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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 Ther
by nextaccountic 3y ago
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)
- paxys 3y agoWho said they are not letting the site stay online?
- Scoundreller 3y agoit says "we will no longer publish content on vice.com" which is ambiguous. If I stop posting new content, have I stopped publishing? Or is it if I stop serving, then I've stopped publishing?
- paxys 3y agoIt is not ambiguous. They are no longer publishing new content. They have not said they will unpublish existing content.
- mingus88 3y ago“New” is not in the original post. Saying “we will no longer publish content” could very well mean they are taking down the site; thus it is no longer published I think it’s very likely that this is what’s going to happen because even a static archive site is going to cost money and dilute their new social brand Perhaps they’ll repost their old stuff on their new channels but it will nevertheless suck for old timers like me that refuse to use social media
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slantedview 3y agoIt wasn't in this post, but it was a separate rumor that the site would be deleted. This sounds crazy, but is exactly what other digital publications have done recently.
- looping8 3y agoAny examples? I don't remember any news about this, although the only publication I can remember with major changes recently is Pitchfork.
- ghaff 3y agoThere can be licensing issues, stuff breaks, stuff gets hacked, most content just gets really stale... I was involved with some sites recently that stopped publishing new content. The plan is to keep most of it around for now. But I have no illusions that if it becomes a "project" for some reason or another in a few years, it will just be turned off.
- Scoundreller 3y ago> 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 s3. Voila. And I'm someone that would take 9 attempts to do FizzBuzz. A bookmark you had to it 20 years ago still works and I still get some Adsense cheque residuals from it for zero effort.
- naet 3y agoI 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 online, and maybe the original authors can get a little credit or name recognition from any search traffic that finds it. The one "liability" to doing this would be for visitors to not realize the site isn't being updated anymore. If vice is still publishing content outside their website they'd have to make it clear that the site is archived and new content is elsewhere, or people might get the wrong idea and assume nothing new is coming.
- babypuncher 3y agoThat liability seems really easily solved with a banner.
- Scoundreller 3y agoyeah, newspapers do this all the time. Could also regex the dates to show up really large.
- ewalk153 3y agoCould 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
- danlugo92 3y ago> 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 Just so you know... investors would probably think it's just a waste of time, which means a waste of money as they (or their financial handlers) would have to keep an eye on this website. Remember, if they think this website is going to make them under $XX an hour they will just nuke it, they are not attached emotionally or otherwise to this "product", exception being shareholder founders but e.g. Steve Jobs.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThey just sell it for $1m or whatever to some company that specialises in running these kinds of sites. They exist.
- shawnz 3y agoI'm in the "this decision is stupid" camp, but just playing devil's advocate here, they might not want to risk damaging their brand by letting some third party agency mishandle their website
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoDon't include the brand in the deal, just the content?
- 3y ago
- mooreds 3y agoI gave up a domain I used to own in the last year or so. It was a mildly popular site that had been around for about a decade. Within a few months someone else had snapped it up, created a site, used the same content (I assume from the Internet archive), and was using it to link farm. At least that's what I thought when I saw the new site with a few links that were not there before. I only discovered it because they also left the Gmail address that I was using for the site. So I got a couple of emails from folks wanting to update info on the site. Feels a bit weird, tbh. No way to determine who is behind it, and what would I do anyway?
- ex3ndr 3y agoi have the same, but they put porn links everywhere and it mildly damages reputation of ex-employees.
- cpeterso 3y agoIt happened to the state of Maryland, too: their domain registration for starspangled200.org, featured on their license plates, expired and was picked up by a gambling website in the Philippines. Maryland has since reclaimed the domain. https://jalopnik.com/maryland-license-plate-url-directs-gambling-website-1850491735 https://jalopnik.com/maryland-license-plate-url-directs-gamb...
- afterburner 3y agoI guess the lesson is, never give up a domain.
- mooreds 3y agoKinda what I took away too. Which is a bummer because it raises the costs of trying things out, at least on new domains. I guess using subdomains of a main site isn't that bad an alternative.
- thewakalix 3y agoWhat a letdown!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dannyphantom 3y agoI’d literally love that idea; it’s a really compelling concept but my first concern would be the potential risk licensing/copyright issues that could arise from the original site owners transferring the site to IA. But seriously that would be so cool to see one day. I came across this thread on DataHoarders before seeing it here and was glad to see so many jump at the opportunity to help archive it on our own ends. In case anyone may be interested to jump in, here’s the link to that thread. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/fnY46CuYOq https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/fnY46CuYOq
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jfengel 3y agoSetting aside the content, I guarantee the domain name has value. The investors will ensure it's going to be sold for a fair bit of money.
- irjustin 3y agoIf it makes no sense, there's someone mean behind it. The deal to work with the media outlets likely dictates they cannot have their own distribution channel even for historical content.
- weinzierl 3y ago"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.
- whythre 3y ago“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.
- RobRivera 3y agoIn 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
- dmix 3y agoNothing in that post indicates they are taking it offline, the HN headline is just editorializing. It says Vice is no longer making new content for their Web properties and focusing on other platforms instead like YouTube. There's no way they'd give up the ads dollars they get from he existing stuff... That makes no sense
- ethbr1 3y ago> no longer making new content for their Web properties and focusing on other platforms instead like YouTube Way to jump out of the boiling pot and immediately place your head in the lion's jaws...
- manderley 3y agoThose ad dollars will diminish quickly, and pretty soon it will be more expensive to keep the website up than to just take it down.
- dmix 3y agoYou'd be surprised how much money you make from long tail or thousands of old articles, even with current SEO rules favouring new stuff It won't be enough to run a big media company but more than enough to keep old content around
- victorbjorklund 3y agoHosting a static site behind cloudflare caching should be very low. Doubt it would cost more than 200 dollars.
- dmix 3y agoIt's not that expensive to host old blog posts and they already host videos on YouTube... What's expensive in those operations is supporting new content and growth. Now they can wind it down and establish a fixed legacy system and eventually run it on autopilot with a small team in support roles.
- manderley 3y ago
- irrational 3y agoBusiness people, who make these decisions, aren’t exactly known for being intelligent or asking intelligent questions of technical people who work for them.
- simonjgreen 3y agoThat’s a very broad brush you’re using for a patronising take there. Technical people, who look at these decisions from across the Internet, aren’t exactly known for their humility, or assuming that non business people may have perfectly valid reasons for their decisions.
- joegahona 3y agoOriginal photography sometimes has tricky licensing — photos are good for only 5 years, then have to be renewed. That’s what photo editors at these magazines do. The text content itself is usually a one-and-done deal though.
- hndamien 3y agoPerhaps an archive to IPFS?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pentagrama 3y agoFor example a site that I liked called The Outline stopped publishing content in 2020 and they leave the site online at least for now https://theoutline.com/ https://theoutline.com/
- davydog187 3y ago(One of the original devs for The Outline here) so happy that it is able to live on, frozen in time, although missing a lot of the features that made it cool. A lot of the cool things we were doing at the outline were on the CMS side of things, its a shame we were never able to share it
- sterlind 3y agoThe letter didn't say anything about actually taking vice.com offline, only that they'd stop publishing content to it.
- zzz999 3y agoArchive it?
- Zenul_Abidin 3y agoRing up the ArchiveTeam, they are pros at this kind of stuff.
- Solvency 3y agoI fashion to understand how WM/archive.org isn't satisfactory for you.
- JohnMakin 3y agowhy would a movie company delete an entire high-budget movie that costs them almost nothing to release without releasing it to anyone? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a similar answer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pogue 3y ago[dead]
- hackernewds 3y agothe solution here is probably to improve the WM UI
- hackernewds 3y agothe site is not shutting down. read the full email release
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- weinzierl 3y ago"There should be a way to donate a website to the Internet Archive so that they run an online archive on it, basically" Can't you? I thought everyone with an account could upload. If it'd stay, is another question and they'd definitely not archive against the expressed will of copyright holder, but you could give it a try.
- 2-718-281-828 3y agowe went from the internet never forgets to the internet is suffering dementia.
- lsde 3y agoWeb archiving is a solved problem, you record the website in an interactive environment [1], and everything what happens on-screen will be saved in a single file in an open [2] and standardized [3] file format authored by Internet Archive and endorsed by Library of Congress for preservation [4]. You can store the resulting WARC file wherever, be it on S3 or under your pillow. As an archivist, I urge everybody here to not reinvent the wheel, please.. [1] https://webrecorder.net/ https://webrecorder.net/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARC_(file_format) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WARC_(file_format) [3] https://www.iso.org/standard/68004.html https://www.iso.org/standard/68004.html [4] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000236.shtml https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0002...
- weinzierl 3y agoThe technical side is a solved problem, the legal side not so much. You practically cannot preserve and make available something if the copyright holders don't want you to. If the copyright situation is complicated you bear the risk. You can say, that this is how it is supposed to be, but it is not like it works in the non-digital realm. You could argue that we'd need something like digital monument protection, where artifacts can be preserved against the copyright holders will.
- vesinisa 3y agoIf you read the announcement it seems they're actually not shutting the website down, jusy stopping publishing new content.
- tlb 3y agoThis could be because they've negotiated an exclusive distribution deal, where the new distributor gets to monetize all the old content too.
- onion2k 3y agoIt wouldn't even be a significant cost and ads would recoup it anyway You'd need a corp to deal with the money, people to handle things like takedown requests and expired copyrights, maybe some IT functions to keep things up when suppliers change stuff. It wouldn't be that straightforward.
- victorbjorklund 3y agoAgreed. Should have some value. Heck I would easily pay 10 000 usd for the site and all content (and im sure others would pay way more).
- dredmorbius 3y agoSite wipes also disadvantage job-hunting staffers who suddenly don't have a public published portfolio to point potential new employers / clients to. Though enterprising staffers may anticipate such moves and archive content as it's published to head off the inevitable. (I've seen this issue raised on previous site shutdowns, quite probably Gawker.)
- ghaff 3y agoIf you care, you should be saving your own stuff in some form. If I counted on people saving what I've written in findable form I'd have very little left. As it is, I have most things I care about.
- dredmorbius 3y agoFor public-facing journalism, a public-facing record (Internet Archive, Archive Today, etc.) provides some third-party credibility that what you say you wrote and was published online actually was written when and as claimed. Keeping your own personal clippings file preserves words but not provenance.
- newsclues 3y agoLeave online for web crawlers to access for free, or take it offline and license access to big data or AI companies…
- omnibrain 3y ago> It makes no sense to not let the site online in an archived form, for the posterity I wanted to say, that Dr. Dobb's did that. https://drdobbs.com/ https://drdobbs.com/ But some time in the last few years something mus have gone broken. You can't open the article links anymore.
- ghaff 3y ago>But some time in the last few years something mus have gone broken. Which tends to be what happens. Something breaks. No one can be bothered to fix it. And at some point they don't renew a domain and take the content offline.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>It makes no sense to not let the site online in an archived form, for the posterity So do you believe this is an action taken out of spite, or that there may be circumstances that a bunch of hackers aren't taking into account? I'm genuinely curious, because I don't believe it's spite, but can't think of the reason. Outside of some long-tail potential liability for which the value of maintaining the site doesn't overcome.
- patmorgan23 3y agoUniversity libraries can serve a function here. They'll often act as archives for local newspapers and outlets. If a publication is shutting down they should definitely work to transfer their site to some organization that will preserve it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lobsterthief 3y agoI’ve worked in publishing (engineering and product side mostly) for a long time; reasons not to keep it up: * Potentially expensive licensing fees for the CMS, depending what it is, and migration costs to something “free” if not. * Ongoing costs to maintain the site (security updates etc). * Of course, hosting costs. I agree in this case it would be smarter to keep it running in a stripped-down form since there’s still value there, then work to find buyers or someone who has an interest in keeping it running.
- julianeon 3y agoI’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.
- surcap526 3y agoIt 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."
- BryantD 3y agoI agree with this premise; as others have noted, it's not clear whether or not the Web site is going away, but it shouldn't. https://thedissolve.com/ https://thedissolve.com/ is still up, and it's been eight years, and I'm really glad they didn't take it down. It's still a useful resource.
- TurkishPoptart 3y agoThere's nothing worth archiving on that site.
- progmetaldev 3y agoWhile the site isn't being shut down, who is held responsible for the old content. What if new regulations are introduced? The site is most likely dynamic, so would at least require a full scrape of all content, and then placing all that content somewhere online (and that probably includes large images and video). Keeping the site going is probably not worth it for the ones on top that are set to be the only ones making profit from it.
- webworker 3y agoI never really went there but wasn't that site like 98% clickbait? Is there any value in keeping that journalism around?