Vice is basically dead — Thousands of stories written over the past two decades could soon be deleted without any warning::CEO Bruce Dixon told staffers that Vice Media will lay off hundreds of employees and stop publishing stories on the site.
Vice did a lot of very good, and generally in-moderate-depth reporting over the years. Hope an overabundance of people scrape that shit while we still have an opportunity. Once its hosted somewhere safe, you could probably even dump access to it somewhere like … the fediverse.
Surely most of it is already on the Internet archive?
Very likely. Those are not secure in the long-run either though, hence the need for an overabundance. No single online service should be genuinely fully trusted. You need a lot of duplication for any kind of real future-proofing.
I don’t know much about the internet archive’s inner workings. But rather recently a huge collection of old 70s-00s tokusatsu shows and movies got deleted along with the uploader. Some remain on piracy sites, but a lot probably live now on some old torrents. We really need an archive of the internet archive.
A while back they had a piece of tech where you could self host a backup of a small part of their dataset, and it stored it in the clear on your computer so you were free to peruse whatever subset of the data you got allocated
The Internet Archive’s time is very limited. People are uploading full-length copyrighted movies. Even Disney movies. They aren’t getting deleted. They are going to be sued into oblivion, taking their whole web archive with them.
More personally to me since I’ve made a lot of use of it, they would also take the Prelinger Archives with them. The Prelinger Archives is a massive noncommercial online archive of industrial, educational, commercial and other types of short films not considered to be pure entertainment from the beginnings of the silent era up even into the 1980s.
Much of it has been backed up on YouTube, so it will not disappear entirely, but then the content will be in the hands of Google, not in the hands of the people.
The Internet Archive is making a huge mistake by not moderating their content and we will all pay for it.
Gotta love the vultures who see a failing site/medium and think about how it will benefit them.
Less about self benefit, more about preservation of data accessibility. Potential self-benefit is a bonus, an extra. Two birds, one stone, nice and efficient. How smart people do things.
But Dixon wrote, rather cryptically, that remaining employees will put “more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussion with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly.”
In other words, the in depth reporting and niche shows aren’t making enough money, so we’re going to dump all that shit and jump on the reality TV bandwagon.
they’ll just fire everyone and licence their stuff for AI training
I remember when they were a bunch of dicks. But, yeah, there was some really good journalism that got done - somehow - amongst all that.
How nice. A site founded by a racist who once stuck a dildo up his ass live on streaming video as a “joke” is going to shove a dildo up the ass of all of its employees.
as a joke
sure
Congratulations, you have repeated the same point as the parent commenter, but removed the quotation marks to make it seem like they didn’t do that, so to create for yourself an opportunity to say it again
Incredibly sleuthy analysis my dude
https://pca.st/episode/26653693-fa5b-4d82-a7c2-683d1b29240d
Vice had a tech podcast called ‘Cyber’ and they dropped a final episode yesterday. It’s just a bunch of the staff bewildered and mourning the fall of Vice. Pretty interesting.
More amusing was that they did it ‘rogue’. Much of their CDN was inoperable, except for the podcast deliver infrastructure.
That’s sad. They did some really good things over the years.
back it up
I’d rather start saving my trash, thanks
How was Vice not profitable with that much output?
Wasnt vice just shitty articles with even worse clickbait? At least thats what I aaaociate with it. I am surprised people are so sad its gone
It was preclickbait articles written by alternative-adjacent freelance writers.
Aka, real people writing about real things. Some of which were vulgar. But life is vulgar. And so was the internet originally
Exactly. Happy to see it go.