perfect. I talk about the "good old days" of the Internet, and it always comes down to Facebook ruining everything. I'd pin it around 2012. You're spot on though - Facebook outright murders internet culture. God, I despise that company and what it stands for so much.

Any central gathering point seems to lead to homogenisation.

I've joked a lot about "YouTube Voice" (I didn't invent the idea) where people often seem to talk with a similar cadence and you can see the shift over time in their videos the longer they spend on the platform.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#205

Post by bsder »

munk-a wrote: post #142
shadowgovt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm extremely torn between "This is an outrage" and "Buyer beware." Nobody forced College Humor, Funny or Die, or any of the other companies that shifted resources to believe Facebook. They took a calculated market risk and the gamble didn't pay off (and they don't have enough reserve capital to survive a failed gamble). In an ideal market, the back-stop on this behavior would be "Nobody trusts Facebook's self-report…

Nope nobody forced them to compete on FB. They would've been quite silly had they not at least tried to capture the FB market - but I think the false reporting of views is something that really shocked the folks trying to balance the books - their videos still seemed to be performing great while the revenue was slowing down. FB isn't responsible for tempting CH over (and CH made the right choice giving it a try) but…

> Nope nobody forced them to compete on FB.

I actually disagree. Both Facebook and YouTube were almost certainly causing video view numbers on video websites like these to decrease.

The problem is: what do you do? You can pivot to YouTube or Facebook and become a sharecropper like the 9 zillion other sharecroppers or ... die.

While people complain that CollegeHumor should have held out, I don't see anybody who held out doing any better.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#206

Post by allovernow »

ConsiderCrying wrote: post #50
Zhyl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some content creators are already doing this. I'm seeing more spinning up their own newsletters or RSS feeds, patreons, direct donations, subscriptions services (or completely independent platforms). There is an awareness of the dangers of putting your eggs in one basket, let alone the dangers of putting them in a basket as opaque and uncertain as Facebook. CollegeHumor had a lot of hits and spawned some genuine tale…

The problem with Patreon is that it's also getting quite bad for content creators (at least there were a lot of complaints about half a year ago) with the cut they take, the money transfers, and the fact that they've tried to ban adult content creators. It would have been fine if this was all stated/implemented right away but, much like many other platforms, they're doing this at a slow creep. There are alternatives…

>It would have been fine if this was all stated/implemented right away but, much like many other platforms, they're doing this at a slow creep

I think this is a consequence of the nature of the tech industry. It is acceptable to lure customers in with ultra favorable terms, operate at a loss until your consumers are captive, potentially destroying competitors in the process, then gradually exploit your increasingly unhappy userbase.

I imagine we have had anti-anticompetitive laws against at least some of these practices for decades, but the old farts responsible for legislation and justice are slow to catch up to tech's tricks.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#207

Post by skinnymuch »

sirzarmo wrote: post #60

When Jake and Amir was canceled I was quite disappointed, When they made an awful soulless return in the form of an anti-trump video, my fury was immense. they held out for quite a while making original content and as of recently once in a blue moon they made something interesting but the company became very corporate, and their main product was incompatible with that, compatibility is a feat I think only Adult Swim…

Really? You’re just butthurt over the Trump Jake and Amir video? It wasn’t even that bit of a deal. It was also mocking people in general as much as Trump.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#208

Post by _nedR »

hexane360 wrote: post #152
ErikAugust wrote: post #61

CollegeHumor did not shut down, from the article itself: “In words that I’m sure are as surreal to read as they are to type, I will soon become the new majority owner of CH Media,” said Reich, a longtime executive at CollegeHumor. “Of course, I can’t keep it going like you’re used to. While we were on the way to becoming profitable, we were nonetheless losing money — and I myself have no money to be able to lose.” Dr…

BTW, Sam Reich also acted in a bunch of CollegeHumor videos (e.g. https://youtu.be/N0ps6HuThMs ). Of any executives to have control of the company, Sam seems the most likely to preserve CollegeHumor's style.

How can you talk about Sam Reich in CollegeHumour videos in a hacker news thread and not choose "Startup guys" as an example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4

Looking at it now, this video seems to have been particularly relevant, considering that the company went bankrupt because they trusted a bunch of silicon valley frauds i.e. Facebook..

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#209

Post by ShroudedNight »

redwall_hp wrote: post #65
echelon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a false premise for many of us. I miss the indie internet, before big corps and big tech started taking over. I miss IRC and forums and personal websites. I miss the time when Digg was new and hadn't taken over, and memes weren't the most upvoted content. When websites weren't all Javascript and Google wasn't Yahoo. MySpace and LiveJournal and Xanga were never as sterile as Facebook and Instagram. The intern…

Speaking of Technorati...the site Technorati. "The Web We Lost" pretty much sums up what I miss: https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/ The early 2000s had so much promise. The rise of reasonably easy to use blogging platforms, RSS, and web companies that were interested in playing in that world of distributed independent communication. Even Google was a different beast back then. It was the perfect balance…

> Some of that amazing stuff is still out there, but it's drowned out by the firehose of corporatism and "normal" people.

The good stuff is much harder to discover than it used to be.

Even before Google, if you were persistent enough you would eventually find what you were looking for deep in the Lycos / Alta Vista search results. I have tried doing that a few times recently with both Duck Duck Go (Bing?) and Google, and past page 2 the results seem to devolve into an unstructured morass (no matching terms - but it might be relevant... somehow?) in ways that were much more depressing than searches of old.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#210

Post by tomnipotent »

redisman wrote: post #117
badloginagain wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take "shut down" as an immediate stop to all services. Domain doesn't resolve, etc.

I'd imagine just keeping the videos on YouTube still brings some 6 figures per year of income to someone so no point in deleting those.

Can confirm. I helped run one of the largest flash animation networks in the early 2000's (FlowGo), and after we uploaded the content to YouTube after we shuttered the business it was a very nice passive stream of revenue from over 5 billion impressions between 2008-2014.
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