[HN Gopher] Helping wikis move away from Fandom
___________________________________________________________________
Helping wikis move away from Fandom
Author : creatonez
Score : 799 points
Date : 2024-10-10 11:21 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (weirdgloop.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (weirdgloop.org)
| backspace_ wrote:
| I have frequently said to myself, "you know what Fandom needs?
| More ads"
|
| If I'm looking for a specific piece of info that ends up being on
| a fandom wiki, it's quite a turn off.
| pytness wrote:
| Also, the site is really slow. The only thing that the site
| manages to turn on is the computer fans.
| chongli wrote:
| It gets a lot better with an ad blocker and other annoyance-
| blockers. The deeper question is whether or not you think it's
| worth it. I think many people visit Fandom pages only briefly
| from a SERP and then take off, like Wikipedia but specific to a
| game. If that's the way you use Fandom then it's probably not
| worth it.
|
| 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.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Whenever my phone accidentally opens fandom with Chrome rather
| than Firefox mobile (with uBO), I wonder how the hell anybody
| browses the internet on their phone without an ad blocker...
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Most of the time I don't notice it because I use Firefox w/ uB0
| on all platforms. But recently I've been playing some games on
| Steam and trying to use Steam's browser overlay to cache some
| guides. Its browser seems to be a chrome fork and does _not_
| support any kind of adblocker, unfortunately, and so I 've been
| exposed to just how bad Fandom wikis are without one.
| rchaud wrote:
| That's just par for the course for any online service these
| days, though. It's not like Netflix, Hulu Spotify are keeping
| their prices flat.
| blendergeek wrote:
| Can wikis on weird gloop use their own domain names? I feel like
| that is the best way to ensure that they can leave and that the
| host can't keep a zombie version of the wiki that hogs Google
| search position.
| gu5 wrote:
| Currently, every wiki they host is on its own domain (besides
| the meta one)
| DandyDev wrote:
| To they can. See the Minecraft wiki for example:
| https://minecraft.wiki
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| From the article
|
| > (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.
| blendergeek wrote:
| I missed the "(hint: it's all about the domain)" or more
| precisely, I didn't get the hint. I guess I need some things
| spelled out for me.
| robjwells wrote:
| > [This post] (and many others) have done a much better job than
| I could, explaining from a reader's perspective why Fandom is bad
| place to host a wiki,
|
| 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
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Thanks, I had the same problem.
| compootr wrote:
| Yeah, the site is down (502 status)
| j3s wrote:
| oop, my bad. it got oomkilled somehow - should be back up now
| :3
|
| original post is at https://j3s.sh/thought/stop-using-
| fandom.html
| m463 wrote:
| nope.
| tombert wrote:
| Fandom is one of my least favorite things now. The site ends up
| having more ads than the average porn or piracy website, it
| manages to slow down my relatively beefy laptops without even
| trying.
|
| I love the idea of fan wikis, but Fandom is basically the worst
| possible implementation of that idea.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| The "fan" in "Fandom" means the fan in your computer.
| setopt wrote:
| And the "dom" refers to how it completely dominates that fan.
| aylons wrote:
| The dom comes from some of the tame ads...
| preciousoo wrote:
| Or how they use every square pixel of the dom
| razodactyl wrote:
| ...I like you. I'm gonna keep you around... hahaha
| GJim wrote:
| What are these 'ads' of which you speak?
| ta1243 wrote:
| Assuming you're not on an adblocker, what's really odd is
| every page has a video about the subject. Not an advert, just
| a video that you aren't interested in.
|
| 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
| homebrewer wrote:
| For some reason you're assuming the owners of the website
| have your interests at heart, and not the interest of their
| bank account.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Sure, but how does serving me a 15 minute video help
| their bank account?
|
| If it were a youtube style video advert I could
| understand it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You watch it, and Google Ads records a veeery long "user
| is present on website" time, which is a boost in SEO -
| Google ranks how long people spend on a website, hence
| the "trend" of endless waffling around in stuff as basic
| as cooking recipes, or inline videos that entice the user
| to spend time on the website. Even if all of it (nowadays
| including videos) is AI-generated slop. But if the user
| immediately finds the information and goes back or closes
| the tab, then the site will get punished for being
| actually efficient and useful.
|
| SEO has ruined the Internet.
| philipov wrote:
| Putting autoplaying videos on every page farms their view
| count and gets the algorithm to show it to more people,
| which drives ad revenue. It's quite similar to how
| Fextralife embeds twitch streams to farm viewer counts.
| jorams wrote:
| > It's quite similar to how Fextralife embeds twitch
| streams to farm viewer counts.
|
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| As I understand things, video ads produce more $$$ - the
| advertiser pays more per view, and per click; and the
| click-through rate is higher. I've heard claims of video
| ads making 5x more.
|
| I assume the irrelevant video is included to give Fandom
| more video ad space to sell.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| laughs in ublock origin
| tombert wrote:
| I use ublock now too, but it's this really annoying feedback
| loop; people use ad blockers, making the websites less money,
| so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have
| ad blockers, and making the website worse and more likely for
| them to install an ad blocker etc...
|
| I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the
| need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _people use ad blockers, making the websites less money,
| so they add more advertisements for the people who don 't
| have ad blockers_
|
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| Some sites have a message like "hey, we can't serve you
| ads, you must be using an ad blocker, stop that and
| absorb the advertising as is your duty because we need
| the money". But maybe that's just desperation and they
| aren't losing much to ad blockers anyway.
| teddyh wrote:
| Many people _believe_ that the loss is great, especially
| web site owners, which would certainly explain such
| messages. But lived experience shows at least me that
| most people don't even know what an ad blocker _is_.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| It's clearly enough of an impact for Google to spend
| effort killing uBlock on Chrome, and (attempting) to
| block it on Youtube. Obviously Google is huge, and even a
| small percentage of users is still a lot of money on the
| table.
| teddyh wrote:
| We can only draw the obvious conclusion: Namely that
| Google plans to introduce a lot more ads once they have
| an iron grip on the consumer. If Google did that _before_
| Google destroyed ad blockers, regular people would indeed
| start to use ad blockers.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| That's possible, but I think it's premature to think this
| is part of some grand plan. What likely happened is that
| Google estimated the cost to fund a team to shut down ad
| blockers was less then the money they were losing from ad
| blockers. Maybe it's part of a larger initiative, but I'd
| be hesitant to assume that without more evidence.
| Drakim wrote:
| The feedback loop doesn't work like that. You are implying
| there is some target revenue that the website aims to hit,
| and if it fails to meet that target it adds more ads.
|
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Things aren't free, but alternative business models to ad-
| supported have not much of an opportunity to develop. The
| hope is that the feedback loop you've identified will
| iterate to the point that ad supported content becomes
| truly unbearable, and eventually enough room will open up
| that some alternative can develop.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| That's a positive feedback loop. Ads are the root of all
| evil on the internet, and the end of that loop is "no more
| ads". And I don't want to hear shit about the internet
| dying without ads, in the same thread people are talking
| about cloudflare serving TBs of data for free or a $4
| unmetered VPS.
| rchaud wrote:
| These sites aren't adding ads to punish the non-ad blocking
| users, they're doing it because Google Ads keeps slashing
| the premiums to keep more of the pie for themselves.
| hbn wrote:
| Ublock doesn't block the AI generated FAQs without manually
| stepping in, and it certainly won't block all the bad info as
| the more dedicated and knowledgeable fans move to other
| wikis.
| duxup wrote:
| It's not even accurate at times. I think a lot of the dedicated
| fans have given up on it. I've seen several that have chunks of
| straight wrong information.
|
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it.
|
| As someone who once edited those wikis, I certainly hope they
| did. Who wants to work for free to enrich some private equity
| firm?
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| > I think a lot of the dedicated fans have given up on it.
| I've seen several that have chunks of straight wrong
| information.
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| I can understand the urge and frustration level.
|
| Just wish there was a more centralized / good alternative
| to promote rather than just wrecking fandom.
| mschae23 wrote:
| Vandalism on Fandom wikis is counter-productive. It just
| makes it look more active, to both users and search
| engines, and so will in turn make it harder for people to
| find the independent wiki. The best thing to do is just to
| ignore abandoned Fandom wikis entirely.
| shbooms wrote:
| Same here.
|
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _It 's not even accurate at times._
|
| 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).
| CM30 wrote:
| Yeah the more dedicated fans have usually gone off to the
| independent wiki instead, leaving the Fandom one a hellscape
| of rumours and outdated information. Just compare the
| versions of Nintendo wikis in the Nintendo Independent Wiki
| Alliance and their Fandom equivalents for example, and the
| quality difference is like night and day.
|
| Same goes with just about every wiki that has a counterpart
| that's not on Fandom.
| jagermo wrote:
| agreed. the good thing is, it teaches a new generation why
| adblockers are great.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| In a nutshell
|
| 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)
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Love the UESP, probably my favorite wiki.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| UESP is amazing, and is a great example of what the non-
| fandom wikis are trying to be
| eviks wrote:
| A big blocking modal with "Privacy Notice We & our 726
| technology partners ask you to consent"?
| fenomas wrote:
| Just a week or two ago my chrome plugins got temporarily
| disabled for some reason, and I didn't notice for a day or
| two... until I happened to check a fandom wiki. Then for about
| five seconds I thought I'd somehow installed All The Viruses.
|
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| > I'd somehow installed All The Viruses
|
| maybe at that moment, you did.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I have blocked the domain on my browser; this helps with
| mindless clicking on fandom sites appearing on top of Google
| searches while the communities have moved on to other wikis.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Fandom is perfectly usable with adblockers and the "Cleaner
| Fandom" userscript. But only with those extensions!
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| I just disable javascript and googletagmanager and don't see
| any ads. The good moment is that Fandom shows static content
| as opposed to an average web 2.0 SPA.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I don't use it out of principle.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Google giving Fandom powerful rankings bothers me too, since
| their intrusive ads clearly go against Google ranking factors.
|
| 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?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement
| abound wrote:
| Theoretically, you can't pay for placement on Google without
| it being labelled an ad.
|
| Practically, you can pay SEO experts to help you keep your
| rankings up.
| niam wrote:
| If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense
| to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search
| rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to
| not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.
| rightbyte wrote:
| How so? Fandom seems to have Google ads. We wouldn't be
| able to prove if Google ranked sites with their ads higher.
| Google's search ranking is black box. Edit: I guess at
| great effort you could scrape thousands of sites, not if
| they remove or add Google ads, and track their rating.
|
| I think it is a better assumption to make, that Google puts
| their profit above luser experience, when it comes to
| search ranking.
| niam wrote:
| > We wouldn't be able to prove if Google ranked sites
| with their ads higher
|
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ok sure I might have misunderstood you. I agree that
| Fandom is most likely not writing checks or paying
| directly in other means to Google for increased search
| rank.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| The black box leaked recently.
|
| https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-
| thousa...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| They don't need to. Fandom benefits from being an old and
| popular site. Google manually adjusts their ranking to
| prioritize such sites, because they think those sites are
| what the "average" searcher expects to see come up when they
| search certain topics.
|
| Essentially, Google fears that the average searcher will
| think Google is broken if certain popular sites don't come up
| in their results.
| starkparker wrote:
| > However, even after browsing their site, is contacting them
| the only way to get something up and running?
|
| 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]
|
| 1: https://weirdgloop.org/contact
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Super confusing as to why not? How else would they achieve
| their goal.
| paradox460 wrote:
| One of the first sites I downrank in kagi is all the fandom
| sites. I don't outright ban them, sometimes they're all there
| is, but I try and make it so any other result shows up ahead of
| them
| Nadya wrote:
| Crazy seeing a weird gloop post in the morning on HN.
|
| 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.
| mdiesel wrote:
| There's also a channel on the rs wiki's discord for reporting
| bad ads, which Cook responds to very quickly (single digit
| minutes from the interactions I've seen).
| card_zero wrote:
| If they're non-tracking ads (related to the content of the
| wiki, instead of the content of the visitor), I could almost
| _like_ them.
| dcow wrote:
| The Runescape wiki is simply amazing. It's one of the most well
| built fit for purpose pieces of quality software+content that I
| have ever come across. It's clean and crisp visually and well
| organized at the IA level despite being exactly the type of
| content problem that resists such attempts by nature. What a
| solid community. The software doesn't fell clunky, it's fast and
| responsive and still feels modern. I can only assume that's a
| testament to the quality of mediawiki. I'm glad that it's getting
| the attention it deserves.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > I can only assume that's a testament to the quality of
| mediawiki.
|
| 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.
| Nadya wrote:
| Try editing anything on a Fandom wiki and that's where the
| real differences in experience comes from.
|
| Fandom makes it extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to do
| something as simple as access the page of an image asset.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Woof. Yeah, you're right. That was not great.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Fandom runs on media wiki too.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Factorio and Rimworld have amazing wikis as well. And they're
| both maintained by the developers AFAIK...
| bombcar wrote:
| The Dwarf Fortress wiki https://dwarffortresswiki.org is
| perhaps the most impressive I've seen, as it maintains
| namespaces to maintain (and update!) information about
| particular versions, because many players end up staying on a
| version for various reasons.
| munificent wrote:
| I wish the Minecraft wiki did that. I don't tend to play
| the latest version because I feel like it got overly
| complex and I get analysis paralysis if I play the latest
| version.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Tell me about it; playing GregTech:New Horizons and
| trying to figure out _vanilla_ mechanics related to
| 1.7.10 is annoying. All the GTNH specific stuff is on
| their wiki, but vanilla mechanics are just assumed.
| sph wrote:
| The good ol' Mediawiki look of the DF wiki reminds me of
| the underrated, and oft maligned Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
| wiki: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Crawl_Wiki
| csmcg wrote:
| I haven't played DCSS regularly since probably v0.24 or
| v0.25, so things may have changed - but if I recall
| correctly, it was not kept up to date very well,
| character guides are flat-out wrong, etc...
| kibwen wrote:
| One of the Crawl design philosophies is that it should be
| possible to play without needing to consult a wiki. E.g.
| inspecting a monster shows you its spells and their
| damage ranges, there's a searchable in-game encyclopedia
| of all items/spells/monsters/etc., there's an extensive
| in-game manual with things like species skill aptitudes,
| examining an item tells you exactly what skill level you
| need to use it optimally, and so on. There's plenty of
| useful stuff on the wiki, but it's not a priority to
| update because it's not entirely necessary.
| wpietri wrote:
| Could you say a bit more about that? Normally I think "have
| to support people stuck on old versions" is something that
| happens when you're selling enterprise software to
| insurance companies. This is the first I've heard of it in
| games.
| Tomte wrote:
| Players comfortable with the ASCII graphics version (the
| one that existed for years) often just paid for Steam
| release with pretty graphics just to support the
| brothers. And then kept playing the "hardcore" version
| they are used to.
| bombcar wrote:
| As mentioned, some versions of the game introduce
| breaking _concepts_ that earlier players may not want to
| deal with (either because it breaks save compatibility,
| or they don 't like the mechanic, etc).
|
| 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://dwarffortresswi
| ki.org/index.php/Release_information
| gazook89 wrote:
| DF had a massive update probably a decade or more ago
| that changed the game from 2D to 3D (still represented as
| 2D z-levels though). With such a change, obviously some
| people would want to stick with the old version. There
| have been numerous large updates since then (the game has
| been in development for 22 years) and with each you get
| some people that just don't want to update, either
| because it might ruin their current games or they prefer
| to avoid new features etc.
|
| Another example is the various Dungeon and Dragons wikis
| that allow you to toggle between versions, since it has
| existed for 50 years now.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| On the Steam platform for instance there is an option
| (perhaps developer supported) to stay on a certain
| version of a game. For instance, in the game Mount and
| Blade: Bannerlord, players notoriously stay 2, 3, or even
| 10 versions behind in order to maintain compatibility
| with specific mods or sets of mods (10s or 100s of mods).
| Eventually, enough of the modders move to the next or
| latest version and the players gradually move with them.
|
| Games with "always on" or auto-updaters avoid this.
| theoldways wrote:
| This actually used to be the norm: you'd release slowly,
| and support old versions for years (which still isn't
| that long, all things considered). It wasn't until
| relatively recently that six months became some sort of
| unconscionable amount of time to support software,
| because it's friendlier to the companies and developers
| writing it, instead of the users using it.
| sph wrote:
| I have seen cookmeplox, one of the admins of the Runescape
| wiki, round these parts. Thank you for your work, as a gamer
| and new Runescape addict. For an MMORPG as massive as OSRS,
| having a good wiki is crucial and probably the reason why it's
| seen a resurgence over the past few years.
| cookmeplox wrote:
| That's me! I also wrote the blog :)
| cyrnel wrote:
| It's more a testament to the devs. I kept up with the RuneScape
| wiki Discord server for a bit and there were flamegraphs flying
| left and right. You can see some of there recent performance
| improvements here:
| https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-06-...
|
| 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
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| I'm one of the folks whose fans go wild. Are they running crypto?
| gsck wrote:
| Dont give them any ideas
| burkaman wrote:
| If you're wondering what happened to Fandom, just look at who
| runs it now.
|
| > 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.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| Can we stop it with the "bad apples CEO" thing. These guys are
| doing what any for-profit enterprise would do. They're not
| exceptions. Theyre the norm.
|
| 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.
| yakz wrote:
| They are objectively bad for some definitions of bad. What do
| you want for them? Universal respect? Just because taking
| something good and making it shitty is one way to make money
| doesn't mean that it is the only way to make money.
| rideontime wrote:
| I think the point is that if we want this to stop
| happening, we have to address the cause of the problem, not
| just complain about its effects.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| to put a finer point on it: capitalism.
|
| "then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a
| systemic issue.
| chongli wrote:
| _to put a finer point on it: capitalism._
|
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I'm assuming parent-poster means "publicly-traded
| corporations with limited-liability and low friction on
| transfers of ownership."
|
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| But the cause isn't simply being for-profit. There are
| plenty of for-profit enterprises which make good
| products.
|
| If I were to propose a cause, it would be the
| normalization of internet stuff being "free".
| Kiro wrote:
| And yet, when YouTube cracks down on adblockers, people
| on here get outraged instead of just paying for Premium.
| Everyone keeps saying "just let me pay" but when the
| option exists, it seems like most still avoid it and
| stick to complaining.
| layman51 wrote:
| I read that in their battle with adblockers, the YouTube
| team seems to have broken Premium at least once. I think
| they were accidentally showing banner ads to Premium
| users.[1] It seems kind of odd, but wouldn't your money
| be better off being spent on helping the ad-blocking
| effort rather than paying websites that seem to offer a
| gradually worse experience for everyone who isn't
| blocking ads?
|
| [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_
| have_you...
| Kiro wrote:
| Yes, that's certainly an odd argument. Why would I do
| that when I'm happy with the service I'm paying for?
| Especially when it's the best way to support the creators
| I enjoy, since they get a much bigger share of revenue
| from Premium views than regular views.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I don't trust or like the company. I expect them to drive
| up the premium price in the future, make it inconvenient
| to use multiple devices, etc. so I'd much rather steal
| their stuff.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| This person is trying to clarify that the problem isn't
| specific to Fandom, it is a general problem with our system
| of capitalism and will never go away until we change our
| system of economic incentives.
|
| 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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Can we stop this capitalism boogeyman thing? Market
| economies don't force people to conduct business this
| way. We've had our current system for a long time and
| while corporate raiding has always existed the current
| epidemic is very recent. Its the result of a complex
| confluence of market, legal, regulatory and competitive
| forces that make it an ideal move for many businesses.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Fandom is unusually bad even in a sea of bad ad-laden
| websites.
| anthonymartinez wrote:
| I'm with you for the most part but we definitely need to hold
| PE and the Ticketmasters of the world more accountable-
| there's no escaping modern capitalism but better markets are
| definitely possible.
| burkaman wrote:
| Yes, when I said "what happened" I was referring to how
| quickly the site changed for the worse and how extreme the
| decline was, not just the fact that it has ads. Most sites
| do follow the pattern described in the parent because they
| can't escape the need to make money, the transition is
| usually very gradual and they often stop at the point of
| sustainability, rather than pushing to the absolute maximum
| of short-term audience-destroying profit.
|
| @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.
| thoma4s wrote:
| Very happy to see the downfall of fandom, on mobile there are
| times when the whole screen is covered by multiple ads, not to
| mention the lag...
| nness wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how does weirdgloop pay for wiki hosting? The
| amount of traffic certainly wouldn't be low... what is stopping
| them from having to abandon these wikis in the future due to cost
| pressure?
| onei wrote:
| There's a recent rough breakdown of costs and funding in [1].
| In short, most funding is from ads. I don't think that takes
| into account funding for the newer Minecraft or LoL wikis, but
| it'll either be funded by ads or the game devs.
|
| [1]:
| https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Board_Meeting_-_2024-03-...
| erikig wrote:
| With so many communities interacting on Discord, and given that
| platform's ephemeral nature, I'd recommend having a module that
| can summarize highlighted chats and import or append them into
| the wiki as a stub that needs expansion.
|
| Most of the updates I've made on Fandom were of this nature.
| citricsquid wrote:
| As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki
| ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird
| Gloop (and similar) are achieving. At the time of selling out,
| the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of
| dollars per month to run and so it didn't feel too much like
| selling out, because we _needed_ money to survive[1]. 15 years
| later, the internet is a different place, and with the
| availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much
| more cost effective.
|
| 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.
| jagermo wrote:
| holy crap that minecraft wiki is fast now. I actually stopped
| going to fandom because it was so slow.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Thanks(seriously). Fandom may not be great, but you could have
| said I don't want to foot the bill, turned off the servers and
| walked away. Then the community would have lost every thing.
| Leaving it with Fandom gave Weird Gloop something to start with
| instead starting from scratch.
| beAbU wrote:
| I can't imagine that this would have happened, like ever. The
| wiki was basically essential reading prior to starting to
| play Minecraft, especially in the early days. I think most
| the crafting recipes were documented by the developers
| themselves during those days.
|
| If they killed the wiki, they would have killed their
| userbase.
| lolinder wrote:
| citricsquid wasn't a Mojang employee. This whole thing is
| and always has been community-run [0], so the "they" in "if
| they killed the wiki" is not the same as the "they" that
| was selling Minecraft.
|
| Now, one could fairly asked 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.
|
| [0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)
| preciousoo wrote:
| You and your team made(a good portion of) my childhood. I
| remember spending nights studying all the potion recipes and
| enchantment odds. Thanks for all you did
| oreally wrote:
| > with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic
| websites is much more cost effective.
|
| sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective?
| wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple
| vps?
| Ambroos wrote:
| If you can run your application on Cloudflare Pages / Workers
| with Cloudflare's storage/DB things, it really gets dirt
| cheap (if not free) and very fast. And even without that,
| Cloudflare's caching CDN is very good, very cheap and very
| easy.
| bombcar wrote:
| Ten years ago bandwidth was expensive. Still is, even if not
| as much. A simple VPS gets overwhelmed, but a simple VPS
| behind cloudflare can do quite well.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| s/cloudflare/a CDN/
| citricsquid wrote:
| More than a decade has passed since then so I am stretching
| my memory. At peak we were serving in the region of 10
| million page views per day which made us one of the most
| popular websites on the internet (Minecraft was a phenomenon
| and every Minecraft player needed the wiki). We were probably
| the highest traffic Wiki after Wikipedia. Nowadays Cloudflare
| could absorb most traffic because of the highly cacheable
| nature of it, but at the time, Cloudflare didn't exist, and
| every request hit our servers.
| owyn wrote:
| Yeah, Wikia in aggregate was in the top 50, maybe a top 20
| site at various points. Wikia was built on caching. From my
| memory, about 99% of page views hit some kind of cache. If
| that dropped down to 97%, servers started to suffer. It's
| good to remember that the Fastly CDN company is a spinoff
| of Wikia, it was developed internally there first. Without
| that (varnish cache plus lots of memcache) Wikia would not
| have been able to handle the traffic. Mediawiki is horribly
| inefficient and one reason why Wikia was attractive as a
| host was that we had figured out a bunch of tricks to run
| it efficiently. The default configuration of
| mediawiki/wikipedia is real bad. Bigger independent wikis
| just couldn't handle the scale and many of the best
| independent wikis moved there for that reason. Just as one
| example, every link/url on a page hits a hook/callback that
| can call into an extension literally anywhere in the code
| base, which was several million lines of PHP code. I
| remember the "Batman" page on the DC wiki used to take
| several minutes to render a new copy if it fell out of the
| cache. That was one page I used for performance
| optimization tests. The muppet wiki and the lyrics wiki
| also had huge performance issues and fixing them was some
| of the most fun engineering work I've done. Every useful
| feature had some kind of horrible performance side effect,
| so it was always a fun puzzle. I also hate landing on a
| Fandom wiki now but thanks to the actual editors, it's
| still got some good content.
| immibis wrote:
| How much of your server load was Grand Exchange Market
| Watch?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually
| be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it
| yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!
| diggan wrote:
| > Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth.
|
| 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.
| KomoD wrote:
| You don't need to pay anything to run TBs through
| Cloudflare, you could use the free plan.
|
| Rent VPS or managed hosting or host wherever you want,
| proxy it with Cloudflare on the free plan, Cloudflare
| caches it.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's more like: if you have a website that (sometimes)
| gets a lot of traffic, do you want Cloudflare to cache it
| and serve it with very few hits to your cheap server, or
| do you want your compute costs to expand to cope with the
| requests?
| rjmunro wrote:
| Cloudflare don't charge per GB/TB. You get unlimited
| bandwidth even on their free plan. The problem with
| paying per GB is that it's in the CDN's interest for you
| to get a DDOS attack so they can charge you for all the
| bandwidth. It's in Cloudflare's interest to reduce DDOS
| attacks and unwanted bot traffic because it costs them
| bandwidth, not you.
| wpietri wrote:
| Your point on interest is spot on.
|
| 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
| Aachen wrote:
| > it's in the CDN's interest for you to get a DDOS
|
| What kind of conspiracy is this? As if anyone charging
| for bandwidth hopes to get their infrastructure attacked
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Why not? They have the capacity they could absorb nearly
| any kind of attack without blinking.
| ezrast wrote:
| The whole point of systemic incentives is that there is
| no conspiracy. Nobody wants a DDOS and every large
| provider will have people genuinely working to avoid
| them. But every time there is an opportunity to allocate
| resources, the team that gets to frame their return on
| investment in terms of real dollars will always have an
| edge over one whose value is realized only in murky
| customer satisfaction projections. Over the lifetime of a
| company, the impact of these decisions will add up with
| no need for any of the individuals involved to even be
| aware of the dynamic, much less conspire to perpetuate
| it.
| account42 wrote:
| Perhaps, but VPS traffic prices are also already a lot
| better than "big cloud" traffic prices, especially if you
| choose your VPS provider with that in mind. And once your
| traffic is large enough there are also options where you
| pay for a fixed pipe instead of a transfer amount.
| pornel wrote:
| Cloudflare caches pages at many many datacenters, often
| colocated with large ISPs.
|
| 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s,
| back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more
| appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the
| reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the
| early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today,
| it isn't.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce
| about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night
| trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or
| whatever - all the information you could ever need, right
| there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much
| on the modern net.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| It's funny that people are now looking back at wikia fondly
| because at the time most folks thought it was full of ads
| and shit. To the point where Curse/Gamepedia managed to get
| serious market share by not screwing with the community in
| the same way at the time.
|
| Funny how they somehow managed to make it worse.
| hinkley wrote:
| How did Curse end up making money?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Lots of ads across their wiki and other community
| websites and D&D Beyond was remarkably successful.
| yifanl wrote:
| I assume they didn't, which is why they were bought by
| Twitch.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great
| value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to
| other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from
| businesses too.
|
| Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| cookmeplox wrote:
| We're already turning a profit! And there are no third-
| party investors (or debt) - it's all controlled by wiki
| people[1]
|
| [1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited
| diggan wrote:
| Aw, I take that as it is in fact a for-profit company
| already.
|
| Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not
| go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.
| cinntaile wrote:
| If it started that way, I'd say it's less likely to end
| up "bad". Compared to non-profit websites that get sold
| to ad businesses.
| robotnikman wrote:
| At least it is a private company though, meaning they are
| are required to make constant year over year gains for
| shareholders and investors. They have much more control
| over where the company goes and how it operates.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| publicly traded companies are not "required" to make
| constant year over year gains for shareholders and
| investors, that is just what the owners usually decide to
| tell the company to do. The owners of a privately traded
| company could decide to, and the owners of a publicly
| traded company could decide not to. For example,
| 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 pretty much
| the same situation that people imagine is the case with
| privately traded companies, even though facebook is
| obviously publicly traded.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| "that is just what the owners usually decide to tell the
| company to do"
|
| 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.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Elon Musk is another CEO in total control. Although Tesla
| is a public company and therefore has a board, it's
| stacked with Elon's allies/appointees and answers to him,
| not the other way around. Despite Elon not being a
| majority owner of Tesla stock.
|
| And when he took over Twitter in 2022, he immediately
| dissolved the board and fired the executives who were on
| it.
| basicallybones wrote:
| This is not totally accurate. For reference, here is the
| Wikipedia entry for Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919) (copy
| and pasted at bottom).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
|
| 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.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| Shouldn't it be worrying that companies are required to
| make consistent gains* for shareholders and investors? At
| some point, a company will naturally reach a market
| saturation point.
|
| * ETA: I meant "growth" here, not profit
| lupire wrote:
| If it can't generate profit, it's worth more liquidated
| than operating.
|
| Employees should buy out investors if they want to keep
| operating for their own personal profit.
| xp84 wrote:
| >If it can't generate 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.
| sph wrote:
| s/are/aren't/ required to make constant profit
| adw wrote:
| It's a company limited by guarantee, which is the
| structure you use in the UK for non-charity non-profits.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| How is it making money?
| cookmeplox wrote:
| We have services agreements with the League of Legends
| and RuneScape developers, and we run 1 ad (below-the-
| fold, not in EU/UK) on the RuneScape wikis. This covers
| all expenses (including 5 staff) by a pretty healthy
| margin
| hiatus wrote:
| It is described in the linked article.
|
| > 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I didn't see anything in the article about setting up
| incentives to keep the same thing from happening to Weird
| Gloop that happened to Fandom, which means the blog post
| is just empty marketing.
|
| 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.
| 35skill wrote:
| Did you read the post? There's a whole section talking
| about how they are entering into binding agreements that
| let communities leave (and take the domain) if they have
| a better option
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Can we flip it? Some companies are explicitly structured
| to guarantee enshittification.
|
| 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?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are millions of websites like that. They don't show
| up on the first page of search results, so nobody finds
| them.
| godshatter wrote:
| Mainly because our biggest search engine is owned by an
| ad agency.
| zellyn wrote:
| The article explicitly covers this question. Looks like
| they're setting up explicit legal(?) agreements. One key
| point is the domain name: minecraft.wiki, for example, not
| a subdomain of something owned by Weird Gloop. So the wiki
| can leave if it wants to.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| Does that mean that to the users of these wikis, the
| switching costs[1] of the backend would basically be zero
| (one day they might just end up on a different server
| with the same content), while on the administrators' side
| the switching costs are at a reasonable minimum?
|
| [1] a variable in whether something _can_ be
| enshittified, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittif
| ication#History_and_d...
| Nadya wrote:
| To my understanding wikis can take all their data, host
| it themselves, point the domain to their new hosting, and
| the move would be entirely invisible to end users if done
| properly and the quality of the hosting infrastructure
| wasn't considerably worse.
|
| 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.minec
| raft.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.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| This is very reassuring. Usually, I assume agreements
| between different groups will inordinately benefit one
| party, but this particular agreement sounds like it
| creates a more level playing field.
|
| And besides, it's not like non-profits are exempt from
| restructuring and becoming worse. There is no silver
| bullet.
| cookmeplox wrote:
| Yeah - it would be on the same domain, so way users
| access it wouldn't change at all.
|
| 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.
| treflop wrote:
| I find this tends to happen when something passes on from
| its creator to someone else. Wikia/Fandom has passed hands
| a bit.
|
| Other people just have very different values and the
| direction of an organization reflects this.
| jchw wrote:
| In all fairness, running modest to large MediaWiki instances
| isn't easy. There's a lot of things that are not immediately
| obvious:
|
| - 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...
| account42 wrote:
| A lot of things should be solved by having (micro)caching in
| front of your wiki. Almost all non-logged in requests
| shouldn't even be hitting PHP at all.
| jchw wrote:
| In my experience this hasn't been necessary yet on anything
| I've ran. I know WMF wikis run Varnish or something, but
| personally I'm trying to keep costs and complexity minimal.
| To that end, more caching isn't always desirable, because
| RAM is especially premium on low-end boxen. When tuned
| well, read-only requests on MediaWiki are not a huge
| problem. The _real_ issue is actually just keeping the FPM
| worker pool from getting starved, but when it is starved,
| it 's not because of read-only requests, but usually
| because of database contention preventing requests from
| finishing. (And to that end, enabling application-level
| caching usually will help a lot here, since it can save
| having to hit the DB at all.) PHP itself is plenty fast
| enough to serve a decent number of requests per second on a
| low end box. I won't put a number on it since it is
| obviously significantly workload-dependent but it would
| suffice to say that my concerns with optimizing PHP
| software usually tilt towards memory usage and database
| performance rather than the actual speed of PHP. (Which, in
| my experience, has also improved quite a lot just by virtue
| of PHP itself improving. I think the JIT work has great
| potential to push it further, too.)
|
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| Varnish caching really only helps if the majority of your
| traffic is logged out requests. Its the sort of thing
| that is really useful at a high scale but matters much
| less at a low scale.
|
| 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)
| jchw wrote:
| Most of MediaWiki seems to avoid too much trouble with
| contention in the database, but I was seeing it prior to
| enabling application-level caching. It seemed to be a
| combination of factors primarily driven by expensive
| tasks in the background. Particularly complex pages can
| cause some of those background tasks to become rather
| explosive.
| noen wrote:
| This is so true.
|
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| Microsoft did open source a bunch of their mediawiki
| extensions. https://github.com/microsoft/mediawiki-
| extensions
|
| Last i heard though they were moving off it.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Have any of Intels server offerings been "premium" since epyc
| hit the scene?
|
| I just assumed they were still there based on momentum.
| jchw wrote:
| With Digital Ocean the cpuinfo is obfuscated so figuring
| out exactly what you're running on requires a bit more
| trickery. With that said I honestly assume that the
| comparison is somewhat older AMD against even older Intel,
| so it's probably not a great representation of how the
| battlefield has evolved.
|
| 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.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for
| _attempting to read a web page_.
| theamk wrote:
| Cloudflare dropped captchas back in 2022 [0], now it's just a
| checkbox that you check and it lets you it (or does not).
|
| 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!
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007370
| eviks wrote:
| but there are more user-friendly captchas than the
| hydrants, which on average could be better that a total
| block on the tablets?
| theamk wrote:
| total block on _old_ tablets - Android 4.4 specifically,
| and I am sure many people on HN would be horrified to see
| those anywhere close to internet. New tablets are fine.
|
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| The checkboxes are also captchas.
| kbolino wrote:
| Even better, you can get a captcha before you're allowed to
| see 404 Not Found.
| whstl wrote:
| At least they moved away from Google Captchas, which really
| hates disabling of 3rd party cookies and other privacy-
| protection measures.
|
| 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 :(
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Ironically its now easier for robots to solve Google
| Captchas than it is for humans, as evident by the browser
| extensions that solve them that exists.
| palunon wrote:
| AFAIK most of those just pay a human in a low income
| country.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I used to have a lot of bot spam, but then I mostly
| foiled them with the world's silliest captcha. Looks like
| a math problem, but the solution isn't what's required to
| proceed.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| That's up to the site owner.
|
| 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.
| treefarmer wrote:
| And god forbid you use a VPN and try to do anything on a
| Cloudflare site
| Svip wrote:
| I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere
| with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do
| a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed
| like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we
| said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still
| host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years.
|
| 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.
| Svip wrote:
| A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am
| considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am
| able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And
| with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick
| in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place,
| because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps
| the spam down, yes, but also new users away.
|
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| What kind of costs are associated with something like this,
| and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering
| what kind of infrastructure you need.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The Infosphere has always been one of the best fan wikis out
| there, thank you for your hard work (and for not selling out
| to Fandom)
| echelon wrote:
| Their growth people emailed me again and again and tried to
| do the same with StrategyWiki decades ago.
|
| 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 :-)
| Arch-TK wrote:
| You say you were a kid when you sold it. I could have sworn you
| weren't from conversations we had on IRC at the time.
|
| Although I most assuredly was a kid.
| fwip wrote:
| "Kid" doesn't really have a hard cutoff. When you're 15,
| 12-year-olds are kids. When you're 30, 20-year-olds are kids.
| citricsquid wrote:
| I was a teenager at the time. I'm in my mid 30s now, it feels
| like I was a kid back then.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Tens of thousands to run a static webpage? LUL
| misode wrote:
| The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage
| tredre3 wrote:
| Mediawiki is trivial to cache, though. For all intent and
| purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static"
| content.
|
| 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.
| nemothekid wrote:
| Seriously? How does that even make sense to you? The OP
| had an asset generation 10k+ a month in profit and was so
| squeezed for cash he had to sell it.
|
| 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?
| citricsquid wrote:
| I could have the numbers wrong, archive.org is down
| otherwise I would check as we shared information publicly
| at the time. As far as I recall, we weren't taking money
| from the websites, we were spending on infrastructure
| alone with more than $10k in spend in the final month
| before the sites were acquired. I think it is easy to
| forget how much more expensive running things on the
| internet was back then along with the unprecedented
| popularity of Minecraft. Once archive.org is back online,
| I'll track down numbers.
| bawolff wrote:
| Not everyone is a professional web hoster with requisite
| knowledge on how to setup caching properly.
|
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I have no idea how it works, but given that the read:write
| ratio is probably 100:1 or more, certainly it could just
| serve static, prerendered pages straight from the
| filesystem or something like memcached?
| bawolff wrote:
| [Im a mediawiki dev]. Typically people use varnish for
| that use case. MediaWiki does support serving logged out
| views from a filesystem cache, but varnish is generally a
| better idea. There are also some caches out of memcached
| (mediawiki has "parser cache" in memcached which is the
| part of the page that stays constant between all users.
| Typically people use varnish on top of that for the
| entire page for logged out users)
|
| Sometimes people add things to their sites that are
| incompatible with caching, which will make hosting costs
| go way up.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Thanks!
| why_at wrote:
| One thing I find interesting about playing video games in
| modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is
| assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game.
| Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers
| sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the
| game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
|
| 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.
| christianqchung wrote:
| I don't really know how exploratory most games are compared
| to old Minecraft. Some games like Stardew Valley have certain
| things that are much easier to do because of third party
| wikis but I don't think the same is true of a lot of games in
| the same way it was for Minecraft.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I picked up Stardew Valley a few months ago for the first
| time, and consciously chose not to use the wiki. I'm
| obviously way behind where I would be had I used the wiki,
| but it's been fun figuring out what works by myself.
|
| One game I recently got which has great exploratory
| potential is Shapez 2. The in-game help is _amazing_.
| mhink wrote:
| > One thing I find interesting about playing video games in
| modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is
| assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game.
| Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers
| sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the
| game at all because they don't have the person-hours for 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.
| Nux wrote:
| > At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft
| Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run.
|
| What kind of decisions got you in that position? Hard to
| phatom.
| Washuu wrote:
| Hey Criticsquid!~ \\(-) -*\\)) It's Azxiana[1].
|
| 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. "(>=V<=*)o
| hinkley wrote:
| One of the things on my todo list is to spend some solid time
| thinking about load-shedding, and in particular tools and
| methods for small or hobbyist projects to practice it. Like
| what do you turn off on the site when it's the 15th of the
| month and you're already at 80% of your SaaS budget?
|
| 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?
| jdoss wrote:
| I play a lot of Path of Exile and one of the best quality of life
| improvements I did this summer was adding the Fandom Path of
| Exile wiki URL to my Kagi deny list so it never shows up in
| search. The official one that is maintained and kept up to date
| by the game developer poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki was
| always third or forth on my searches.
| xnorswap wrote:
| Yes, despite the poewiki migration being a fairly long time ago
| now, the fandom wiki still ranks frustratingly highly. The data
| on it is of course now very outdated and causes confusion for
| new players.
|
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| Why can't they replace the old pages with a link to the new
| page? Or otherwise remove the contents from the old site?
| yifanl wrote:
| Usually attempts to advertise migration efforts on high
| visibility wikis away from Fandom will be deleted by Fandom
| staff.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And they will remove rights from wiki admins who take
| steps to advertise alternate resources.
| xnorswap wrote:
| That's considered vandalism of fandom, and probably rightly
| so.
|
| 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. ;)
| cubefox wrote:
| I mean the Wikipedia content arguably belongs more to the
| Wikipedia community than to the Wikimedia Foundation...
| Of course it is hardly possible to gain the approval of a
| majority of editors.
|
| > 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)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3so7xdZHKxw
| jjmarr wrote:
| it already belongs to the Wikipedia community, but it's
| licensed under a copyleft licence. Ditto for Wikia.
| Anyone can fork it if they give proper attribution.
| cubefox wrote:
| Good point
| xcode42 wrote:
| By the way, you can replace the fandom in the url with breezewiki
| and get a much more pleasant experience without ads. it's not
| that much of a difference on desktop, and the layout might
| debatably be uglier, but it's a godsend on mobile where the
| search bar doesn't even work half the time for me.
| layer8 wrote:
| Does anyone know of an iOS Safari extension that allows to
| freely configure such substitutions?
| paranoidxprod wrote:
| A few years ago, Path of Exile migrated from the fandom to a new
| site. GGG (Path of Exile's company) even decided to host the new
| wiki on their servers (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-
| thread/3292958)! At this point, the new wiki ranks higher then
| the old one, but for a time it was an issue. Interesting to see
| more cases of games wikis leaving Fandom with how horrible the
| site is, and hopefully this is just the beginning of a trend.
| ykonstant wrote:
| Fandom PoE still pollutes the top of Google searches :(
| paranoidxprod wrote:
| Just tested a bunch and it seems like `path of exile
| [skill/currency]` usually ranks the Fandom higher while `poe
| [skill/currency]` ranks the new wiki higher which is why I
| never noticed (I actually never noticed because I block the
| PoE Fandom and pin the new wiki on Kagi)
| ykonstant wrote:
| That's good info.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| There is an extension which automatically redirects you from
| Fandom to the new wiki. While that's convenient it probably
| helps Fandom stay near the top.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| It does, if you're clicking on those fandom links and not
| subsequently providing any negative signals back to Google
| it'll assume that's where you wanted to go.
|
| It was and remains a worthwhile trade-off to ensure folks
| got to the right wiki though.
| entrox wrote:
| Consider switching to Kagi with its feature to personalize
| your results by biasing certain domains.
|
| I've configured it to lower results from *.fandom.com and am
| really happy about it.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| And we just launched the wiki for PoE2 which GGG are hosting
| for the community.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I'm happy that people are creating alternatives, but personally I
| never had a problem with Fandom.
|
| 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.
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| Most of the platforms you mention _are_ "replacements" which
| have "won" over a long term--Google unseated AltaVista and
| Yahoo!, Reddit outlived Digg and SlashDot, and microblogging
| like Twitter started as blogs. And of course, Fandom "replaced"
| other, less bad wiki farms by virtue of buying them.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| But I don't personally remember any of that happening. I
| wasn't using Reddit when Digg was still around, just like I
| didn't join Facebook when MySpace was still relevant. The
| first time I used Yahoo! was after its search engine because
| Bing with a different label.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Fextralife Wikis are an alternative:
|
| 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.
| kimbernator wrote:
| It's not fresh in my memory, but I recall being extremely
| annoyed at the Elden Ring wiki around the release of the game;
| not for lack of being filled out, but the site was just not fun
| to use.
|
| Truth be told, it appears that Weird Gloop/mediawiki has a bit
| of a monopoly on wiki platforms that don't suck.
| sigh_again wrote:
| fextralife has the exact same behavior as Fandom: autoplaying
| their Twitch streams to farm views and displaying ads, at times
| hiding it in invisible iframes, or making it so small you can't
| find it, leading to Twitch making rules against embedding
| autoplays, ads everywhere, shitty AI generated stubs for half
| the articles, botting and automatically piling on criticism,
| and fundamentally, it's just plain wrong, everywhere.
|
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| I loved the Dark Souls wikidot. Sad to see the Elden Ring
| "official" wiki is the Fextralife one.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| On a scale of 0 - Good, I would score my _overall_ experience
| with fextralife as "not great", especially when viewing it
| on my phone. I don't know the history and controversies re:
| other sites, I only started reading fextra wikis in 2022/23.
|
| 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.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Is darksouls.wikidot.com not the initial Dark Souls wikidot
| page? Was there something else that was closed down?
| delecti wrote:
| Every page has a live chat and video stream. The content tends
| to be better, but it's not mechanically much better than
| Fandom.
|
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Everyone complains about Fandom, but it's the only reason 99% of
| the communities on its site have a wiki.
|
| 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.
| teddyh wrote:
| If there actuallt _exists_ a community, they can scare up
| somebody to host some infrastructure the community depends on.
| Otherwise the community is dead, and it's archive.org you
| should be thanking.
| layer8 wrote:
| Archive.org is awfully slow, and more importantly, the
| archived pages are not indexed by Google, hence aren't
| discoverable.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| They can, but they didn't 99% of the time.
|
| 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.
| Ukv wrote:
| WeirdGloop is supposedly profitable despite having only a
| single, non-intrusive banner ad. It's perfectly possible to run
| forums/wikis/etc. on even just the free tier of
| Cloudflare/Oracle OCI.
|
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| For the RuneScape wiki at least, they seem to have a paid
| agreement with jagex to maintain the wiki. Which makes a lot
| of sense, the game devs probably want to have a good wiki for
| their own game (especially for a game like RuneScape). Not
| sure if that's the case for the other wikis they host,
| though.
| dianliang233 wrote:
| That is correct. However the jagex funding is not really
| enough[1] so they added ads. The League wiki seems to be
| also under this model, but I suppose they got a better
| deal. The Minecraft Wiki doesn't have any ads at all, and
| it's just been feeding off by the runescape wikis.
|
| [1]: https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Funding_the_wikis
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Woah, I didn't know that what jagex has paid for
| basically only covers the infrastructure. It's crazy
| considering how central the wiki is (because the game is
| very far from "self documenting"). Thanks for the info!
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active games
| and communities in the world. 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.
|
| 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.
| Ukv wrote:
| > WeirdGloop also runs wikis for the biggest, most active
| games and communities in the world
|
| 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.
| rifty wrote:
| I think with Fandom similar with Reddit, or Twitch, most people
| focus on the interface experience as sole advantage of the
| platform, and miss how they provide an accessible space to
| incubate new communities. You get low barrier to entry hosting,
| operation tools, and network exposure.
| kps wrote:
| There's a browser extension that provides links to Fandom
| alternatives on various topics:
| https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy
| for1nner wrote:
| It's hard running and managing wikis, and anyone/org/group that
| does so outside of the auspices of fandom or similar trash-
| aggregation hosts should be celebrated. Love this for weirdgloop.
| On a related note, shoutout to liquipedia[1], which has been a
| great experience for so long (a number of years I refuse to
| recognize as it would prove I'm old), and I have always feared
| the possibility of it moving to or becoming a fandom.
|
| [1]https://liquipedia.net/
| broodbucket wrote:
| Can't see it ever happening, it's obviously not a service
| driven by revenue. The Dota2 non-esports wiki recently migrated
| from Fandom to Liquipedia too
| duxup wrote:
| These are hosted by weirdgloop.org ... but as far as I can tell
| without a common known good domain it's hard to know if you're
| looking at a "good" wiki or "bad".
| sph wrote:
| I mean.. you can use your eyes to tell if it's a good wiki or
| not.
| duxup wrote:
| I feel like there's a lot of value when searching when you
| see a known good domain / would help unseat fandom a great
| deal.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| There is a browser extension called Indie Wiki Buddy that keeps
| track of who the best wiki for each game is. And for the ones
| that do insist on using fandom, it can redirect to breezewiki
| which is a lite and respectful rehoster.
|
| https://getindie.wiki/
| duxup wrote:
| Very cool, thank you.
| maverwa wrote:
| I'd say if you cannot tell what its hosted at, its "good". If
| it shouts "fandom" in your face, its "bad". Easy!
| card_zero wrote:
| Slightly ad hoc funding (which is probably sensible, spread it
| around):
|
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| Given that Jimmy Wales is president of Fandom, I don't know if
| that's a good idea for WMF to get involved.
| card_zero wrote:
| Ha! I didn't know that. I'm unclear on whether he actually
| has any influence at WMF or just serves as a fluffy mascot,
| but yeah, maybe not such a good idea.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| MediaWiki is actually pretty easy to set up on a web server,
| speaking as someone who's now done it twice. You plop the files
| into htdocs, make sure PHP is set up, set up vanity URLs _if you
| want to_ , and then... well, that's it. The final step is to go
| to the site, fill in the setup form, download the settings file
| it gives you and upload it. It doesn't even need an external
| database, it can use SQLite; if email setup is annoying, it
| doesn't even need that. And it's the most powerful and flexible
| wiki software out there: if there's something you want a wiki to
| do, MediaWiki can do it, but it also isn't too bloated out of the
| box, so you can just install plugins as and when you need them.
| Thoroughly recommend it.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Making MediaWiki survive non-trivial amounts of traffic is much
| harder than simply setting it up. It's not an impossible task
| for sure but there's no one click performance setting.
| starkparker wrote:
| Specifically, managing edge and object caches (and caching
| for anonymous viewers vs. logged-in editors with separate
| frontend and backend caches) while mitigating the effects of
| cache misses, minimizing the impacts of the job queue when
| many pages are changed at once, optimizing image storage,
| thumbnailing, and caching, figuring out when to use a
| wikitext template vs. a Scribunto/Lua module vs. a MediaWiki
| extension in PHP (and if Scribunto, which Lua runtime to
| use), figuring out which structured data backend to use and
| how to tune it, figuring out whether to rely on API bots
| (expensive on the backend) vs. cache scrapers (expensive on
| the frontend) vs. database dump bots (no cost to the live
| site but already outdated before they're finished dumping)
| for automated content maintenance jobs, tuning rate limiting,
| and loadbalancing it all.
|
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| Everything is hard at scale. You have to be pretty big
| scale before some of that stuff starts to matter (some of
| course matters at smaller scales)
| starkparker wrote:
| While that's not wrong, the wiki loop of frequent or
| constant, unpredictably cascading content updates, with
| or without auth and sometimes with a parallel structured
| data component + cache and job queue maintenance + image
| storage + database updates and maintenance becomes a
| significant burden relatively fast compared to a typical
| CMS.
| asl98 wrote:
| What are people's thoughts on putting wikis on web3
| infrastructure
| noman-land wrote:
| Do it. The costs shouldn't be borne by a single entity, they
| should be spread across the community of users. Onboarding and
| lag are two big hurdles to overcome, as you will inevitably
| have to put editing behind a transaction.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I love this post. I also LOVE wikis. I have railed against Fandom
| for years and I have often shared my view on this in the
| past[^1]. It's an absolute blight on so many beloved game
| communities at this point.
|
| 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...
| baud147258 wrote:
| I skimmed the post linked at [^1], but I have a doubt about
| that:
|
| > 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
| dcchambers wrote:
| You're right, that's incorrect on my part. Fandom (well,
| Wikia) was founded and run by Jimmy Wales for a long time,
| but there is no official connection with the Wikipedia
| project/Wikimedia foundation. I will fix that.
| bawolff wrote:
| They never had a stake at any point.
|
| 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.
| dcchambers wrote:
| To be fair I think you could argue we're actively
| witnessing a cautionary tale about one founder having large
| interests in both a nonprofit and a related for-profit
| company with the ongoing Wordpress.org/Automattic/WPEngine
| drama.
| bawolff wrote:
| Oh definitely. Its definitely a bad coi for soneone to
| control both.
|
| 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.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they
| changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the
| wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at
| their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned
| themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent
| a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be
| early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product
| development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the
| data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without
| needing to degrade the customer experience.
| rideontime wrote:
| I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is,
| but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...
| languagehacker wrote:
| Sure, but think about something as low stakes as, "Does such-
| and-such a character from my favorite TV show have any
| siblings" vs. "Is it safe to consume XYZ"
|
| 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.
| sushid wrote:
| Aren't those types of prompts the MOST likely to generate
| hallucinations?
| Sebguer wrote:
| Not in the contexts that the author is talking about,
| when you have the canonical answers in your data set and
| know roughly where to look for them.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's worth remembering that there was AI before generative
| AI, and there are applications of AI that don't produce slop,
| like knowledge graphs and natural language search. Some of
| that might be called just "machine learning" now.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like "AI" has mostly become a marketing term
| for generative large models. For the people doing the stuff
| that is often called "machine learning", I see two
| reactions. Those seeking hype will call it "AI" anyhow, and
| a bunch of those that don't are firmly sticking with
| "machine learning" to avoid the rising backlash.
|
| I'm very curious to hear how others are seeing the terms
| used, though.
| pwdisswordfishz wrote:
| Imagining?
|
| https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-
| to...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x.
| ..
| iamacyborg wrote:
| They tried this on a wiki and the community rightfully went
| and got their pitchforks out
| jezzamon wrote:
| A data moat of user provided wiki contents? The thing that this
| article is advocating for the users themselves to own over the
| hosting site??
|
| Somehow I don't think that is the solution.
| languagehacker wrote:
| The licensing on that stuff is complicated, and I haven't
| looked at it in a while. It does allow you to take your toys
| and leave, but for those that don't, it would be simple
| enough to prevent ethical AI scrapers from extracting that
| content. That's all I mean by data moat in this context.
| owyn wrote:
| Former Wikia engineer here too! I also thought there was a lot
| of potential there. We even invested in some RDF and structured
| data and NLP projects (second screen, sentiment analysis on
| comments for detecting flame wars, etc), but for various
| reasons they just didn't work out beyond hackathons and demos.
| I think there were a lot of well meaning engineers who wanted
| to make stuff like that work. Part of the problem is mediawiki
| itself. A page is literally just text using an awful hacked
| together xml parser and some regexes to emit HTML. It might
| look like a database sometimes when it is rendered (and there
| is Wikidata) but there is no actual structure to it, just a
| pile of templates made of other templates that people have to
| tediously wrangle by hand. That it eventually turns into some
| HTML that you can view is almost an accident.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Oh man, good to see you on here, dude!
|
| 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.
| Washuu wrote:
| Former Gamepedia/Wikia/Fandom engineer, I left not too long
| after Fandom bought out Gamepedia/Curse. You left at a good
| time. The upper management had no idea what they were doing and
| were entirely disinterested in the company. Talking with the
| CEO felt like talking with someone that had no idea what they
| were doing there.
| layer8 wrote:
| > I don't think we would ever do a "self-service" thing where you
| could just sign up and immediately make a wiki.
|
| 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.
| dianliang233 wrote:
| That would be Miraheze [1]. Community funded wiki farm. However
| it's had some instability such as internal conflict and server
| issues, but it's better than all the alternatives.
|
| [1]: https://miraheze.org/
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I found Wikia a great product name which evoked the feeling 'this
| topic may be too obscure for Wikipedia, but here you can make an
| entire Wiki about it!', and I never understood why it was changed
| to 'Fandom'
| zhobbs wrote:
| There are advertisers who specifically want to reach fans
| (gamers, tv/movie fans, etc), the name change was to make that
| ad sale conversation stronger:
| https://about.fandom.com/mediakit
| iamacyborg wrote:
| It's particularly dumb given it was literally entering the
| lexicon as a generic term in a lot of instances.
| sph wrote:
| A thing that bothers me is that Jimmy Wales, a founder of and
| arguably the face of Wikipedia, is also the founder and president
| of Fandom, Inc. (2004-present)
|
| 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.
| whstl wrote:
| Jimmy Wales lost my respect with Wikia itself, even before it
| was acquired.
|
| 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.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Jimbo is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, and as such I find it
| unsurprising that he has created both a wonderful,
| decentralized, communitarian project as well as a capitalistic
| nightmare. Libertarians are essentially anarchists who
| selectively turn their brains off when they see dollar signs.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think you're talking about the other wikipedia founder, no?
| Jimbo might have some libertarian tendencies too but they
| haven't been super visible in the way he directed the wiki.
| But yeah, his involvement with wikia is a huge stain
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Nope, I am talking about Jimbo. From that website he
| founded:
|
| > 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.
| sph wrote:
| What has objectivism got to do with anarchism? I take
| offence at being put in the same pile as Rand fanatics.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| I'm an anarchist too, and I would also take offense to
| being lumped in with libertarians! I only meant to say
| that they often seem to have the seeds of an anarchism in
| some of their thinking e.g. individual liberty and
| volunteerism, but then immediately embrace contradictory
| positions due to their inability to critique property.
| card_zero wrote:
| I was an anarchist as a child because I read a short
| dictionary definition, maybe describing it as meaning
| "without rules", and I figured that was what I wanted in
| life. Then I graduated to libertarianism as a teenager.
| Then in my 20s I encountered people who really called
| themselves anarchists, and they were all basically
| socialists with a sprinkling of individualism, which
| seemed incoherent because the socialism is all about
| taking people's property away for "the public" (which
| definitely won't ever turn into _for the state,_ right?)
| ... so I sadly had to stop using the word "anarchy"
| since the dictionary had apparently misled me and nobody
| is just purely against being ruled.
|
| 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.
| everforward wrote:
| There are sub-families of anarchism, and you would be
| correct that the predominant form at the moment is a
| flavor of socialist anarchy. The purported relation to
| anarchy is that the world would be split into tons of
| small, self-organized communities that individuals are
| absolutely free to join and leave at will.
|
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| That's interesting. I wonder if that was more due to the
| fact that everyone on the internet back then seemed to
| have an obsession with Rand, and he might have moved on
| since. But maybe he's still like that, I just didn't pick
| that up from the more recent stuff I read from him.
| Thanks for the info though!
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Are they turning their brains off or on?
| marxisttemp wrote:
| Depends on whether you think it's possible for property to
| be used as a means of curtailing individual liberty, or
| whether individual liberty is fundamentally rooted in
| private property. I believe the former, and as such I find
| libertarianism to be ideologically inconsistent.
| yakk0 wrote:
| It think it's been changed, but I believe the Transformers wiki
| on Fandom started out as a copy of the superior
| [TFWiki](https://tfwiki.net). TFWiki has been referenced by many
| official creators and Hasbro designers themselves and has proven
| to be a great resource. I have no idea what their infrastructure
| or backup plans are, but I dread the day they go down.
| bityard wrote:
| Does anyone predict Discord might end up going down the same
| path?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Would be cool to know what extensions you're using on MediaWiki
| and how you've set it up to maximize performance. These wikis
| seem really quick to respond.
| cookmeplox wrote:
| Thanks! I've been meaning to write up a post that talks about
| some of the specific tricks we're using. A couple big ones:
|
| - 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%
| starkparker wrote:
| Is there a RSS feed on the WG blog? I couldn't track one
| down, and it looks like a Jekyll site, so I'm not sure if
| there is one. I don't want to miss that post.
| cookmeplox wrote:
| https://weirdgloop.org/feed.xml should do it
| renewiltord wrote:
| Would love to read that post. Thank you for these tips. I'll
| subscribe to your feed and wait for it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| There is something fundamental here. It used to be the case that
| you could form communities around commercial entities. But
| nowadays it seems to be too many short term profit vultures
| roaming around looking for targets, to not end up selling out the
| community. Efficient market I guess.
| evanfarrar wrote:
| They should promise not to become wikimedia board members. That
| is the main thing that allows fandom to be so bad.
| tjbiddle wrote:
| Decided to give OSRS (Old School RuneScape) another try after
| more than a decade break from the game. Without their wiki, I
| don't think I would've continued to play; it's open constantly -
| incredibly easy to use, very well up to date, and just an all
| around wonderful resource. Above and beyond what used to exist.
| otterpro wrote:
| The only wiki in Fandom I actually go to is the Vim Tips Wiki
| (https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki). But how did Vim get
| in a Fandom in the first place? I hate going to Vim Wiki, even
| though they have good tips not found anywhere, due to all the
| things that were mentioned in the article. 50-70% of screen real-
| estate is filled with ads or distractions. I hope that vim will
| get its own wiki instead.
| linux2647 wrote:
| > But how did Vim get in a Fandom in the first place?
|
| It was created back when Fandom was Wikia, back when it was a
| good place to host a wiki
| rbits wrote:
| Check out BreezeWiki (https://breezewiki.com/). It lets you
| view any fandom wiki with a much better UI. The Indie Wiki
| Buddy extension also lets you automatically redirect fandom to
| BreezeWiki (https://getindie.wiki/)
| marxisttemp wrote:
| First thing I thought of seeing the title was the wonderful Old
| School RuneScape wiki! Whenever I have to use a Fandom wiki I
| think longingly of the OSRS wiki. I would love if the GTA wiki
| migrated to you.
| vman81 wrote:
| Hey, as long as they don't have those dark pattern cookie consent
| forms, I'm a happy camper. The EU should really have specified
| that accept all/decline all should be a top level choice instead
| of "Accept all" with the alternative being "learn more" leading
| to submenus for every one of the 891 "partners".
| thih9 wrote:
| That is already the case:
|
| > 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...
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| what is required is not the same as what happens in practice.
| Visit any wiki.gg site and see what they're doing.
| jampekka wrote:
| The law is not enforced. The non-enforcement is largely by
| design/lobby though.
| thih9 wrote:
| This law hasn't been enforced here but it's not like it
| has never been enforced; major websites like Google,
| Facebook and others were forced to add "reject all":
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/21/23035289/google-
| reject-al...
| thih9 wrote:
| When visiting a wiki.gg website from the EU I'm seeing an
| "Allow essential cookies" button next to "Accept all". This
| seems compliant with the EU laws - the laws are against
| non-essential cookies only; same source as in grandparent
| comment:
|
| > 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.
| zellyn wrote:
| Random question: do you work with the new wikis to create some
| kind of license that prevents Fandom from scraping future changes
| back into their version of the wikis? Obviously the technical
| modifications can't translate, but it seems like it wouldn't be
| that hard for them to slurp most textual/markup changes back in
| and make it look like their version of the wiki is still alive...
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Should mention the pessimistic possibility that Fandom buys WG
| and those wikis return under their umbrella. An example being
| Wowpedia forked off WoWWiki in 2010, moved to Curse's Gamepedia
| in 2013, which, Gamepedia, Fandom (then Wikia) bought in 2018.
|
| edit: Seems they moved again recently to wiki.gg.
| rbits wrote:
| With Weird Gloop they have agreements that the community can
| move the wiki away from Weird Gloop if that happens. For
| example this one is not legally binding yet, but once the
| minecraft wiki had a legal entity it will be:
| https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...
| Washuu wrote:
| The reason behind Fandom buying Gamepedia/Curse is both a
| blessing and a curse(HAH!) that would require a specific set of
| circumstances to happen again.[1]
|
| 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.
| nullindividual wrote:
| The Noita wiki moved away from Fandom to noita.wiki.gg due to
| ads, etc. The Fandom one still exists, of course, but has no
| community backing and lacks information from the newer updates of
| the game.
|
| Unfortunately the Fandom wiki is still the first link when
| searching on DDG :-(
| zellyn wrote:
| Sadly, Fandom still has a lot of search mojo. For instance, when
| searching for "minecraft redstone filter bedrock" I get a link to
| the Fandom minecraft wiki rather than minecraft.wiki. Hopefully
| over time, that corrects itself.
|
| Also, the Google search results page for that search made me pine
| for the good old days of Google being 10 real links...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| What is weird gloop doing exactly ?
|
| 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
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > but having a site which changes a lot but is still static can
| cost a arm and leg
|
| How so? Seems like it would be trivial in PHP
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| The ads and videos on fandom are out of control. I get these
| distractions on top and bottom with a tiny sliver of content in
| the middle, basically.
| gregjw wrote:
| Weird Gloop have been doing a great job with the Old School
| Runescape Wiki for a while now, happy to see them extending that
| elsewhere.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What are the major Fandom/Wikia alternatives out there right now?
| Besides Weird Gloop, this thread has also mentioned Miraheze,
| wiki.gg, Wikidot, and Fextralife. What others?
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| You have named all the players. Maybe throw ShoutWiki in there,
| but I recently tried to create a wiki there and it wasn't
| working--YMMV. There's also NIWA, focused on Nintendo-related
| IP, but I believe that's more of a webring and doesn't manage
| hosting for their members.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Self hosting is also relatively uncomplicated.
| xmprt wrote:
| Did you get in touch with Riot Games to be able to host a
| subdomain of leagueoflegends.com. If so, it's great that they're
| also behind this
| ggregoire wrote:
| Literally the second sentence of the article:
|
| > We've spent the last couple months working with the Riot
| folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom
| scoofy wrote:
| Just a shameless plug for https://golfcourse.wiki
|
| If you're into golf, help try to build the most thorough list of
| courses in the world, accessible to all.
| dpedu wrote:
| I was a user of one of the Fandom wikis this group took over.
| Moving the information to a better platform is fine.
|
| 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.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| The same thing is happening to older forums, if you browse
| without an ad blocker you get ads that try to trigger every
| emotion all at once, all of them larger than the actual content.
|
| Three cheers for weird gloop, JES, and everyone else fighting the
| good fight.
| Destiner wrote:
| I love when somebody disrupts a hidden market like that. Fandom
| had terrible UXs for years, but nobody seemed to care enough to
| make an alternative. I'd assume most users are not
| engineers/founders, so the opportunity was hidden for a while.
|
| In hindsight it makes total sense.
| starkparker wrote:
| There have been several competitors formed in response to or
| predating Wikia/Fandom over the years, particularly
| Gamepedia/Curse Media (which Fandom acquired). Fandom also
| acquired other game-focused community knowledge resources, like
| GameFAQs and Giant Bomb.
|
| 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.
| johnklos wrote:
| This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see.
|
| 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.
| jjcm wrote:
| It's the classic question of "how much of our brand did we sell
| to achieve this bump in revenue?".
|
| 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.
| xahrepap wrote:
| I've wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep
| raising prices, making it less affordable for people.
| Eventually basically no one is riding, so they ... raise
| prices.
|
| It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I'd
| like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more
| money.
| hendersonreed wrote:
| I've had this thought about public transit quite often.
|
| 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.
| greenchair wrote:
| does public transport even work without heavy subsidies?
| zhobbs wrote:
| It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're
| optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue
| over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad
| load is a lever you are probably going to pull.
|
| 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.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Google search has totally craptastic'd out.
|
| Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't
| get why they think it's a good idea.
| manquer wrote:
| They don't have to care ? That is the problem of
| monopolies.
|
| 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 ?
| Rygian wrote:
| I think the technical term is enshittification:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| sitkack wrote:
| They know what they are doing, they can burn an unpriced asset
| for short term gain, looks good on their balance sheet while
| they have screwed over the commons (their internal commons).
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > If people and companies took the bigger picture in to
| account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
|
| 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).
| dartos wrote:
| Thank god. Fandom is the most unusable website I have ever landed
| on.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| The most important aspect of any kind of community thing, if that
| involves adverts and other income options for the party that owns
| the platform, is to give back to the contributors.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I've noticed how many wikis for games I look up are on fandom
| and, probably because of my experience with web development, I
| take special note of the fact that they're always at game-name.
| _fandom.com_ (I 'm also a bit disappointed, like when I bought
| Chrono Trigger on Steam and looked up why the cat wouldn't follow
| me). I don't think I've ever seen a wiki with their
| branding/style that is not also on their domain. Perhaps some
| exist which use their software but I've never heard of such a
| vendor then also demanding a new style to be used, though I guess
| that's possible.
|
| 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.
| bakugo wrote:
| > For starters: on average, moving away from Fandom doubles the
| number of people editing
|
| 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.
| paradox460 wrote:
| In my opinion, the best approach to videogame wikis is what valve
| did with the TF2 wiki. They saw that it was a great community
| resource, and so they took it under their wing, gave it hosting
| and a subdomain, and then _left it alone_. The wiki maintains
| full editorial control, which lets it remain a useful resource
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Valve is in a unique position. Private company which makes
| infinite cash from their store. Plenty of freedom for little
| community outlays which can be impossible to approve when you
| have to justify finance numbers to the street.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| That's what seems to be happening here. Riot games paid for the
| wiki to be moved from fandom and hosted by weird glop but
| governance seems unchanged.
| Ameo wrote:
| A huge congrats to the Weird Gloop team on this, and to the
| League of Legends community for what's certain to be a huge bump
| to the availability of high-quality information and community
| space.
|
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Not sure how expensive this is to offer, but I would love if more
| wikis were encouraged to offer a bulk export option. Monthly db
| dumps or similar. I am sure many sites get wasteful spider
| traffic which could be avoided if the structured content were
| available. Maybe host them on Internet archive the way stack
| overflow did.
|
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| And of course "Weird Gloop" super duper promises not to
| enshittify, even though they are a free product that will
| eventually need advertiser funding. Bottom line is, this will
| keep happening until internet users realise that this model
| breeds this outcome. If you want nice things you must be willing
| to pay.
| m463 wrote:
| can someone explain why weirdgloop is better/more secure long-
| term?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-10 23:00 UTC)