9 mo. ago • 98%

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 the company will lay off hundreds of employees and stop publishing stories on its flagship site.

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.

65 comments

Before this particular Enshittification some of the people from Vice formed their own journalist led site. Including the editor from Motherboard.

https://www.404media.co/

160
- I’ve been hugely impressed with their work thus far. They hit the ground sprinting and haven’t let off the gas
  
  52
- Oh, that’s who they are. I’ve seen that domain pop up some recently.
  
  25
  
  I like their writing style.
  One of two newsletters I actually subscribed to read.
  Selfh.st and 404media.co
  Edit: Corrected to selfho.st
  
  4
- Glad they offer an RSS feed. So many sites stopped doing that
  
  4
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.

106
- Surely most of it is already on the Internet archive?
  
  42
  
  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.
  
  52
  
  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.
  
  6
- Gotta love the vultures who see a failing site/medium and think about how it will benefit them.
  
  -29
  
  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.
  
  41
Journalism has become an absolute dumpster fire for almost anyone trying to do actual journalism. No wonder corporations are running roughshod over us all, the industry is hostile to anyone not willing to be some sort of shill.

74
- And people will bitch and moan about a paywall.
  
  24
  
  It's a double edged sword. Quality information should be accessible to everyone. We ensure that for kids through public school systems, but for adults you need to pay for it yourself. Which is a huge problems since that is the same demographic as "voters".
  
  21
  
  The problem with paywalled isn't an unwillingness to pay for quality, its being attacked with a subscription when we don't want to be locked into a single source. Today I want a good article on popular particle physics, tomorrow I want to know whats going on with education in Nigeria. Let me make a quick crypto micropayment with no fuss and I'll read your article, try to make me a lifelong subscriber and get fucked.
  
  19
  
  Yeah, I understand that journalism needs to be paid for, but I don't think paywall's are much of a solution.
  
  I don't want to pay a subscription for one publication's news. I don't even really want a subscription for a selection of publication's news. I just want to read whatever I want to read and I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount for that.
  
  3
- It's all our collective fault, mine included. I've never paid for news, yet expect unbiased news free from corporate fuckery....
  
  8
  
  And over here the state-funded media is getting less money every year because our right-wing parties don't like it.
  
  4
  
  There is no such thing as unbiased news free from corporate fuckery. But you can subscribe to several well-known and reputable news outlets, public broadcast services, and other varied reliable sources, and hope that the combined fuckery cancel each other out. For now, that's the best that you can do.
  
  It's not easy and it's not cheap.
  
  1
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.

55
- they'll just fire everyone and licence their stuff for AI training
  
  4
I remember when they were a bunch of dicks. But, yeah, there was some really good journalism that got done - somehow - amongst all that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240111063111/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/inside-vice-media-shane-smith.html

24
That's sad. They did some really good things over the years.

17
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.

13
- as a joke
  
  sure
  
  5
  
  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
  
  9
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.

8
back it up

6
- I'd rather start saving my trash, thanks
  
  2
These folks are backing it up, from a post on Bluesky by Aram Zucker-Scharff (@chronotope.aramzs.xyz):

Interesting fact about Vice's content: a full site archive, including saving outbound links, was performed by the volunteer Archive Team last year & it took ~6 months to capture all the Vice content across all the languages they publish in. They've published a lot! They're updating the archives now.

https://opencollective.com/archiveteam

4
How was Vice not profitable with that much output?

1
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

-5
- 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
  
  6
- Exactly. Happy to see it go.
  
  1

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