If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years).
[1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.
Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.
Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.
Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.
The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.
Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.
I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?
Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.
350k/ day likely means sometimes it's 3.5 million, all smashed into a 30 minute period of time, because some nitwit linked to my site.
And then, I get paged about "my site being down" and I have to stop hanging out with my friends or family and fiddle around with things I don't want to fuzz with. Or maybe it just breaks and doesn't self heal and it is offline for a week until I notice it and fix it, and by then people all think the site's gone.
Anyhow, sure, maybe people not wanting to devote their lives to devops fanfic is something that can "just be solved with this simple trick cloudflare hates" but maybe not.
It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.
But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.
Though this post and response so far have given me hope.
[0] https://theinfosphere.org/Table:Server_news! (the exclamation point is part of the URL, in case HN ignores it)
Here's one of their emails:
> [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers
> I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you're going to might have less time with your studies. As an incentive I can point to a few things that might make the move easier
> 1. We have cool new software - gaming.wikia.com lets users do more blog-like contributions in addition to wiki editing - new social networking tools on the wiki - see our test server at http://sports.box8.tpa.wikia-inc.com/index.php?title=User:[R...
> 2. We could also hire you to help moderate the strategy wiki and other wikis if you need some beer and pizza money :-)
> 3. or we could offer to pay all the hosting costs and share some of the ad impressions/revenue with u
> If nothing else, I'd love to chat by phone and get to know you better.
> Let me know if that'd be ok :-)
It’s so upbeat too. I can totally see someone that doesn’t know better being taken in.
And Jimmy should be ashamed about being involved with Fandom/Wikia. Then again, he's also not ashamed about begging from third-world people and others much less well off as himself.
Funny how they somehow managed to make it worse.
Or the complete plot of “Harry Potter”, as seen in this 20 year old artifact:
Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.
Unless explicitly structured to prevent it, my bet is it will. If it's backed by a for-profit entity, it'll eventually need to turn a profit somehow, and users/visitors are the first to lose their experience at that point.
However, if Weird Gloop is a properly registered non-profit with shared ownership between multiple individuals, I'll be much more likely to bet it won't suffer the same fate.
I skimmed around a bit on the website to try to get an answer to if it is an non-profit, but didn't find anything obvious that says yes/no.
Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.
Because the entire system encourages it. The market rewards growth FAR more than it rewards a consistent dividend payout. (See: companies growing 40% YoY command a significfantly higher earnings multiple than those growing 10% YOY). So imo this is a like saying "people could decide to just invest money and then not seek the best returns possible." Also remember these shareholder are seldom John Smith principled human retail investor. It's firms whose entire purpose themselves is to seek maximum return.
"The owners of a privately traded company could decide to"
Meanwhile this DOES actually happen sometimes. See: Valve. We all know there's ways Valve could put up really great growth numbers for about 2-3 years while completely destroying all of the things that make Steam so god damn compelling to users that they can command the same cut as Apple, on an OPEN platform (vs Apple fighting utterly tooth and nail to keep iOS 100% airtight locked down). But they don't.
"For example, zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes"
TBC most founders/CEOs are NOT majority voters in their companies. They answer to the board. Most company founders lose voting control. The fact that Zuck is still in control is incredibly unusual and is a testament to how fast Facebook has grown that he's been able to keep hold of the reins.
(Steam does try to do part of the job of the OS though, taking control over updates and even deciding what is acceptable on their platform and what is not.)
And when he took over Twitter in 2022, he immediately dissolved the board and fired the executives who were on it.
In fact, the relatively new concept of a "public benefit corporation" is (at least in part) an effort to allow for-profit entities to pursue goals other than shareholder enrichment. However, some have criticized public benefit corporations as being entities that simply strengthen executive control at the expense of shareholders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
About Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.:
Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919),[1] is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism.[2][3] At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule, leaving Ford an extremely wide latitude about how to run the company.[citation needed]
The general legal position today (except in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled and where shareholder primacy is still upheld[4][5]) is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive.[citation needed] Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
> zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks
This is only true in cases where zuckerberg's actions are not intended to benefit his interests at the expense of other shareholders'. I think in the Ford case, there was not a majority of shareholders who wanted to expand the business and increase wages at the expense of profit, So it was essentially two minority shareholders fighting.
* ETA: I meant "growth" here, not profit
Employees should buy out investors if they want to keep operating for their own personal profit.
This wasn't exactly the question. The question was about growth. A company could be very profitable without growth (say, they own a mine which produces $40 million worth of ore each year with expenses of $10 million with no end in sight) or can have growth without profit (Open AI is a great example, or for history, the first 5 years of Facebook.)
I know most of stock investing is about capital gains and not dividends, but I think GP was saying it's inherently impossible to have growth forever.
On a financial level I get why people prefer to invest their money in a stock that goes up rather than one that pays them 8% a year consistently in dividends, but it seems unfortunate that somehow it seems like we aren't allowed to just have sustainable companies that don't depend on infinite growth to stay in business.
> The company primarily relies on three streams of revenue: user donations, serving ads on select Weird Gloop wikis, and a contract with Jagex that includes a fee to cover hosting and administration costs.
The only difference is that Weird Gloop is the little guy. Competition is good! That might be a good enough reason to choose them if you're in the market for wiki hosting!
But the moral posturing won't last if they become dominant, unless they set up incentives fundamentally differently than Fandom did, which doesn't seem to be the case.
As long as advertising is one of their revenue sources, the user experience will get crappy as soon as the network effects make it hard to leave. The cycle continues.
Venture capital/private equity is what causes this. We've been poisoned to believe that websites should exist purely to achieve hyperscale and extract as much money as possible. When you look at the real physical world there are tons of small "mom and pop" businesses that are content with being self sustainable without some special corporate structure to legally require that.
Maybe websites could be the same?
[1] a variable in whether something can be enshittified, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#History_and_d...
Observant users might notice the removal of any Weird Gloop branding but otherwise the only way people would know if the wiki itself announces the move or performance of the wiki becomes noticeably worse.
And Weird Gloop won't do what Fandom does and keep a zombie copy of your wiki online. So you won't be competing with Weird Gloop wiki traffic to reclaim your traffic. In fact, the obligations they agree to forbid it.
Reading the Minecraft.wiki Memorandum: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...
Upon termination by either party, Weird Gloop is obligated to:
- Cease operating any version of the Minecraft Wiki
- Transfer ownership of the minecraft.wiki domain to the community members
- Provide dumps of Minecraft Wiki databases and image repositories, and any of Weird Gloop's MediaWiki configuration that is specific to Minecraft Wiki
- Assist in transferring to the community members any domain-adjacent assets or accounts that cannot reasonably be acquired without Weird Gloop's cooperation
- This does not include any of Weird Gloop's core MediaWiki code, Cloudflare configuration, or accounts/relationships related to advertising or sponsorships
This sort of agreement means Weird Gloop is incentivized to not become so shit that wiki would want to leave (and take their ad revenue with them) because they've tried to make leaving Weird Gloop as easy as possible.
And besides, it's not like non-profits are exempt from restructuring and becoming worse. There is no silver bullet.
If any of the wikis we host want to leave, we'd provide them with a database dump. The admins would have to configure all of their own MediaWiki stuff of course, but I figure that's a pretty reasonable switching cost.
Other people just have very different values and the direction of an organization reflects this.
If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their userbase.
Now, one could reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game.
I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.
[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.
It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.
While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.
Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
I do remember downloadable (and maybe also bundled with game magazines ?) game tricks encyclopedias in the Windows help file format.
Video game magazines would regularly publish short walkthroughs and maps, as well as tips on common places to be stuck in popular games, and cheat codes.
Guidebooks were found in stores next to the games, they were typically slim, full-color affairs full of screenshots and production art, with complete lists of all the stuff you could do in the game. Full walkthroughs, item statistic charts, locations of the 52 Secret Gears you need to collect to build the Wind-Up Sword to achieve the secret ending, etc, etc. Here's a photo of someone's collection of a bunch of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/comments/12rsvll/seems...
One game I recently got which has great exploratory potential is Shapez 2. The in-game help is amazing.
sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?
By definition, very few wikis will have to deal with becoming one of the most popular websites. (And as you say, at that point one should be able to figure out funding.)
If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option.
Otherwise, if you like the experience of not paying per GB/TB, go for a dedicated server with unmetered connection that has the same price every month, regardless.
Rent VPS or managed hosting or host wherever you want, proxy it with Cloudflare on the free plan, Cloudflare caches it.
Usually you have something like a platform/tool/service that is mostly static requests that could be cached, with some dynamic requests that couldn't, as they're CRUD requests or similar.
If your struggling to serve static content, then do go ahead and slap Cloudflare on top of that bad boy and probably your visitors will be a bit happier, instead of upgrading from a cheap VPS.
If you're struggling to serve the dynamic requests, Cloudflare/CDN won't matter because these things actually need to be processed by your backend.
So instead of trying to shave 50ms off from my simple static requests with a CDN, I'd much happier to optimize for all the requests, including the "dynamic requests" that need to hit the backend anyway.
I'll still go for a dedicated server with proper connection and performance rather than a shitty cheap VPS with a CDN in front off it.
I moved a few of my personal websites to AWS's CloudFront and it cost me like a buck a month, way cheaper than maintaining a virtual server to do it. Except that somebody somewhere decided to try their DDOS tool on one of them for a few hours in the middle of the night, and I got a bill for $2541.69.
Eventually they credited it, but it was not a fun ride, and decided that I was done using a CDN with misaligned incentives: https://sfba.social/@williampietri/111687143220465824
What kind of conspiracy is this? As if anyone charging for bandwidth hopes to get their infrastructure attacked
> putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company
The free plan is a lot bigger than you think.
> dedicated server with unmetered connection
And where have you found one of those with reasonable pricing?
This lets Cloudflare deliver pages from their local cache over local links (which is fast and cheap), instead of fetching the data every time across the world from wherever the VPS is located.
- For anything complex/large enough you have to set `$wgMiserMode` otherwise operations will just get way too long and start timing out.
- You have to set `$wgJobRunRate` to 0 or a bunch of requests will just start stalling when they get assigned to calculate an expensive task that takes a lot of memory. Then you need to set up a separate job runner in the background, which can consume a decent amount of memory itself. There is nowadays a Redis-based job queue, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of documentation.
- Speaking of Redis, it seems like setting up Redis/Memcached is a pretty good idea too, for caching purposes; this especially helps for really complicated pages.
Even to this day running a Wiki with an ambient RPS is kind of hard. I actually like MediaWiki because it's very practical and extensible, but on the other hand I know in my heart that it is a messy piece of software that certainly could make better use of the machine it's running on.
The cost of running a wiki has gone down over time in my experience though, especially if you are running things as slim as possible. A modest Digital Ocean machine can handle a fair bit of traffic, and if you wanted to scale up you'd get quite a boost by going to one of the lower end dedicated boxes like one of the OVHcloud Rise SKUs.
If anyone is trying to do this I have a Digital Ocean pro-tip. Don't use the Premium Intel boxes. The Premium AMD boxes are significantly faster for the money.
One trap I also fell into was I thought it might be a good idea to throw this on a hyperscaler, you know, Google Cloud or something. While it does simplify operations, that'll definitely get you right into the "thousands of dollars per month" territory without even having that much traffic...
At one point in history I actually felt like Wikia/Fandom was a good offering, because they could handle all of this for you. It didn't start out as a bad deal...
I adopted mediawiki to run a knowledge base for my organization at Microsoft ( https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/I... ).
As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.
So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.
Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.
I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.
I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.
Last i heard though they were moving off it.
There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mistakes which were never replied to. I sort of suspect the patch thing was some sort of internal excuse because the team involved wanted to make their own thing.
Regardless, im really happy they decided to open source their extensions and it was nice to see that they put in effort to upstream core patches.
The efficiency for scale of mediawiki is hard to beat.
The calculus on this probably changes dramatically as the RPS scales up, though. Not doing work will always be better than doing work in the long run. It's just that it's a memory/time trade-off and I wouldn't take it for granted that it always gives you the most cost-effective end result.
Application level caching (memcached/redis/apcu) is super important even at a small scale.
Most of the time (unless complex extensions are involved or your wiki pages are very simple) mediawiki should be io-bound on converting wikitext -> html (which is why caching that process is important). Normally if db is healthy, db requests shouldn't be the bottle neck (unless you have extensions like smw or cargo installed)
I just assumed they were still there based on momentum.
That said, Digital Ocean is doing their customers a disservice by making the Premium Intel and Premium AMD SKUs look similar. They are not similar. The performance gap is absolutely massive.
What kind of decisions got you in that position? Hard to phatom.
Although I most assuredly was a kid.
Like maybe if a request for an image doesn't result in a 304, instead of sending a 200 response you redirect to lower res versions, or just 429 out. How much throttling do you do? And do you let bots still run full speed for SEO reasons or do you do something else there?
For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.
Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.
Aside from that: is DDosing actually illegal (under US law)?
(In other news, the Internet Archive got DDoSed today :(
I haven't had a problem with Cloudflare and their new Captcha system since their changed, but I still suffer whenever I see another website using Google Captcha :(
And this mean that my ancient android tablets can no longer visit many cloudflare-enabled sites.. I have a very mixed feelings about this:
I hate that my tablets are no longer usable so I want less Cloudflare;
but also when I visit websites (on modern computers) which provide traditional captchas where you click on picture of hydrants, I hate this even more and think: move to Cloudflare already, so I can stop doing this nonsense!
As for "more user-friendly captchas" - I have seen some of those (like AliExpress' slider) but I doubt they will work as well as hydrants. And with new AI startups (1) slurping all the data on the web and (2) writing realistic-looking spam messages, I am sure anti-bot measures would be more important than ever.
I'm also shocked at the tens of thousands per month, it can't possibly be hosting alone. It has to be that the maintainer had a generous salary or something.
That's not what static means in the context of hosting. Static means you upload files by FTP or WebDav or some other API and that's it. Something like hosting on S3. If users can log in, even if they usually don't, it's nothing like static any more.
Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully.
MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.
> Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully.
Most users should not even be hitting MediaWiki. It's ok to show cache entries that are a couple of seconds or even minutes out of date for logged out users.
> MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.
Again, nothing reasonably needs to update all that often.
Doesn’t it make more sense that a media have site would have been paying through the nose for bandwidth, hence the callout for cloudflare which would have made that cost free?
Sometimes people add things to their sites that are incompatible with caching, which will make hosting costs go way up.
People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn't like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up!
What they don't see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they're too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increase, but of course they don't take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads.
If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).
The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.
Maximizing revenue over the next 12 months is measurable.
Creating an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever is _not_ measurable.
So, all these big brain MBAs end up forcing myopia on everyone below them because number go up. They seem so proud of themselves to have mastered inequalities.
Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't get why they think it's a good idea.
There is no incentive to improve the product , there is every incentive to degrade quality because what are you going to do not shop at Amazon or not search with google ?
Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart?
I do shop at Amazon, but there are many goods that I could buy there but that I get elsewhere - food, cleaning supplies, clothes, home goods of all kinds, on and on. Some I get when I go grocery shopping each week, while others I get from other online sources.
I don't intentionally avoid Amazon specifically; the reason is that shopping at Amazon is an unpleasant experience ridden with ads, no-name goods of unreliable quality, and sometimes unreliable shipping. I just don't think to get these things from Amazon, the same way I don't have to think about not going into a dirty old store with high prices. I just don't go there.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2024/06/11/why-perp...
Is it? I get a lot of product recommendations from Amazon that aren't sponsored. For example, we bought a countertop dishwasher a few years ago, and then for two months afterwards Amazon kept showing us other countertop dishwashers that we might want to add to our collection.
Selling your brand is a very real thing, and I wish more people would take it into account. Brand health correlates with long term health.
That's part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile vision and legacy have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level.
How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that's granted based on short term shareholder results.
And it doesn't help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn't seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is for the shareholders first and foremost, and what's a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).
It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.
But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you
1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people
2. Run more buses emptier than you were before
But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost.
In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of.
(Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.)
Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.
We're all very familiar with induced demand when it comes to widening highways and other car-centric infrastructure.
Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.
Good systems do; most systems don't, for lots of reasons.
1. Public transit is for poor people, and poor people don't fund re-election campaigns
2. Subsidizing public transit is spending the public's money, and the public has spent decades being told that "socialism" is going to take away their freedom and choice; in this case, the government is going to put more of YOUR tax dollars into public transit and then TAKE AWAY your cars.
It becomes a vicious cycle:
1. Transit is under-funded (or the funding is maintained but not increased to match rising ridership and costs)
2. Service has to get cut in areas with low ridership (e.g. areas with a lot of retirement communities get cuts to route frequency)
3. People get mad because now their buses run less often so they have to leave earlier or later than they wanted to
4. Why are we paying these people when they're just giving us worse and worse service?
In the end you wind up with a scenario where people are voting no to additional transit funding, and pointing to the direct results of under-funding as their explanation - look how bad service is, why would we give them more money? [0]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-refe...
In Western Australia, right now public transport is free for all students, and is free on Sundays for everyone. They also capped the cost of cross-zone travel to 2 zones, i.e. you'll never pay more than $5ish for a ride. Furthermore, unlike a lot of places, the airport train does not have any extra fare.
In Queensland, right now all public transport is capped at 50c. Not sure how long this will last, seems it's a bit of cost-of-living relief, and a bit of an election sweetener.
Something can just be a public good without delivering profit.
If you think about it, the same could be said of state subsidized public transport, where increased economic activity due to improved traffic (getting people to/from jobs, shops and their homes) can increase tax revenue which can then be spent on public transport subsidies, turning them revenue positive. Of course whether most state subsidized systems actually live up to those aspirations is a bit more questionable.
Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.
https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-fa...
Edit: I think this is the article I originally read, but I'm not 100% certain. https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification.
Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.
But being on an old version makes navigating the wiki hard. I'm never sure if some content applies to me. Sometimes they say which version a feature was introduced in, but if a mechanic changes, they often just document the latest behavior.
Interestingly, DCSS's best source of info is the IRC bots/learndb.
Another example is the various Dungeon and Dragons wikis that allow you to toggle between versions, since it has existed for 50 years now.
Minecraft has this somewhat also, with some people sticking on various versions because of mods, or play style, or combat, etc.
For example, one huge change was going from a 2D map to a 3D one, another was how world generation was done.
See "Eras" here for the big ones: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Release_information
Games with "always on" or auto-updaters avoid this.
I think the theory is people edit more if pages load lightning fast. I can attest to that, especially if you use tools for partially-automated mass edits like https://github.com/wikimedia-gadgets/JWB
I was curious about this so I poked around both and I think I disagree. Both load very fast for me and are snappy and look pretty nice. The one difference is that the Runescape wiki has a single ad in the sidebar or at the bottom, below the content footer. While the Fandom wikis have 3+ ads, far larger, one of which covers content until interacted with (like being closed). For me, Fandom's ad approach absolutely falls within "offensively bad," while the Runescape ad approach reminds me of early 2000s, "here's an ad to pay the bills. We've tried to keep it well out of your way."
So I'd opine that it has less to do with the quality of mediawiki, and more about how much money both Wiki hosts are seeking to gain from the existence of these resources.
Fandom makes it extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to do something as simple as access the page of an image asset.
Yes, extracting the real human-readable text from a Wiki was a lot harder than you'd expect.
There was also a question of investment. I think even with some early successes quantified with A/B tests and things like that, there just wasn't the executive or product buy-in to broaden the investment.
Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.
I'm very curious to hear how others are seeing the terms used, though.
Somehow I don't think that is the solution.
I've configured it to lower results from *.fandom.com and am really happy about it.
It was and remains a worthwhile trade-off to ensure folks got to the right wiki though.
(I'm guessing it does technically exist online, but access to it is limited to closed beta players (under NDA) for now ?)
(As a contributor for the wiki for PoE1 I really should have tried the obvious link... less obvious on the phone though !)
I like this approach much more than the games that have decided to move to another managed/hosted service like https://wiki.gg - which has a very real change of becoming the "next" Fandom.
Truly independent wikis are the best.
[^1]: https://publish.obsidian.md/dakota/Hobbies/Gaming/Gaming+Wik...
> Fandom is actually part of the for-profit arm of Wikipedia
Are you sure about this? Since Fandom got acquired by private equity in 2018, I don't think Wikipedia has any stake in Fandom anymore
The connection is that 2 of the main people involved originally (jimmy & angela) had a lot of ties to wikimedia, but they were doing wikicities/wikia/fandom as their own thing, not as part of wikimedia.
Also long ago there was some minor connections. They briefly shared an office like 15 years ago i think, and they tried to jointly develop a wysiwyg editor back in like 2012 (wikimedia did most of the work i think, but wikia leant a few devs to the project at one point) which eventually became the mediawiki visual editor.
Anyways totally separare orgs.
The other side of this is that jimmy does not have very much control over Wikimedia foundation now a days either. He still has a board seat, but its just one seat among many and the board is pretty hands-off.
Still, I'm glad for some competition. However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them the only way to get something up and running?
I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousa...
This to me is a different argument, though admittedly reasonable to arrive at through the language of "paying Google for placement".
> I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts their profit above luser experience, when it comes to search ranking.
I mean, yes. Though I should hope I needn't preamble any statement about <company> with how cynical I am about their intentions... It's not relevant here because I'm not arguing on the grounds that 'Google would be ethical and kawaii if they didn't accept payment for organic search ranking'--I'm saying that from a business standpoint it wouldn't make sense.
Practically, you can pay SEO experts to help you keep your rankings up.
Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will think Google is broken if certain popular sites don’t come up in their results.
Yes, per this post:
> I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
...
> If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi[1]
I wonder how much the effect of lots of people having a redirect extension has. If google sees people click on the fandom result and not come back, do they treat it as a good result when in reality people are redirecting to poewiki via the extension?
The situation improves every league, particularly since now there are quite a lot of items, skill gems or skill tree node passives/notables missing from the fandom wiki. It's much better than in the past when you could outright search "<skill> poewiki" and not have the poewiki result anywhere.
But it still feels like there's a long way to go, and it's a shame because it further increases the knowledge gap between experienced players who might know to seek out the poewiki, and new players (or very casual players) who might not.
It hints also at the power of the "old web" and it's historic power over google rankings.
Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.
Could you imagine if someone declared a successor to wikipedia and edited all the pages to redirect?
Sometimes you just have to put the effort into making the new better, and it's a hard long slog especially against a well funded incumbent.
But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)
> But like all problems in PoE, PoE2 will fix it. ;)
Isn't that the game for which Sannikov came up with his new global illumination algorithm? [1] (Apparently yes)
The linked post (at j3s.sh) appears blank to me, so if others have the same problem here’s an archive link: https://archive.ph/kwt1b
original post is at https://j3s.sh/thought/stop-using-fandom.html
I respect the work of Mr. Wales immensely, and I cannot explain how he has allowed his creation to become synonymous with ad-ridden borderline unusable gaming wikis.
There was a huge push in Wikipedia in the 2010s to delete content that could be moved into Wikia/Fandom, and a huge amount of quality information was removed. It was clear the goal was to pump views in the money-making website.
Then we only saw Wikia becoming Fandom and getting progressively worse.
> Wales has previously referred to himself as an Objectivist, referring to the philosophy of writer Ayn Rand in the mid-20th century that emphasizes reason, individualism, and capitalism.
But, I must say, I'm increasingly easy-going about the whole thing. I don't claim to know how things should be arranged, tax me if you must, assign me to clean the communal latrines, do what you like, such is life. I will generally assume that we're all getting it wrong, regardless of viewpoint.
I was an anarchist as a teenager. Then I stopped thinking about politics until recently, when I rediscovered it, with a much more critical look. Then I read the Tao Te Ching, fell in love with its positive view of humanity and nature, and more importantly because Laozi can be described as the first anarchist but more grounded, as a large part of his work was advising actual monarchs, not academic posturing that's prevalent today.
Anarchism today means everything and nothing. One thing I have learned to loathe in my adult age is any form of anarcho-communism, as communism is nothing more than dictatorship of the proletariat. The much maligned anarcho-capitalism, and even early American libertarianism is more compatible with the ideas of freedom and "don't tread on me nor impose any rules on me" than any anarcho-communism that has been so popular in the past 100 years. Why should proletariat decide that I cannot have any private property?
On the other side, Randian and modern day libertarians are just conservative republicans with a different name, but libertarianism at the end of the 19th century had its root firmly in anarchist ideals.
The whole point is they don’t, there is no state to enforce this, you are free to go off and enjoy your private property. Anarcho-communism means believe that our communities are better organized around sharing and collaboration than striving for individual gains, and that pursuing private property is fundamentally hierarchical in nature.
Have any of you “anarcho”-capitalists actually read any anarchist theory? Proudhon, Kropotkin, etc?
I tend to agree that it makes far more sense to call it socialism with some individualist facets than anarchy with some socialist attributes.
What you’re describing would be closer to individualist anarchy or philosophical anarchy. Individualist anarchy believes the right of the individual is paramount, excepting when the rights of two individuals clash. Philosophical anarchy is the general belief that the desires of individuals should not never be co-opted because one person can never morally justify forcing another to do something and thus governments can never be moral as their entire reason to exist is to wield the monopoly on violence against individuals to override their will. Individuals are of course still free to join groups and abide their rules if they choose, but those groups would not be able to enforce any kind of agenda against its members.
Thanks! Anarchism is about removing hierarchy, of which the most potent in our modern times is the hierarchy of capitalism. Anarchism is also opposed to the state; you’ll find there’s a lot of us at protests of police brutality and other instances of the hierarchy of the state.
I notice this raises the question of the similarities or differences between hierarchies (of people, not html tags or whatever) and rulership. Certainly management, or government, or the church (going etymological again), has a hierarchy of higher-up hierophants issuing commands to lower-down losers, and it's all full of stinking rules, and there's some connection. And, say, HN, has a hierarchy which consists of Dang, and us, and below us, noobs, and that's about enforcing the rules, which I have to admit might not stink in this particular case. But sometimes there can be a hierarchy without a connection to rules. For instance, how fancy is your hairstyle? Do you shave it off as irrelevant, or just let it grow like a hippie, or cultivate dreadlocks, or have a bowl cut, or trim it with clippers, craft it with scissors, or perhaps opt for dye, a perm, a beehive, or Roman braids? In the hair hierarchy there are people, the owners of the hair, but no chain of command or enforced rules. Capitalism, seen as simply people having money, has potential, perhaps, to be as benign as people having hair.
Yes, just like “conservative portion” doesn’t talk about politics. The political ideology of anarchism, the mention of which is what triggered this entire discussion, is by definition about resisting power hierarchies, so your hair example is a bit contrived.
But why would I expect genuine political discussion on HN instead of semantic navel-gazing? Read some Kropotkin.
I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst possible implementation of that idea.
And ironically, I already hated fandom before I'd seen it without an ad blocker! Just for the large sidebars and ugly flyouts and whatnot. It really feels like a contender for worst site on the internet.
Usually it's stuff where the fan seems to have picked up on something implied in a story, but missed where it is clearly stated that isn't the case ... but then they go and write on fandom and make lots of assumptions from there and fill in other gaps with guesses.
It's a not-so-open secret that a lot of wikia wikis are not only vandalised but encouraged to be vandalised as to make people move off them.
Just wish there was a more centralized / good alternative to promote rather than just wrecking fandom.
I am aware of a few game communities that purposefully poison the fandom version of the wiki with inaccuracies that are non-obvious and time-consuming to verify (so they aren't just auto-reverted).
Prior to my discovery that fandom was bad and a lot of wikis were moving away, I was following so many instances of out dated info in games I was playing due to not realizing that the wiki was no longer maintained since the active contributors had moved elsewhere and updates/patches to the game had rendered the info moot.
Same goes with just about every wiki that has a counterpart that's not on Fandom.
As someone who once edited those wikis, I certainly hope they did. Who wants to work for free to enrich some private equity firm?
I don't get it. If I'm looking up a specific year in the star trek universe, say 2381, to see what happened, why would I want 14 minute video on "a history of star trek".
Then why would I want it again when I check the next year
If it were a youtube style video advert I could understand it.
Fextralife notably stopped streaming almost a year ago after Twitch announced that embedded views would no longer be counted. The solution is in the incentive, but unfortunately on the modern internet those generally don't favor the user.
SEO has ruined the Internet.
I assume the irrelevant video is included to give Fandom more video ad space to sell.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page
vs
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
(Though UESP has had banner ads for a while now)
I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.
I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few, and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.
But that's just nonsense, if a website can get more revenue from more ads, they are gonna put more ads right away, they aren't gonna wait until their revenue drops under some magic number before they do.
At especially large scales, spinning the API and job queues off altogether into microservices and insulating the live site from the performance impact of logging this whole rat's nest.
> (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem.
So yes, the wikis have their own domains for this exact reason.
If I'm looking for a specific piece of info that ends up being on a fandom wiki, it's quite a turn off.
What makes it worth it is if there’s a page specific to a game you like and you spend a good amount of time there reading stuff. That’s a long tail thing though.
edit: Seems they moved again recently to wiki.gg.
Basically during 2018 Curse's owners, Twitch and Amazon, wanted more head count for Twitch and to cut out anything that was not part of Twitch's main mission. The decision at the time from the Twitch CEO was to completely shut down Curse and fire everyone by the end of 2018 even though Curse was a cash positive subsidiary. That would mean turning off every single wiki with no transfer to anywhere else. It would all just be gone.
So the director of Curse at the time worked his ass off find a buyer for the company. The final options came down to The Verge, Wikia, and one other that I forgot. Essentially Wikia was the only one that could promise to meet all of the buyout terms and a two year transition period of employee benefits for current employees.
I'm not going to call Wikia a savior here, but without any company offering to buy Curse a lot of wikis and jobs may have been lost that December.
[1]I signed some NDA about this, but it has been many years and I don't care.
> The GDPR is specific that consent must be as 'easy to withdraw as to give', meaning that a reject-all button must be as easy to access in terms of clicks and visibility as an 'accept all' button.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directiv...
> European law requires that all websites targeting European Union member states gain "informed consent" from users before storing non-essential cookies on their device.
But yes, this is not the case on fandom wikis - in practice these are not compliant.
And e.g. Meta (and many newspapers) already has a new obviously illegal tracking scheme with the "pay to not track".
The intended effect of GDPR would have been easily gotten with legally binding do-not-track and similar automated means. Very few people want to be tracked, but most of them are against their true consent.
We all know what it means, but it isn't specific enough. "Single click no" or something to that effect. And don't get me started on "legitimate" interest...
Cook is very passionate about wikis - as is the rest of the team - and the RS wiki has long been regarded as one of the best gaming wikis on the internet; no contest. If you run a wiki - talk to Weird Gloop. The blog isn't bullshit and they genuinely want to help.
I think it's awesome that they're helping more wikis move away from Fandom after the success of the Minecraft wiki moving.
They also are running a wiki for Andrew Gower's upcoming game as well.
I really hope I hear about other wikis making the move in the near future. Fandom deserves to die out.
The RS Wiki is the single website I've whitelisted in my ad blocker. And despite needing ads to cover costs - they made sure to ask the community first about adding them and what alternatives to funding might be possible. It was really a last resort and they are obsessive about making sure the ads are non-intrusive, single banner, not in primary real estate, and not harming the wiki experience. If any ads cause problems they completely pause running ads until the ad host resolves the issue. Although I'm usually signed in - so never see ads anyway as they only show for users who aren't signed in.
The only use of CC-BY-SA-NC on Fandom I can recall is Memory Alpha (Star Trek Wiki) which was acquired with that license. There were some extra hoops to jump through to be able to advertise there - I think they granted themselves the ability to do so through Terms of Use that override the license.
What wasn't fine is how they made every single page on the existing Fandom wiki redirect to a meme page that didn't explain what was happening. This was particularly disruptive because it made every single google result for "<game name> <topic>" invalid as it redirected to this useless page. Fandom has better SEO and the replacement wiki was so new it didn't appear in google results for several weeks. It was extremely annoying.
[1]: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-03-...
It was created back when Fandom was Wikia, back when it was a good place to host a wiki
https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited
Some donations, some ads, and contracts (one so far) with companies that benefit.
It all looks very Wikipedia-like. I wonder if the WMF could be persuaded to throw some of their massive pile of cash in this direction, in the public interest? But then Weird Gloop would probably have to be a non-profit.
Unfortunately the Fandom wiki is still the first link when searching on DDG :-(
In OSRS there's a button next to the minimap that you click on first and then on the subject and it opens the wikipage for it.
I wish Warframe would move to a osrswiki model. A theorycraft heavy game almost requires a good, performant wiki.
Somewhat recently Wowpedia moved away from fandom to wiki.gg, dunno yet if it'll be another fandom, we'll see.
Oh, and, yeah, I probabbly have "/wiki et" as a muscle memory now - it's so fast and easy to check in-game events using this chat command.
Anyway, I've always doubted it to be an accident that seemingly all of their wikis are hosted on the same domain[1]. Glad to see someone doing good work about that, even if it's just incidental while they solve a different problem. Seeing the official LoL wiki on leagueoflegends.com suggests they don't intend to do the same sort of -- admittedly presumed -- widespread tracking.
Regardless, it sounds like the wiki maintainers prefer working with Weird Gloop rather than Fandom and I don't otherwise have a lot of sympathy for Fandom. I have no specific bone to pick with them but I also can't help but feel glad for people who are finding other wiki software vendors.
(It's also kind of interesting to see the Minecraft wiki at minecraft.wiki instead of something like wiki.minecraft.com. I guess it's a community project, just noting that Microsoft/Mojang don't seem interested in maintaining it(?). Maybe the community prefers it that way and they're respecting that.)
1: Turns out it definitely is not an accident: https://support.fandom.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021258554-I-...
> We can only change the first part of your wiki's URL (i.e. example.fandom.com) - we do not support wikis outside of fandom.com.
Also, the Google search results page for that search made me pine for the good old days of Google being 10 real links…
It’s very useful, however, to have a place where that’s possible, even if that’s currently Fandom. Many wikis wouldn’t exist without that non-barrier to entry. Those that gain traction can then decide to move elsewhere.
As others have pointed out, the RuneScape Wiki (where Weird Gloop started out) is probably the highest quality gaming wiki on the internet. Not only is its information itself up-to-date and accurate, but it has countless custom features and interactive tools that elevate it from a crowdsourced knowledgebase to a sort of data and analytics hub for the game.
Anyway, this really is terrific news and any wiki that chooses to partner with Weird Gloop is certainly in the best of hands.
In hindsight it makes total sense.
There's also now wiki.gg, which focuses on official wikis run by game developers and was launched after the Gamepedia acquisition by Gamepedia's founder and a former Fandom president. Several wikis are on independent MediaWiki farms like Miraheze or ShoutWiki, and numerous others self-host entirely independently.
This Weird Gloop effort seems to be more like wiki.gg, but for community-run wikis rather than gamedev-run wikis — bespoke relationships with communities that want to migrate or relaunch, rather than open sign-ups to a platform like Miraheze or ShoutWiki.
https://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forked_wikis
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:Departure_from_Wikia
etc.
Most of the updates I've made on Fandom were of this nature.
Three cheers for weird gloop, JES, and everyone else fighting the good fight.
Also, if the exports were significantly better documented that Wikipedia”s. I could not make heads or tails of the hundreds of options Wikipedia presents, all seemingly without any unifying resource describing the differences.
Is it hosting it on cloudflare / using cloudflare workers or what exactly (because I heard cloudflare being mentioned here)
I am all ears because hosting a static site is basically free thanks to github pages / cloudflare pages , but having a site which changes a lot (a wiki can have changes be applied to at an insane rate , though I am not sure if we could use something like git as a wiki I think wikis also allow messages between users ) but is still static can cost a arm and leg
How so? Seems like it would be trivial in PHP
> We’ve spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom
But, smart on the publishers to take (even more) control of the "community projects" this way.
They own TVGuide now.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one who actively avoids contributing to Fandom wikis because it's effectively doing unpaid labor for a corporation that only cares about making as much money as possible off of said unpaid labor.
- Heavy use of Cloudflare Workers to cache ~95% of logged-out pageviews, with a particular focus on doing a lot of edge-side modifications to minimize cache fragmentation
- Using the MediaWiki jobrunners to repopulate the parser cache before pageviews are requested, so even when pageviews hit the server, there's a high chance that the core contents have already been computed somewhere
- I realized that MediaWiki latency is usually dominated by I/O wait time. For example, some pageviews require thousands of synchronous database/redis cache reads, so the difference between 0.5ms lookup and 0.1ms lookup adds up. So we colocated more of those caches on the same physical machines as the webservers that were reading them, which on average dropped latency by ~40%
If you’re into golf, help try to build the most thorough list of courses in the world, accessible to all.
Fun(?) fact – Fandom put even more restrictions right after Minecraft Wiki moved[2]. Now it doesn't even allow wikis to put a banner on their main page saying that there's a forking discussion unless they contact Fandom support and get permission.
[1]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy
[2]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy?diff=375705...
Take a random game like https://endlesslegend.fandom.com/wiki/Endless_Legend_Wiki
That game is 10 years old and its wiki was built in the height of its popularity when it had people to build it. The developer moved on, the community moved on. If its wiki weren't on Fandom, then its wiki would depend on some random person paying the bill for eternity for a game they themself moved on from long ago.
Yeah, it has ads, but someone has to pay the bill. I'll take the ad-ridden wiki that exists over the idealized one that went offline seven years ago when the interest died out.
This becomes a metaphor for the internet in general.
And archive.org is not a replacement for a website, not even a Fandom wiki. It's horrible to use and you're lucky if it indexes a quarter of what you want, especially on a property as big as a wiki. And it's read-only.
On Fandom I can still log in and make improvements.
— Something becomes popular.
— A $POPULAR_THING Wiki is swiftly created, some freelancers are hired to create article stubs. Links to it spread through other popular wikis.
— People trying to learn something about that topic get a lot of search results directing them to that new wiki. They assume that it's some kind of “community”, try to participate, and never realize that they're making love to an inflatable doll. Real activity, links and clicks now force the pages to stay on top, and attract even more naive visitors.
Of course, it's not specific to that site. “Social” sites often make people believe that they “interact” with thousands or millions of others, when in fact they shout into an empty box, and watch the movements of a primitive mechanism.
The issue is that Wikia/Fandom, Reddit, etc. subsumed most other alternatives by offering what was for a long time a legitimately convenient and decent-quality service, but now that communities are too locked in to move (due to intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed.
Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.
You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that. The problem is that there's rarely the will because it's a hobby endeavor for tiny communities, and until you last as long as the Fandom alternative would last, it wasn't even necessarily the right thing to do.
You can't just migrate and call it a day. You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest in the game and fiddling with MediaWiki.
Most of the costs are those that scale up/down by activity - MediaWiki itself is free/open-source and the wiki's content is contributed for free by volunteers.
Also, keep in mind I'm not saying that each wiki needs to be individually self-hosted. Can be a host the size of WeirdGloop but made up of smaller game wikis, for instance.
> I'm more concerned about the rest of the wikis like the example I gave where I'm googling for game mechanics for a dead game.
Prospects for long term information accessibility are pretty terrible on sites aggressively squeezing out all the profit they can. See Reddit eliminating archives and third party clients and then cutting off all search engines that don't pay, or mass deletions of user content by sites like Photobucket/Imgur/etc.
> You can migrate wikis away from Fandom. The OP is about doing just that.
With significant difficulty, fighting against both Fandom's policies and SEO/network effects. The OP lists "wiki communities need to be able to freely leave their host" as the primary rule for "How to not turn into Fandom 2.0".
> You have to stick around for another decade so people can find that information long after you've lost interest
Hence ability and willingness to pass on the torch is critical - so that the information doesn't die with one person or company.
Yes, they will monetize the content, but they'll also manage it because it makes them money. Content on fandom is probably going to still be available 10 years later. It's the same with DeviantArt, it's worse now than it has ever been, but artwork uploaded 10 years ago is still available, and it will probably still be available 10 years later. You could also say this about Youtube, Google, and many other platforms.
I hope the emerging alternatives prove to be successful, but so far I still don't see a reliable alternative for Youtube, Google, or DeviantArt (or even Twitter, Reddit, etc.). In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a replacement win in the long run. Maybe I'm just too young.
> In February 2018, former AOL CEO Jon Miller, backed by private equity firm TPG Capital, acquired Fandom.
> In February 2019, former StubHub CEO Perkins Miller took over as CEO
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
It's hard to imagine a worse leadership team than private equity + StubHub.
The reality is that ads and such are (probably) the only effective way to go and founders will sell to capital groups for profit. Over and over. Look at image hosting, which is a similar case. We went from ad laden tinypic's and such to ad-free imgur and now imgur is ad-heavy, app heavy, dark pattern heavy, etc once the startup money ran out and founders and investors expected profit.
We're destined to be on this "get on this service, then get off that service for that new service" wheel for eternity under this system because this boom and bust period and startup-to-profit system is fundamental under our system of capitalism.
If I were to propose a cause, it would be the normalization of internet stuff being “free”.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_have_you...
"then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a systemic issue.
That's still an extremely blunt point. While we can imagine some alternative world where we all live in a communist utopia and the internet is the great free place it was in its early days, it's not so easy to build such a society. All the attempts I'm aware of either didn't scale (small, local communes) or were large-scale disasters resulting in the deaths of millions.
What we have now is no paradise, but it's not a disaster either. It's balanced on the razor's edge of disaster, however.
However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.
In contrast, I've never heard a complaint about a previously-respected product run by a private-equity firm that became ruined after it was taken private by a closely-held family business.
Basically, sell everything of value to make a quick buck is the guiding principle of our economy at present. It's the best way to get rich even though it ultimately makes society way worse off long term. We have to solve this on a fundamental level or things like Fandom will just keep happening.
I'm sort of without, in the sense that they are for profit, so the CEO is going to attempt to increase profit. The problem arise when short-term profit is priorities over all else. I don't see the point in trying to have a record year, in terms of profit, if that means that customers/users are leaving your business long term.
Part of it might be the whole misguided SV startup mentality where we burn a ton of money and then sort of hope that profit will appear when volume is reached. Imgur is a pretty good example, not once did the founder stop to think about why all their competitors sucked. In the long run Imgur was forced down the same dark path because the idea is, and always was, going to be unprofitable.
I don't think Fandom is unprofitable necessarily. They have a lot of original content, written by unpaid users, and which has been increasing in popularity. The problem is how profitable they need to be vs. how profitable they want to be. They don't need to be a billion dollar company, there's nothing wrong with being a 100 million dollar company, or how much they are able to sustain without pushing users away. They just have to not lose money.
@zoeysmithe I'm sorry for the mass downvotes though, I think you are basically right. I still think it's worth noting private equity ownership because while we can't really choose what economic system we're in, we can often choose to work with people who care about more than just profit.
https://www.wiki.fextralife.com/
Comments sections on wikis there for e.g. FromSoftware games can tend toward rebarbativity, and the ads can be annoying, but in my recent experience the information troves compiled for big games such as Elden Ring are an indispensable resource.
The initial Dark Souls wikidot was excellent. Fextralife bullied and threatened them into closing down. At this point, people don't move on because of habit, but the quality for the Elden Ring wiki is dramatically bad. Information is outdated, poorly maintained, actual fixes are being reverted by their own, paid editors, other wikis are suspiciously often the target of attacks and deleted content.
But I haven't experienced problems with information in the guides. Off the top of my head: for Elden Ring, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Hollow Knight, I don't recall a single time when the info was flat out wrong. In the case of comments pointing out something incorrect or incomplete, it had already been fixed by the time of my reading.
It also highlights an important difference between why wikis can be useful. If I want information about Elden Ring as a game, Fextralife is pretty good (with some ublock filters to kill the stupid chat), but it does that at the expense of information about Elden Ring as a fictional world. That's not usually why I'm looking up Elden Ring information, but it sometimes is.
Truth be told, it appears that Weird Gloop/mediawiki has a bit of a monopoly on wiki platforms that don't suck.