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Vice website is shutting down

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Re: Vice website is shutting down

#421

Post by dirtybirdnj »

DamnableNook wrote: post #191
dirtybirdnj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I got absolutely tarred and feathered at an agency for suggesting this strategy and I just want to say thank you for validating what I wanted to do.

Out of curiosity, what was the argument against it?

I had a proof of concept for us to migrate sites to a static / low / no cost hosting option.

They were unwilling to spend time "training" the team to learn react (in 2020).

They were unwilling to let their senior FE dev spend any time with me to correct the CSS issues I was struggling with.

They used this deception and dishonesty to say "it didn't work" and wasn't worth any more time. I build a prototype in a week. It's not like I spent month(s) on it without any ROI. They just wouldn't look at it because that would mean acknowledging I and or / my ideas had value.

The closest thing I got to an answer is that the CMS they preferred, which was chosen 10 years ago by people no longer working there... was the only way they could support client sites. Because that's what they've been using. Turnover means it's so hard for us to support anything new because we have no time...

Basically they Brawndo'd me.

It was hard to stomach getting fired by the incompetent people driving the business into the ground when I was literally pleading with them to implement money saving measures.

The horse sometimes would rather kill itself than drink the clean water you've found... that's just life. It's hard to accept.

https://i.redd.it/h2lmsdwqtci81.jpg

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#422

Post by ajmurmann »

tivert wrote: post #195
ajmurmann wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That type of data would be so interesting for things like historical sentiment analysis

> That type of data would be so interesting for things like historical sentiment analysis Except that internet commenters are very weird, and like the least representative sample ever. Not quite as weird as Wikipedia editors, but still really weird.

They aren't representative of the general public. This can still make it very interesting though. Do trends show up earlier among commentators? If so, has the time it takes for the trends to flow to the mainstream changed over time. Has the likelihood at which online commentator trends flow to the mainstream changed? It's the influence more pronounced for specific subjects?

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#423

Post by macspoofing »

Not surprising. One of the big changes over the last 10-15 years was the centralization of content onto Social Media Platforms (with textual content being completely sidelined). That coupled with the advent of smartphones, means people don't browse the "open" web as they did pre-2010. This in turn collapsed ad-revenue and companies like Vice are paying the price for that.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#424

Post by Intralexical »

billywhizz wrote: post #410
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

they are already on it. they do really important work. worth helping them out with funding. https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1760755908219466017

Note that Archive Team and the Internet Archive are separate, unaffiliated entities, though they do often work together.

Archive Team is a loosely organised group of individual volunteers that share a common interest in Internet preservation, and develop tools and share notes to serve that goal. They're basically one of your old-school Mediawiki communities, with very little budget:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/

Internet Archive is a full-blown multimillion dollar `501(c)(3)` nonprofit, which functions as more of a general-purpose library. They maintain physical offices and datacentres in multiple countries, host many petabytes of data, do activism, run conferences, and when they develop custom tools it tends to be somewhat more advanced than the Archive Team's decentralized web scrapers, like custom book scanning hardware:

https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107

A lot of the information in the Wayback Machine, which is run by the Internet Archive, was saved and contributed by Archive Team. For example, as of writing this comment, that is true of the latest snapshot of `https://www.vice.com/en`. You can see this with the "About this capture" button on a Wayback Machine capture.

Both groups have ways to receive monetary donations.

For Archive Team though, I wonder if it would be more useful to donate compute by running their Warrior archiving VM/container, or contributing code to their GitHub:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Dev/Source_Code

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#425

Post by macspoofing »

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).

>Its sad that Vice feels like they can only gain value from social media and YouTube.

It's not that they 'feel' this - this is a fact. You cannot survive on ad revenue running a web magazine anymore. Also, people don't browse the web anymore the way they used to. Everyone hangs out on social media platforms on their phones.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#426

Post by cortesoft »

DennisP wrote: post #73
Scoundreller wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't understand why publishers take down Kindle books when the paper book goes out of print. It happened to one of my favorite scifi novels. It takes zero effort to keep the book available (I know, I self-published a silly little one), and zero effort to include it in your accounting as long as there's a data feed and a computer.

> It takes zero effort to keep the book available

It isn’t about the effort. This is the same thing people say about out of print video games, too.

It isn’t about difficulty, it is about incentives. They want you to buy new books and video games, and if you are reading/playing old free ones, that is reduced demand for what they are selling. Why would they want to help you satisfy your need for free?

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#427

Post by syntheticnature »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #205
jonnyone wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those Yahoo Groups could be a trove of niche, otherwise uncollected information, especially with regard to vintage or specialty electronics. Removing them was a huge loss.

It's all on groups.io

Group owners had to import; it was not all preserved.

There was some effort done with public groups by the ArchiveTeam, but I know they didn't get everything as there was no good way to find all groups.

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#428

Post by EamonnMR »

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.

I'm very interested in something like archive box but:

* Can also download Internet Archive snapshots

* Suitable for (read only) exposure to the open Internet, or saves sites as static content that you could host easily by slapping it into an Nginx or Apache directory.

Is it the tool for the job?

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#429

Post by tekla »

rsynnott wrote: post #351
cal85 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sense is fewer Zoomers are interested in the grimy/underworld/rave vibe compared to Millennials and Gen X. It’s all the same to them. My theory is that when Millennials were growing up there was still a strong ‘default culture’ that helped sustain a thriving counter-culture. One could move decisively between the two when bored/frazzled. Zoomers have grown up flailing around in a devolved soup of ideas. Everything’…

I would just like to point out that members/former of every counterculture back to at least the 50s have said this about the younger generation; it’s almost a cliche.

So what is the counter culture these days?

I go to underground parties all the time and I actually don't see many people that seem younger than mid to late 20's.

Mostly late 20's early 30's millennials, and the crust punks of the 70's and 80's/

Re: Vice website is shutting down

#430

Post by Intralexical »

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"…

> 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" service.

https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/

> *What are your fees?*

> At this time we have no fees for uploading and preserving materials. We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. While there are no fees we always appreciate donations to offset these costs.

There's some discussion about this idea on this thread, including comments by ?id=markjgraham, who manages the Wayback Machine, thoughts from John Carmack:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1473327982605385735

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1473327982605385735.html

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