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Vice website is shutting down

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Re: Vice website is shutting down

#211

Post by [deleted] »

toomim wrote: post #196
ewalk153 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been wondering this too. I've even been considering authoring a web standard to allow hosts to specify how their pages can be archived in a standard way (e.g. which scripts to include, etc.) and then pitch the IA to offer a "pay $X to archive this data forever" deal to the universe. I'm really curious what the cost per byte would be to make it worthwhile to offer a "host this byte forever, for one up-front fee"…

[deleted]

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#212

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

rafark wrote: post #192
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 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…

> Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. Yet for some reason the big companies are dominating more and more. It could be my perception because I was just a kid back then, but there seemed to be more independent sites in the 2000s than now, despite then being harder and more expensive to host a site. It doesn’t make sense to me.

The thing that's really, really important to understand is that lowering barriers to entry leads to more consolidation, not less, because any products that are even of slightly better quality/service/price whatever end up taking nearly all the market.

Yes, in the late 90s and early 00s there were tons of independent sites (if you're too young to be familiar with it, look at the Wikipedia page for GeoCities). And while we may have some nostalgia for that now, the fact is that 95% (I'd probably say 99.9%) of the sites were total crap. Probably over half of them were "Under Construction" banners, but even the ones with actual content were usually pretty atrocious even if you ignore the "murder on the eyes" visual design.

With so much content but limited time and attention, most people don't actually want to wade through the 95%+ of crap - they just want to see the best stuff. So they go to the "market leaders", which can attract more eyeballs and, importantly, more funding to ensure people creating these sites are highly paid to attract the best people.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#213

Post by kombookcha »

notatoad wrote: post #197
mvdtnz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like they're regularly 100k-500k views with a few outliers every few months in the millions and a couple of times a year hitting 5M. I have no idea how this translates to income.

just anecdotally, among the youtubers i follow those seems like view counts which would allow a solo creator to quit their day job and hire a part-time editor.

I'm beginning to see the issue. That's 1,5 employees covered by the youtube money, now for the remaining 2998,5...

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#214

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

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)

we went from the internet never forgets to the internet is suffering dementia.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#215

Post by jsemrau »

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).

Substack exists. There are places where you can match content with payment. Comparing Medium and Substack, I make money with my Autonomous Agents newsletter on Substack, not so much on Medium. I also used to run a Web3 site where people would be paid good money for good content (paying on avg 25 USD per 5 days), but not many takers for this kind of business model.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#217

Post by krisoft »

simlevesque wrote: post #177
dpezet wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I did a giant curl job, recursively regex'd out the login/comment submission fields and dumped them on s3" That is not zero effort. That is at least 1.2 efforts.

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 contractor doing it might just do a half assed job or none at all.

Not to mention they can only think about doing this if they have an inkling that it is possible. They might be operating in a mindspace where “maintaining the servers” is a large monthly expense. For example if years ago they were sold a CMS with all the bells and wistles for some $bigbucks recurring cost. If they are savvy business people they might have done their research to figure out if “this” can be done cheaper or not. But they might not realise that it is possible to change the requirements such to achieve a massive reduction in cost. This is especially true if they treat the cost of servers as a kind of black box.

And very often the people who are providing them with IT services are not incentivised to tell about this option. Will they tell the business owner that oh by the by for half the monthly recurring cost they are paid the business could find someone who puts the page on ice and for the other half runs it for the next decade? Of course not! Doing so would under cut their income stream. That would be crazy. In fact they might spread all kind of FUD and sabotage attempts at scraping the site.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#218

Post by gigatexal »

Hopefully the internet archive can save Vice from itself and archive it for posterity. This sucks. This sucks. I really liked Vice for their journalism. Shame there’s basically no money in it these days. I hope the journalists go somewhere else and are able to do the same awesome work.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#219

Post by ein0p »

DamnableNook wrote: post #207
coffeebeqn wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Gavin McInness was still making content for them. Their strength was always to have stories and bits that no where else would. Not sure how much they strayed from that in the last 5-10 years but they almost never showed up on my radar anymore

Gavin McInness? Founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInness?

[flagged]

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#220

Post by [deleted] »

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

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