Pluralistic: Vice surrenders

Cory Doctorow on the demise of Vice, "a Canadian media success story... founded by a motley clique of hipsters... transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners... one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video"... spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doomed attempt to conquer Youtube...And yet, at every turn... Vice's reporters continued to turn out stellar material".

I read a lot of that stellar material, so this is an enlightening read. Main points:

• Vice's problem was not that "writers don't do productive work" or "that work isn't economically viable" - too many escapees went on to found successful media sites
• the latest owners' strategy is INSANE: "abandoning their website in order to publish on social media"

This may have been an excusable mistake ~10 years ago, but it's clear as day today that "the social media business model is a giant rug-pull ... encourage media companies to become reliant on third parties to reach their audiences... [and then] charge the media companies to reach their audiences" - the original definition of enshittification, which applies equally to all other sorts of company, and governments too". .

Doing this today is "like trusting your money to Sam Bankman-Fried…in 2024.... This is not the moment to be "social first." This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control".