12mo ago

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.

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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.

65 comments