There is Deadspin in the Gawker portfolio which I think was a great example of the natural maturation you are talking about. The style of the site and what they covered definitely matured over the years, but that same defiant ethos stuck around until and was perhaps defined by the very the moment the entire team mass resigned in response to mismanagement. And it is interesting to note that multiple writers who resigned from Deadspin ended up at Vice.

Peter Thiel had used pictures of himself shirtless on a gay cruise as his profile on some social media. To consider that his privacy was invaded because he may not have specifically said the precise words "I am gay" is disingenuous. Not to mention, courts have repeatedly held that billionaires are considered "public figures" by virtue of their "outsized influence and impact on public affairs".

There's a reason Gawker was never successfully sued by Thiel.

Gawker and Hogan _had_ also settled before Thiel got involved. Hogan had settled with the other party, the one who _sold_ the tape, for 0.02% of the claim against Gawker.

Isn't another of the tenets of a justice system the right to face your accuser, not have someone Wizard of Oz behind the scenes bankrolling things because of their own vendetta?

I can dislike Gawker (TMZ, et al) and still see huge flaws in how this all went down.

You communicated it better than I. I was somewhat horrified with the outcome because I (perhaps naively) had some belief that this tenet of the justice system had not yet been compromised. But the old adage that we have N justice systems for N wealth buckets (where N in {[rich, poor], [1%, 99%], ...}) seems to be true.

I wouldn't take back the claim, but I would chuckle a bit.

The plural of data is not necessarily a narrative. I would ask you to try again, this time without deliberately ignoring the thread and misreading it.

In other words, I believe they are in decline because they are trying to be "woke". and as they say when you go woke you go broke.

That is hardly a countercultral media outlet position nowadays

Now? Yeah, I wouldn't call them counter-cultural anymore.

The racist, mysogynist cofounder is gunna be a hard thing for me to forget when I think about Vice going forward.

This isn't a question I was trying to answer, and I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive. My only point is that Vice changed from being some free crap you picked up at American Apparel which most popular part was shaming people's fashion style, to what it is today. How did American Apparel get so large (and where are they now?)? All they did was sell very expensive t-shirts. My guess is fashion trends and marketing - much of that marketing done by, sigh another fairly controversial figure.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/nov/18/terry-richar...

Perhaps making fun of people = visitors = website clicks (as their was an online version of this as well) = advertising moneys. I dunno. Someone saw value in that, and trusted this particular person. I could opt that successful businesses with little real worth are built with the hands of sociopaths (but I'm going that far).

Not to derail this thread too much, but I think that one is potentially even more insidious because it's much more spiritually authoritarian and panoptical. But that one too is beginning to elicit fatigue, especially with corporate sponsors that for a while had been attempting to subsume it into a third position that they now believe may have become [1] untenable.

I guess the question is, what's next?

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cut-diversity-program...

I like to think it’s because society at-large has improved - otherwise PeopleOfWalmart and other websites of its ilk would still be relevant.

Definitely.

Afterwards, the company went straight to shit. Now, we're blessed with quality articles such as: 1)"Nintendo Switch's Joy-con Sync issue is Even worse if you put it in your butt" 2)"Three days of torture in a male chastity device" 3)"How to pick a chastity cage lock with a condom wrapper" 4)"Finally, a new emoji to mock men"

I will be celebrating when Vice (along with BuzzFeed and Vox) file for bankruptcy.

The irony here is that vice, huffpo, buzzfeed, etc demanded social media censor fringe "alt-right" media and start favoring more established media. They got their wish. Now google, youtube, facebook, etc heavily favors CNN, MSNBC, Foxnews, NYTimes, WaPo, etc. It still shocks me how oblivious these people were. They depended entirely on social media providing an equal playing field to everyone. And yet, they were the ones demanding social media companies play favorites.

At this point, what is there but to just laugh at them. Nobody should feel sorry for these people/companies as they got what they asked for. Censorship and favoritism. The funny thing is that most likely the alt-right media will outlast vice, huffpo, buzzfeed, etc.

I'd be interested to see examples though if you have them.