Mic's Drop: How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.
In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.
whoever drank that particular flavour of neoliberal koolaid deserved it
Oddly I haven’t missed them. Hell, I didn’t even notice their absence.
I noticed they were gone because Mic actually had me blocked here
Every so often I’d try to comment on some long discussion and I couldn’t because the OP was a shitty Mic article
I was blocked also, but their pandering shit kind of blended into the rest of tumblr I guess.
In a sense Tumblr stole their thing because any self-loathing hubris filled tween could write for them.
Wait a second don’t bury the lede, Mic blocked people on tumblr (as a way of making sure the reblog chains of their official ports-to-tumblr never went through ancaps and were more hugboxy) ??
One more thing I didn’t realize could happen until someone broke a norm and it looked obvious in retrospect. 2017!
Yes, they actively blocked. If you took them to task and had any sort of following where the criticism gained traction you got the hook.
They were basically a Gawker subsidiary knock-off sharing that over-processed corporate-plastic political facade formulated on race and gender baiting.
They took the lowest of the low hanging clickbait fruit and were easy to trash for it. The garbage heap is the best place for that incarnation of Mic.
According to that article they’re going to get into video production though. Vice has become hugely successful following that track, I wonder if they’re attempting to emulate.
“pivot to video” is journalist-speak for “the money is shutting our click farm down, though they may reuse the brand for a Hail Mary attempt at video, which will also close down”
I’m not sure Vice is successful in “match viewers to advertisers” sense, they just have the deepest-pocketed and most patient corporate backers, they really took the magazine brand (Do’s & Dont’s, cocaine gentrification) and sold out hard to like Disney around 2007 when we were going to ride the real estate boom to heaven drinking Sparks and wearing American Apparrel. That’s how they invested so heavy in video so early, also why they sloughed off McInnes towards Taki’s and Street Carnage (Pepsi VICE) and later the Proud Boys. VICE Media was gonna be the new Time-Life