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CollegeHumor shuts down

washingtonpost.com

211–220 of 226 posts

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#211
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. How is that not "shutting down"? It's contracted to life support in order to empty the existing pipeline to minimize losses. Maybe this is a Ship of Theseus kind of thing. They get rid of almost all employees, empty the pipeline, and then retool. What's left of College Humor?

> It's contracted to life support in order to empty the existing pipeline to minimize losses. Is it really life support? Or simply, what is always should have been? Do you really need 100 staffs for College Humor? For the production side, sure you may need quite a bit of staff for each individual production, but once a production is done, you no longer need them, but you still have to pay them. How long you'll have t…

I worked at the company that owned Cracked.com prior to it selling to Conde Nast, and I was always blown away by the TINY team they had producing all that content. Granted they were supported by a much larger parent corp, but it definitely demonstrated to me that you don't need a lot to create a lot.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#212
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, eve…

> but crypto has the lowest if you don't need speed

Fees are a moot discussion when the underlying crypto is unstable. I'd much rather have higher fees than an unpredictable "currency" like bitcoin that could be worth 50% less one month than when it was collected.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to be honest; I think a lot of this rhetoric (not just from this poster, but in general) smells like "I miss being in charge of a wonky system that was hard for people who didn't specialize in understanding it to use." IRC didn't go anywhere. LiveJournal is still there. JavaScript-free pages still exist. What has changed is the network of users has found them wanting and left those spaces ghost towns because t…

> I don't miss a system that excludes users. I do. Not every community needs to be inclusive. Meritocratic communities with onboarding rails that are non-discriminatory are important in many places. Do immunologists appreciate armchair antivaxers? Social media has given everyone a soap box to perpetuate damaging memes, and it makes our work harder. I can't use Reddit to the extent I used to.

You miss the old system that was exclusive to others because the inclusion of all these people has had the effect of excluding from participating to the extent that you used to?

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#217
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try not to judge people by their respective comments but in this case I would venture to guess you are below 25 years of age.

Missed that by almost a decade. I just feel that there is a lot of nostalgia for the old times whereas nothing is actually preventing people from doing what was done before. Replying a bit transversally here, but I was on IRC 18 years ago and still am every day. Any game you have played before can be played now, easier than before, heck we are just organizing Worms I tournament. Youtube is still full of funny stuff a…

Than you know the internet used to be fun. Social drama isn’t what made the internet fun, it was the unique corners and pockets you could explore. IRC especially so.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant Twitter thread from Adam Conover ("Adam Ruins Everything"): https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120 An article about the settlement, including a link to the document itself: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/facebook-pay-40-mi...

what I don't get is, if they saw a high number of views on FB with no actual revenue, why didn't they revert to their previous behavior of just sharing links?

Because, as one of the parent comments mentioned, it was too late. CollegeHumor's readers changed their behaviour because of FB's shady practices.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#219
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missed that by almost a decade. I just feel that there is a lot of nostalgia for the old times whereas nothing is actually preventing people from doing what was done before. Replying a bit transversally here, but I was on IRC 18 years ago and still am every day. Any game you have played before can be played now, easier than before, heck we are just organizing Worms I tournament. Youtube is still full of funny stuff a…

Than you know the internet used to be fun. Social drama isn’t what made the internet fun, it was the unique corners and pockets you could explore. IRC especially so.

My whole point is that none of the fun that was there before died. It got overshadowed by popular stuff but IRC, Forums and personal blogs are still out there. I know because I use all of them daily.

Re: CollegeHumor shuts down

#220
post #205
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

We should put responsibility where it lies: Facebook and YouTube aren't causing video view numbers to decrease; users are choosing to stay in the FB / YT ecosystems rather than seek out some third-party website.

Having seen both the performance and ad-blast of Cracked's website, I can understand why. FB and YT are a better user experience.

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