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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

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).

arsome 3y ago
I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. Perhaps it's just me, but it seriously makes the rest of social media look like an absolute trashfire by comparison.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Sorta. YouTube is kinda anti-monetization of your content unless you get 1000 subscribers, which is kinda hard if you don’t do consistent topic or are entertaining. If you’re a grouchy mechanic and do boring videos of exactly how to do brakes on every car, that’s incredibly useful, but not subscribeable (unless your grouchiness becomes a meme). I feel bad for the one guy that did 1 perfect video on how to fix&overhaul my garage door opener. But he won’t see a cent even as YouTube puts ads on it anyway and takes 100%. Meanwhile on blogs etc with Adsense, you could monetize immediately. That’s how i started out and figured out what worked. Went from $2/month, to 20 to 200 to 2000 for a while. Lots of random articles. Didn’t care to become a “platform” (new users that visit and never come back are the best ad-clickers).
  - glfharris 3y ago
    I suppose that's where things like tip jars work quite well. To reward useful but otherwise niche content.
    - fleischhauf 3y ago
      is tip jars an actual software solutions for tipping? I'm wondering what is most commonly used for tipping websites/content?
      - whatamidoingyo 3y ago
        > I'm wondering what is most commonly used for tipping websites/content? Probably something like ko-fi.com. I have it on my sites, but no one has ever tipped (besides my girlfriend, haha). I imagine other people do get tips via kofi, though.
      - colingoodman 3y ago
        I'd imagine there's a lot of undesirable friction in "tipping" online (clicking a link, filling out a credit card form, etc.) that a tip jar in a cash-based society never had.
  - youcantcook 3y ago
    [dead]
- fjfkjfdljkfd 3y ago
  Youtube is pushing Tik Tok style "shorts" pretty hard. If you ever accidently click on one, the UI makes it very hard to find your way back, and easy just to sit and watch a bunch of 15-second clips. Even the long-form content is a minefield. The line between educational, informative long-form content (Clickspring, Tech Ingredients, Ox Tools, Matthias Wendel, Alan Millyard, etc) and "lifestyle entertainment" (Matt Armstrong, Cleetus McFarland, Matt's Offroad Recovery, etc) is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), and you might not notice you've crossed it until too late. Don't even get me started on the videos that contain a vital piece of information that could be written in one paragraph, but spread it over 10 minutes. A lot like the online recipe site disasters.
  - demaga 3y ago
    Yes, I hated that Youtube felt the need to compete with TikTok and went this route. Short-form video is the worst medium to ever exist.
  - xxs 3y ago
    the best part is to block all of that short jazz with a firefox extension (also don't use youtube logged in) > is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), a Where would you place "This Old Tony" in that regard?
    - dajtxx 3y ago
      I’m not sure where TOT sits. He’s not particularly ‘how to do it’ like mrpete222 or maybe Presso, but he’s not trivial dumb stuff either. He’s entertaining and I think YT would be worse without him.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      > also don't use youtube logged in I find YouTube to be a much better experience when logged in. There is targeting in both cases, but it tends to be better aligned with what I want when I am logged in. And I second the extension, I use "Youtube-shorts block" which also exists for Chrome. On the topic of YouTube specific extensions, I also recommend SponsorBlock.
- cududa 3y ago
  But I don’t like video or podcasts. My brain doesn’t learn that way. I like reading
  - jahsome 3y ago
    It doesn't really compete will well-edited prose, but transcripts are available on youtube and actually often pretty good, despite being auto-generated.
  - a1o 3y ago
    Same, I really need things written in detail. I can't learn from video. :/
  - arsome 3y ago
    You weren't learning anything from Vice either.
    - cududa 3y ago
      Vice has done lots of investigative reporting. Two weeks ago I brought up one of their years old investigations in a discussion, went and found the article to brush up on the topic, my cousin and I spent about a half hour reading their articles on the topic, then we discussed. Yes, I did learn things from vice. I'm assuming your confusing Vice with a listicle producer or something. Your smug self-assured arrogant pessimism is showing.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- torginus 3y ago
  I feel like the recent AI advancements will ruin that as well - YT will find a way to pull a Quora - extract all that passionately made content, whitelabel it, and sell it back to you.
- DrBazza 3y ago
  I typically watch YouTube content once, but I'll likely revisit a webpage many times. But I suppose YouTube returns more potential ad revenue despite lower visits.
- darkwater 3y ago
  > I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. This has downsides on its own. Nowadays there are tons of YT videos that convey useful info in which the same useful info could be conveyed in a 200 words written piece. But no, you have to skip through a 20 minutes video where the signal to noise ratio is extremely low to get the really useful bits.
  - smallnix 3y ago
    That is true and it can also be said about a lot of long form written content.
    - darkwater 3y ago
      At least, skimming a long text is easier.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  Most of the long form content I see on YouTube is a 10 minute video stretched out over 50 minutes
- ethagnawl 3y ago
  Agreed. I know they're the minority but I'm regularly astounded by how well researched, produced and informative the videos by many of the channels I follow are (e.g. the retro tech scene). They make it look easy and I'm sure it does get easier once you've got momentum and a process but as someone who has dabbled in such things ... it's anything but.
rafark 3y ago
I made a similar comment a few weeks ago on another post about another site shutting down. It’s so sad how the internet has less and less “independent” sites and instead more people and organizations are just relying on the big names (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Shopify, Reddit, etc). Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. Yet for some reason the big companies are dominating more and more. It could be my perception because I was just a kid back then, but there seemed to be more independent sites in the 2000s than now, despite then being harder and more expensive to host a site. It doesn’t make sense to me.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. Yet for some reason the big companies are dominating more and more. It could be my perception because I was just a kid back then, but there seemed to be more independent sites in the 2000s than now, despite then being harder and more expensive to host a site. It doesn’t make sense to me. The thing that's really, really important to understand is that lowering barriers to entry leads to more consolidation, not less, because any products that are even of slightly better quality/service/price whatever end up taking nearly all the market. Yes, in the late 90s and early 00s there were tons of independent sites (if you're too young to be familiar with it, look at the Wikipedia page for GeoCities). And while we may have some nostalgia for that now, the fact is that 95% (I'd probably say 99.9%) of the sites were total crap. Probably over half of them were "Under Construction" banners, but even the ones with actual content were usually pretty atrocious even if you ignore the "murder on the eyes" visual design. With so much content but limited time and attention, most people don't actually want to wade through the 95%+ of crap - they just want to see the best stuff. So they go to the "market leaders", which can attract more eyeballs and, importantly, more funding to ensure people creating these sites are highly paid to attract the best people.
- Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
  > Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. I wish that were true. The desktop site editors (Frontpage, Dreamweaver) are long dead. There are barriers to My First PHP Site that just weren’t there before: you can’t put up a site without https (unless you want scary browser warnings and no Google coverage), you can’t send mail without a whole bunch of complex server headers and expect it to be delivered, you can’t make a simple mistake in your code without the server being compromised by constantly scanning nefarious bots. And that’s even before you get on to the insane complexity of the frontend tech and tooling if you want to make anything look vaguely contemporary. Discovery is broken - check out the story posted here the other day about Google ranking SEO review churn above independent sites. Facebook and Twitter will randomly bury your promo work because they don’t like the links in it for some reason. And if your independent site is in the same area as a VC-funded one, you’ll be buried by the sheer weight of their marketing paid by the free VC money. You can still build a site with Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix. It won’t do much but it’ll exist. But no one will find it.
jsemrau 3y ago
Substack exists. There are places where you can match content with payment. Comparing Medium and Substack, I make money with my Autonomous Agents newsletter on Substack, not so much on Medium. I also used to run a Web3 site where people would be paid good money for good content (paying on avg 25 USD per 5 days), but not many takers for this kind of business model.
imperialdrive 3y ago
Some day, perhaps soon, YouTube may charge for serving content. A lot of folks will fork it over, and a lot more folks will scramble.
agumonkey 3y ago
Good things never really die, they reappear in more favorable contexts later. We just have to be patient.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
instagib 3y ago
Maybe it will work in a cycle to respawn Vice. Become more popular with short form content, re-specialize getting better with that, slowly move in long form content, and partially return to where we were. Some of the content creators I watch say they get click conversions to longer content or streaming via shorts, TikTok, and very short videos. The algorithm seems to be boosting shorter videos .
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
[dead]
_fat_santa 3y ago
I think the problem with Vice is not that they are moving to just social media / YouTube, it's that the whole segment news publishers is dying. If you are running an org with hundreds of positions, management overhead and other fixed costs that come with operating a traditional company, it's very hard for your to compete with the likes of Substack and other independent journalists. In fact I'd say that there are very few companies these days that can make it work, either you are the New York Times or a similar org in which case you can use your sheer weight in the space to survive, or you're an org like Daily Wire that has a specific angle (conservative news) and then subsidize your standard revenue with products (DW launched a razor company, and a chocolate company, both are billed as the "conservative alternative" to Harry's / Hershey's). Outside of those groups, everyone else is getting clobbered by Substack and Twitter. 10-15 years ago if you wanted to be a journalist you had to go work for one of the major newspapers, nowdays you can strike out on your own with a Substack and Twitter/X account. Those guy put our news just like they would at the major newspapers, but they have a fraction of the overhead that those guys do.
- 15457345234 3y ago
  > 10-15 years ago if you wanted to be a journalist you had to go work for one of the major newspapers, nowdays you can strike out on your own with a Substack and Twitter/X account. That's not journalism, that's punditry. What's new is considering people that professionally flap their lips about anything that comes into their head - no matter how removed from reality - 'journalists' when 10-15 years ago the term would have been 'outspoken lunatics.'
snthd 3y ago
Sad, but not surprising. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/vice-media-secretly-organised-20m-saudi-government-festival https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/vice-media-sec... >One employee claimed Vice executives were acutely aware of the potential reputational damage that could be caused if Vice’s western audience became aware of the extent to which it was working with the Saudi state, saying: “It is astounding that – despite ongoing opposition from staff – Vice is still happy to take money from a country that was literally responsible for the state-sanctioned murder of a journalist.” https://theintercept.com/2023/09/09/vice-deleted-documentary-saudi-arabia/ https://theintercept.com/2023/09/09/vice-deleted-documentary... >In the past, Vice has documented the history of censorship on YouTube. More recently, since the company’s near implosion, it became an active participant in making things disappear.
macspoofing 3y ago
>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.
nailer 3y ago
> 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). Vice did short lived, low quality, clickbaity, dopamine-chasing content outside social media, it's just more profitable to do inside social media.

arsome 3y ago

I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. Perhaps it's just me, but it seriously makes the rest of social media look like an absolute trashfire by comparison.

Scoundreller 3y ago
Sorta. YouTube is kinda anti-monetization of your content unless you get 1000 subscribers, which is kinda hard if you don’t do consistent topic or are entertaining. If you’re a grouchy mechanic and do boring videos of exactly how to do brakes on every car, that’s incredibly useful, but not subscribeable (unless your grouchiness becomes a meme). I feel bad for the one guy that did 1 perfect video on how to fix&overhaul my garage door opener. But he won’t see a cent even as YouTube puts ads on it anyway and takes 100%. Meanwhile on blogs etc with Adsense, you could monetize immediately. That’s how i started out and figured out what worked. Went from $2/month, to 20 to 200 to 2000 for a while. Lots of random articles. Didn’t care to become a “platform” (new users that visit and never come back are the best ad-clickers).
- glfharris 3y ago
  I suppose that's where things like tip jars work quite well. To reward useful but otherwise niche content.
  - fleischhauf 3y ago
    is tip jars an actual software solutions for tipping? I'm wondering what is most commonly used for tipping websites/content?
    - whatamidoingyo 3y ago
      > I'm wondering what is most commonly used for tipping websites/content? Probably something like ko-fi.com. I have it on my sites, but no one has ever tipped (besides my girlfriend, haha). I imagine other people do get tips via kofi, though.
    - colingoodman 3y ago
      I'd imagine there's a lot of undesirable friction in "tipping" online (clicking a link, filling out a credit card form, etc.) that a tip jar in a cash-based society never had.
- youcantcook 3y ago
  [dead]
fjfkjfdljkfd 3y ago
Youtube is pushing Tik Tok style "shorts" pretty hard. If you ever accidently click on one, the UI makes it very hard to find your way back, and easy just to sit and watch a bunch of 15-second clips. Even the long-form content is a minefield. The line between educational, informative long-form content (Clickspring, Tech Ingredients, Ox Tools, Matthias Wendel, Alan Millyard, etc) and "lifestyle entertainment" (Matt Armstrong, Cleetus McFarland, Matt's Offroad Recovery, etc) is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), and you might not notice you've crossed it until too late. Don't even get me started on the videos that contain a vital piece of information that could be written in one paragraph, but spread it over 10 minutes. A lot like the online recipe site disasters.
- demaga 3y ago
  Yes, I hated that Youtube felt the need to compete with TikTok and went this route. Short-form video is the worst medium to ever exist.
- xxs 3y ago
  the best part is to block all of that short jazz with a firefox extension (also don't use youtube logged in) > is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), a Where would you place "This Old Tony" in that regard?
  - dajtxx 3y ago
    I’m not sure where TOT sits. He’s not particularly ‘how to do it’ like mrpete222 or maybe Presso, but he’s not trivial dumb stuff either. He’s entertaining and I think YT would be worse without him.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    > also don't use youtube logged in I find YouTube to be a much better experience when logged in. There is targeting in both cases, but it tends to be better aligned with what I want when I am logged in. And I second the extension, I use "Youtube-shorts block" which also exists for Chrome. On the topic of YouTube specific extensions, I also recommend SponsorBlock.
cududa 3y ago
But I don’t like video or podcasts. My brain doesn’t learn that way. I like reading
- jahsome 3y ago
  It doesn't really compete will well-edited prose, but transcripts are available on youtube and actually often pretty good, despite being auto-generated.
- a1o 3y ago
  Same, I really need things written in detail. I can't learn from video. :/
- arsome 3y ago
  You weren't learning anything from Vice either.
  - cududa 3y ago
    Vice has done lots of investigative reporting. Two weeks ago I brought up one of their years old investigations in a discussion, went and found the article to brush up on the topic, my cousin and I spent about a half hour reading their articles on the topic, then we discussed. Yes, I did learn things from vice. I'm assuming your confusing Vice with a listicle producer or something. Your smug self-assured arrogant pessimism is showing.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
torginus 3y ago
I feel like the recent AI advancements will ruin that as well - YT will find a way to pull a Quora - extract all that passionately made content, whitelabel it, and sell it back to you.
DrBazza 3y ago
I typically watch YouTube content once, but I'll likely revisit a webpage many times. But I suppose YouTube returns more potential ad revenue despite lower visits.
darkwater 3y ago
> I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. This has downsides on its own. Nowadays there are tons of YT videos that convey useful info in which the same useful info could be conveyed in a 200 words written piece. But no, you have to skip through a 20 minutes video where the signal to noise ratio is extremely low to get the really useful bits.
- smallnix 3y ago
  That is true and it can also be said about a lot of long form written content.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    At least, skimming a long text is easier.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
Most of the long form content I see on YouTube is a 10 minute video stretched out over 50 minutes
ethagnawl 3y ago
Agreed. I know they're the minority but I'm regularly astounded by how well researched, produced and informative the videos by many of the channels I follow are (e.g. the retro tech scene). They make it look easy and I'm sure it does get easier once you've got momentum and a process but as someone who has dabbled in such things ... it's anything but.

rafark 3y ago

I made a similar comment a few weeks ago on another post about another site shutting down. It’s so sad how the internet has less and less “independent” sites and instead more people and organizations are just relying on the big names (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Shopify, Reddit, etc). Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. Yet for some reason the big companies are dominating more and more. It could be my perception because I was just a kid back then, but there seemed to be more independent sites in the 2000s than now, despite then being harder and more expensive to host a site. It doesn’t make sense to me.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. Yet for some reason the big companies are dominating more and more. It could be my perception because I was just a kid back then, but there seemed to be more independent sites in the 2000s than now, despite then being harder and more expensive to host a site. It doesn’t make sense to me. The thing that's really, really important to understand is that lowering barriers to entry leads to more consolidation, not less, because any products that are even of slightly better quality/service/price whatever end up taking nearly all the market. Yes, in the late 90s and early 00s there were tons of independent sites (if you're too young to be familiar with it, look at the Wikipedia page for GeoCities). And while we may have some nostalgia for that now, the fact is that 95% (I'd probably say 99.9%) of the sites were total crap. Probably over half of them were "Under Construction" banners, but even the ones with actual content were usually pretty atrocious even if you ignore the "murder on the eyes" visual design. With so much content but limited time and attention, most people don't actually want to wade through the 95%+ of crap - they just want to see the best stuff. So they go to the "market leaders", which can attract more eyeballs and, importantly, more funding to ensure people creating these sites are highly paid to attract the best people.
Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
> Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. I wish that were true. The desktop site editors (Frontpage, Dreamweaver) are long dead. There are barriers to My First PHP Site that just weren’t there before: you can’t put up a site without https (unless you want scary browser warnings and no Google coverage), you can’t send mail without a whole bunch of complex server headers and expect it to be delivered, you can’t make a simple mistake in your code without the server being compromised by constantly scanning nefarious bots. And that’s even before you get on to the insane complexity of the frontend tech and tooling if you want to make anything look vaguely contemporary. Discovery is broken - check out the story posted here the other day about Google ranking SEO review churn above independent sites. Facebook and Twitter will randomly bury your promo work because they don’t like the links in it for some reason. And if your independent site is in the same area as a VC-funded one, you’ll be buried by the sheer weight of their marketing paid by the free VC money. You can still build a site with Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix. It won’t do much but it’ll exist. But no one will find it.

jsemrau 3y ago

Substack exists. There are places where you can match content with payment. Comparing Medium and Substack, I make money with my Autonomous Agents newsletter on Substack, not so much on Medium. I also used to run a Web3 site where people would be paid good money for good content (paying on avg 25 USD per 5 days), but not many takers for this kind of business model.

imperialdrive 3y ago

Some day, perhaps soon, YouTube may charge for serving content. A lot of folks will fork it over, and a lot more folks will scramble.

agumonkey 3y ago

Good things never really die, they reappear in more favorable contexts later. We just have to be patient.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

instagib 3y ago

Maybe it will work in a cycle to respawn Vice. Become more popular with short form content, re-specialize getting better with that, slowly move in long form content, and partially return to where we were. Some of the content creators I watch say they get click conversions to longer content or streaming via shorts, TikTok, and very short videos. The algorithm seems to be boosting shorter videos .

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

[dead]

_fat_santa 3y ago

I think the problem with Vice is not that they are moving to just social media / YouTube, it's that the whole segment news publishers is dying. If you are running an org with hundreds of positions, management overhead and other fixed costs that come with operating a traditional company, it's very hard for your to compete with the likes of Substack and other independent journalists. In fact I'd say that there are very few companies these days that can make it work, either you are the New York Times or a similar org in which case you can use your sheer weight in the space to survive, or you're an org like Daily Wire that has a specific angle (conservative news) and then subsidize your standard revenue with products (DW launched a razor company, and a chocolate company, both are billed as the "conservative alternative" to Harry's / Hershey's). Outside of those groups, everyone else is getting clobbered by Substack and Twitter. 10-15 years ago if you wanted to be a journalist you had to go work for one of the major newspapers, nowdays you can strike out on your own with a Substack and Twitter/X account. Those guy put our news just like they would at the major newspapers, but they have a fraction of the overhead that those guys do.

15457345234 3y ago
> 10-15 years ago if you wanted to be a journalist you had to go work for one of the major newspapers, nowdays you can strike out on your own with a Substack and Twitter/X account. That's not journalism, that's punditry. What's new is considering people that professionally flap their lips about anything that comes into their head - no matter how removed from reality - 'journalists' when 10-15 years ago the term would have been 'outspoken lunatics.'

snthd 3y ago

Sad, but not surprising. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/vice-media-secretly-organised-20m-saudi-government-festival https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/vice-media-sec... >One employee claimed Vice executives were acutely aware of the potential reputational damage that could be caused if Vice’s western audience became aware of the extent to which it was working with the Saudi state, saying: “It is astounding that – despite ongoing opposition from staff – Vice is still happy to take money from a country that was literally responsible for the state-sanctioned murder of a journalist.” https://theintercept.com/2023/09/09/vice-deleted-documentary-saudi-arabia/ https://theintercept.com/2023/09/09/vice-deleted-documentary... >In the past, Vice has documented the history of censorship on YouTube. More recently, since the company’s near implosion, it became an active participant in making things disappear.

macspoofing 3y ago

>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.

nailer 3y ago

> 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). Vice did short lived, low quality, clickbaity, dopamine-chasing content outside social media, it's just more profitable to do inside social media.