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Vice website is shutting down

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Re: Vice website is shutting down

#401

Post by billy99k »

input_sh wrote: post #251
DamnableNook wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, he left Vice over "creative differences" a couple of years before he founded Proud Boys. He wasn't as openly fascist while at Vice, though Vice definitely had to do some damage control over his comments.

"openly fascist"

I disagree with you here. Proud boys was originally created out of the need to protect people from the likes of Antifa, which is a facist group.

Most activists/hacktivists are fascists. If you don't agree with them, they cause issue, violence, and/or destruction until they get their way. Opposing groups like this does not make one fascist.

Lots of what Gavin does is satire...which many people apparently don't get or understand.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#402

Post by julianeon »

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)

I’m not sure your premise is correct. This is important here.

You start off by saying: it costs nothing to keep this site up. No downside.

But there may be some downside from an SEO perspective, which the minuscule ad revenue would not offset.

Even brands with good SEO, with pages which are making money, take some of them down occasionally. They idea is that you want to refocus all your SEO on the pages that matter most - which means pulling others.

Here, you may want all the SEO “juice” to go to your videos, to push the maximum number of users there. If some of them are getting diverted to the website, and that pays less per click, you may in fact be losing money on it vs. having no website.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#403

Post by input_sh »

sanderjd wrote: post #334
input_sh wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, he left Vice over "creative differences" a couple of years before he founded Proud Boys. He wasn't as openly fascist while at Vice, though Vice definitely had to do some damage control over his comments.

I would honestly really like to read a book (or New Yorker article, but I repeat myself) about this period. Was he fascist, just not openly, in the early days of Vice? Or was he radicalized later? If he was radicalized, how did that happen? As loathsome as I find him, he also started two well-known organizations, with very different vibes, but also a through-line you can see if you squint. It must be an interesting s…

I'd say this Vanity Fair article is the closest thing to what you're looking for: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-secret-history-o...

Another interesting example if you're into that sort of thing is Baked Alaska, coincidentally also from Canada, that went from being a Bernie bro working for Buzzfeed to livestreaming Jan 6th inside the Capitol.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#404

Post by greenie_beans »

billy99k wrote: post #398

If you really want to save the content for yourself, use something like https://archivebox.io/ I've been running a local instance for a few years now and download/save tech articles all time. I can search and find them as needed.

that looks very useful, thanks for sharing

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#405

Post by satao »

ejb999 wrote: post #303
satao wrote: 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.

The US already has state sponsored media.

Also, the US military is a big sponsor of Hollywood related content as long as they don't put the military in bad light.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#406

Post by satao »

Clubber wrote: post #324
satao wrote: 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.

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/

yeah, NPR/PBS is great. we should always vote for people who advocate for it instead of people who wants to cut its funds.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#407

Post by sanderjd »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #375
sanderjd wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would honestly really like to read a book (or New Yorker article, but I repeat myself) about this period. Was he fascist, just not openly, in the early days of Vice? Or was he radicalized later? If he was radicalized, how did that happen? As loathsome as I find him, he also started two well-known organizations, with very different vibes, but also a through-line you can see if you squint. It must be an interesting s…

I had to do a double take when the proud boy stuff started showing up many years later. At the time I think he was kind of a comedian

Yeah exactly. I think that must be part of the story. I can see how doing, like, countercultural grittiness as an act could lead to cognitive dissonance and a desire to "stop being a poser".

This is why I'm skeptical of dismissing radical rhetoric as "oh that's just talk". A lot of people have a strong desire to be "real", which will drive some of them to put their money where their mouth is, even if they started out with just some "harmless" rhetoric because it seemed fun to say edgy stuff.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#408

Post by surcap526 »

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)

It is CIA operation. Staff did their job. Now is time to delete history and if it will be useful in the future they will resell as "new."

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#409

Post by RobRivera »

whythre wrote: post #389
weinzierl wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

In instances like this, I find it pays to reserve a little energy toward being open minded and holding a 'trust but verify'. Specifically tho, trusting yourself and past lessons, but verifying, as opposed to trusting others.

People are complicated, and negative interactions do tend to have an outsized influence on molding our behavior

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#410

Post by billywhizz »

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

they are already on it. they do really important work. worth helping them out with funding.

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760755908219466017

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