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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours.
Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.
The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.
Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.
Ah OK, that's basically exactly the setup I'd use as well. Surprising that the server alone couldn't handle the traffic, as the sibling says, 4 rps isn't that much when you cache (cache hits are basically free).
I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?
4 requests per second is absolutely something even a cheap VPS should be able to handle, even if you double that for peak load. You just need to put caching in front of everything dynamic.
Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.
An off-hand reference to "350k/day" shouldn't be naively translated to "4 per second"
350k/ day likely means sometimes it's 3.5 million, all smashed into a 30 minute period of time, because some nitwit linked to my site.
And then, I get paged about "my site being down" and I have to stop hanging out with my friends or family and fiddle around with things I don't want to fuzz with. Or maybe it just breaks and doesn't self heal and it is offline for a week until I notice it and fix it, and by then people all think the site's gone.
Anyhow, sure, maybe people not wanting to devote their lives to devops fanfic is something that can "just be solved with this simple trick cloudflare hates" but maybe not.
It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.
But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.
Though this post and response so far have given me hope.
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
This is basically an offer to buy your business for $0 and we might hire you as a contractor. It's a bad deal. I mean Jimmy Wales himself wouldn't have accepted this for Wikipedia.
Cripes, that sounds creepy and exploitive. I'm pretty sure it would have raised more than a few red flags in my mind, even as a teenager about to head off to college. (Granted, I was a wee bit uptight at that age.)
> As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame)
And Jimmy should be ashamed about being involved with Fandom/Wikia. Then again, he's also not ashamed about begging from third-world people and others much less well off as himself.
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.
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.
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.
I remember thinking that wikia sucked at the time, but at least it didn’t actively hinder me from finding what I was looking for. I just don’t open fandom pages because it locks up my phone.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
You just explained one reason why Steam is like this. Because they do not control the OSes Steam runs on. (Arguably, even not in the case of SteamOS.)
(Steam does try to do part of the job of the OS though, taking control over updates and even deciding what is acceptable on their platform and what is not.)
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.
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.
This doesn't contradict what I said. In fact it supports it. I said that the owners of the company are the ones who determine what it does. The shareholders are the owners. If the owners of the company want it to do a certain thing, and the directors do a certain thing, and it does that thing, no court is going to stop them. There is a rule that says that shareholders aren't allowed to try to screw over other shareholders, but I don't think "The other shareholders decided to pursue the public benefit rather than maximum profit" would quality.
Actually, you pointed out a true inaccuracy in my comment, because when I said:
> zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks
This is only true in cases where zuckerberg's actions are not intended to benefit his interests at the expense of other shareholders'. I think in the Ford case, there was not a majority of shareholders who wanted to expand the business and increase wages at the expense of profit, So it was essentially two minority shareholders fighting.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
I work for private equity, and while we have a lot of layoffs, we don’t necessarily pursue short term gains (at least, as far as I can determine not as a factor of being PE anyway)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game.
I hate that MCW ultimately ended up with Fandom in the end. Keeping MCW and the other wikis running smoothly was essentially my one huge passion in my life that I lost after Fandom acquired Curse. No one wanted it to happen that way. Even internally at Curse/Gamepedia we were all devastated when we learned that the company was buying bought out by the rival we were striving to overcome all those years. I am so glad to see after the past few years that the wikis are finally healing and going to places that are better for them.
[1] I'm the tech lead/manager that worked on Gamepedia at Curse that administered Minecraft MCW for many years before Fandom bought Curse in December 2018. I'm just writing this here since I figure other readers won't have any idea. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
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.
> 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.
Video game magazines would regularly publish short walkthroughs and maps, as well as tips on common places to be stuck in popular games, and cheat codes.
Guidebooks were found in stores next to the games, they were typically slim, full-color affairs full of screenshots and production art, with complete lists of all the stuff you could do in the game. Full walkthroughs, item statistic charts, locations of the 52 Secret Gears you need to collect to build the Wind-Up Sword to achieve the secret ending, etc, etc. Here's a photo of someone's collection of a bunch of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/comments/12rsvll/seems...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I bet, being by some counts the most popular video game ever - but which also makes it kind of a bad example to use when talking about wikis.
By definition, very few wikis will have to deal with becoming one of the most popular websites. (And as you say, at that point one should be able to figure out funding.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's sound logic. In this specific case of capitalistic incentives, I haven't noticed that it's working out in a way that make one more vulnerable to DDoS when one pays for bandwidth
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?
> 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?
Usually you have something like a platform/tool/service that is mostly static requests that could be cached, with some dynamic requests that couldn't, as they're CRUD requests or similar.
If your struggling to serve static content, then do go ahead and slap Cloudflare on top of that bad boy and probably your visitors will be a bit happier, instead of upgrading from a cheap VPS.
If you're struggling to serve the dynamic requests, Cloudflare/CDN won't matter because these things actually need to be processed by your backend.
So instead of trying to shave 50ms off from my simple static requests with a CDN, I'd much happier to optimize for all the requests, including the "dynamic requests" that need to hit the backend anyway.
I'll still go for a dedicated server with proper connection and performance rather than a shitty cheap VPS with a CDN in front off it.
Hetzner is pretty cheap, but only offers Europe location for their dedicated servers last time I checked. For more locations, DataPacket is nice, although a bit more expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
The rumour i heard is they were making their own custom thing.
There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mistakes which were never replied to. I sort of suspect the patch thing was some sort of internal excuse because the team involved wanted to make their own thing.
Regardless, im really happy they decided to open source their extensions and it was nice to see that they put in effort to upstream core patches.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
To be fair a lot of wikis' and internet cultural places' continuity woes would be mitigated by making it easier to decentralize hosting or at least do a git pull. Wikis especially don't tend to be that large and their S/N is quite high, making them attractive to mirror.
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.
Not a lawyer, I'm guessing here.
I'd assume the intention matters a lot. Scrape bots don't intend to cause trouble, they intend to get your data (for free). Same way as when some famous person tells people on Twitter to visit a website or when some poor blog gets the hug of death from HN. The intention wasn't to bring down the site.
Aside from that: is DDosing actually illegal (under US law)?
Right. Pretty sure it's illegal under EU law(s), and people were already condemned for it (but yes, in case ill intent was proven) - why wouldn't it be illegal under US law - it's basically akin to vandalism ?
(In other news, the Internet Archive got DDoSed today :(
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 :(
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.
The other side of the coin is lizards trying to literally end the internet era with their irresponsible behavior, and hell, making a nice living in the process
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is better off learning how to setup caching properly than continue to pay tens of thousands dollars per month. It's not rocket science.
> Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully.
Most users should not even be hitting MediaWiki. It's ok to show cache entries that are a couple of seconds or even minutes out of date for logged out users.
> MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.
Again, nothing reasonably needs to update all that often.
> For all intent and purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static" content
That's not what static means in the context of hosting. Static means you upload files by FTP or WebDav or some other API and that's it. Something like hosting on S3. If users can log in, even if they usually don't, it's nothing like static any more.
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?
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?
[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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
Factorio has a similar goal, which actually works really well. It lets the wiki focus on strategies and things that aren't well described in-game, but for quick "how does this work" you can just stay in game.
I mean yeah, I agree, I'm a longtime player. I appreciate DCSS's in-game discoverability. I find wikis useful for more in-depth explanation of game mechanics though. How combat rolls are calculated, etc. Ideally a wiki would provide that kind of deeper level of information, guide materials, etc.
Interestingly, DCSS's best source of info is the IRC bots/learndb.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It used to be the norm because releasing and installing stuff was hard and expensive.
I agree we should be focused on the users, but I think the solution there is not to leave them on various outdated software, but to make it so easy for them to be on the new thing that they are happy with frequent updates.
And I feel pretty strongly about this because I've met people whose entire lives are about keeping old, broken stuff limping along so that pathological bureaucracies can never get their acts together. Sure, it's a living, but it's also a colossal waste of human potential.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This all comes down to one phrase I’ve grown to hate. “It must be measurable”.
Maximizing revenue over the next 12 months is measurable.
Creating an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever is _not_ measurable.
So, all these big brain MBAs end up forcing myopia on everyone below them because number go up. They seem so proud of themselves to have mastered inequalities.
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 ?
Fortunately for there are competitors for Google now, like Perplexity[0], ddg, and that one I always see on hn that costs money but everyone is happy to pay because it's that good. They may not have the mindshare Google has, but if Google continues the enshittification of search, people will flock towards better things.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart?
Amazon has many competitors. Grocery stores, warehouse clubs, apparel stores, home goods stores, the list goes on.
I do shop at Amazon, but there are many goods that I could buy there but that I get elsewhere - food, cleaning supplies, clothes, home goods of all kinds, on and on. Some I get when I go grocery shopping each week, while others I get from other online sources.
I don't intentionally avoid Amazon specifically; the reason is that shopping at Amazon is an unpleasant experience ridden with ads, no-name goods of unreliable quality, and sometimes unreliable shipping. I just don't think to get these things from Amazon, the same way I don't have to think about not going into a dirty old store with high prices. I just don't go there.
Is it? I get a lot of product recommendations from Amazon that aren't sponsored. For example, we bought a countertop dishwasher a few years ago, and then for two months afterwards Amazon kept showing us other countertop dishwashers that we might want to add to our collection.
> 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).
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.
> It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty buses.
But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you
1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people
2. Run more buses emptier than you were before
But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost.
In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of.
(Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.)
Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.
A couple states in Australia have experimented with fee reductions for public transport.
In Western Australia, right now public transport is free for all students, and is free on Sundays for everyone. They also capped the cost of cross-zone travel to 2 zones, i.e. you'll never pay more than $5ish for a ride. Furthermore, unlike a lot of places, the airport train does not have any extra fare.
In Queensland, right now all public transport is capped at 50c. Not sure how long this will last, seems it's a bit of cost-of-living relief, and a bit of an election sweetener.
> Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.
Good systems do; most systems don't, for lots of reasons.
1. Public transit is for poor people, and poor people don't fund re-election campaigns
2. Subsidizing public transit is spending the public's money, and the public has spent decades being told that "socialism" is going to take away their freedom and choice; in this case, the government is going to put more of YOUR tax dollars into public transit and then TAKE AWAY your cars.
It becomes a vicious cycle:
1. Transit is under-funded (or the funding is maintained but not increased to match rising ridership and costs)
2. Service has to get cut in areas with low ridership (e.g. areas with a lot of retirement communities get cuts to route frequency)
3. People get mad because now their buses run less often so they have to leave earlier or later than they wanted to
4. Why are we paying these people when they're just giving us worse and worse service?
In the end you wind up with a scenario where people are voting no to additional transit funding, and pointing to the direct results of under-funding as their explanation - look how bad service is, why would we give them more money? [0]
The way I heard it, trains in Japan aren't (state) subsidized, but rather they are real estate businesses where "subsidized" cheap traffic into and between train stations drives increased real estate value and thus commercial rents.
If you think about it, the same could be said of state subsidized public transport, where increased economic activity due to improved traffic (getting people to/from jobs, shops and their homes) can increase tax revenue which can then be spent on public transport subsidies, turning them revenue positive. Of course whether most state subsidized systems actually live up to those aspirations is a bit more questionable.
I’ve worked in media and digital advertising and, on multiple occasions, actually implemented ads on sites.
The proper way to do it is to A/B test different ad SDK configurations (refresh rate, delay to initialization, etc) and measure the impact on various user engagement metrics (time on page, session duration, etc).
These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO.
Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least.
I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months.
A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts.
Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.
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).
> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification.
Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.
Unrelated but I put Forbes on a blocklist on my Google News feed because they almost intentionally epitomize the enshittification of the web. I can only imagine the horrors of browsing Forbes without an ad blocker, but even with an ad blocker, Forbes does some weird shit with my browser history. On Android, if I swipe, I either do a browser Go Back action, or if nothing to go back to, exit the browser. On Forbes, swiping takes me... Right to the page I was already on. I check my history stack, there's like five Forbes records. If I find the article interesting enough to share, I'd copy the URL... But for some reason, the URL is not even for the article I'm reading. It's for some totally unrelated article. How do I get the URL of the article I'm reading? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know!!
Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.
I've seen some interesting articles lately on Forbes' transition from news site to content farm. I couldn't find the one I originally read, but this one seems to be covering the same bases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just as an example - the stardew valley offical wiki is massive and complete, and nearly everyone uses that, but google still directs users to the fandom site for almost any specific search. Its one of the main things that has led me to think that using Google gives far less useful information than competitors.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
I tried adding some helpful links to the new Runescape wiki back when the split happened, and within a few hours Fandom had permabanned my decade-old account across their entire network.
Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.
> [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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
I was an anarchist as a teenager. Then I stopped thinking about politics until recently, when I rediscovered it, with a much more critical look. Then I read the Tao Te Ching, fell in love with its positive view of humanity and nature, and more importantly because Laozi can be described as the first anarchist but more grounded, as a large part of his work was advising actual monarchs, not academic posturing that's prevalent today.
Anarchism today means everything and nothing. One thing I have learned to loathe in my adult age is any form of anarcho-communism, as communism is nothing more than dictatorship of the proletariat. The much maligned anarcho-capitalism, and even early American libertarianism is more compatible with the ideas of freedom and "don't tread on me nor impose any rules on me" than any anarcho-communism that has been so popular in the past 100 years. Why should proletariat decide that I cannot have any private property?
On the other side, Randian and modern day libertarians are just conservative republicans with a different name, but libertarianism at the end of the 19th century had its root firmly in anarchist ideals.
> Why should proletariat decide that I cannot have any private property?
The whole point is they don’t, there is no state to enforce this, you are free to go off and enjoy your private property. Anarcho-communism means believe that our communities are better organized around sharing and collaboration than striving for individual gains, and that pursuing private property is fundamentally hierarchical in nature.
Have any of you “anarcho”-capitalists actually read any anarchist theory? Proudhon, Kropotkin, etc?
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.
Thanks! Anarchism is about removing hierarchy, of which the most potent in our modern times is the hierarchy of capitalism. Anarchism is also opposed to the state; you’ll find there’s a lot of us at protests of police brutality and other instances of the hierarchy of the state.
The word has potential to mean "without rule", following its etymology. Once in a while, especially in art criticism, it can be unambiguously used that way. If a review of Dude, Where's My Car calls it an anarchic comedy, that doesn't mean it attacks hierarchies. It just means it defies established rules, such as "a successful movie must be any good". But historically, early anarchists were class-struggle types (maybe Irish or Spanish?) with those round cartoon bombs with the lit fuse sticking out, so it's always going to carry both meanings.
I notice this raises the question of the similarities or differences between hierarchies (of people, not html tags or whatever) and rulership. Certainly management, or government, or the church (going etymological again), has a hierarchy of higher-up hierophants issuing commands to lower-down losers, and it's all full of stinking rules, and there's some connection. And, say, HN, has a hierarchy which consists of Dang, and us, and below us, noobs, and that's about enforcing the rules, which I have to admit might not stink in this particular case. But sometimes there can be a hierarchy without a connection to rules. For instance, how fancy is your hairstyle? Do you shave it off as irrelevant, or just let it grow like a hippie, or cultivate dreadlocks, or have a bowl cut, or trim it with clippers, craft it with scissors, or perhaps opt for dye, a perm, a beehive, or Roman braids? In the hair hierarchy there are people, the owners of the hair, but no chain of command or enforced rules. Capitalism, seen as simply people having money, has potential, perhaps, to be as benign as people having hair.
> If a review of Dude, Where's My Car calls it an anarchic comedy, that doesn't mean it attacks hierarchies. It just means it defies established rules, such as "a successful movie must be any good".
Yes, just like “conservative portion” doesn’t talk about politics. The political ideology of anarchism, the mention of which is what triggered this entire discussion, is by definition about resisting power hierarchies, so your hair example is a bit contrived.
But why would I expect genuine political discussion on HN instead of semantic navel-gazing? Read some Kropotkin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am aware of a few game communities that purposefully poison the fandom version of the wiki with inaccuracies that are non-obvious and time-consuming to verify (so they aren't just auto-reverted).
Prior to my discovery that fandom was bad and a lot of wikis were moving away, I was following so many instances of out dated info in games I was playing due to not realizing that the wiki was no longer maintained since the active contributors had moved elsewhere and updates/patches to the game had rendered the info moot.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember that Google has established a pattern of hiding their true motivations so well that even lawyers can't find them (internal chats "off the record"), and they're in trouble with the law as a result.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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".
> 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.
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.
It took EU enforcement eight years to enforce obvious violations of the law for a few companies. The illegal nags are still rampant.
And e.g. Meta (and many newspapers) already has a new obviously illegal tracking scheme with the "pay to not track".
The intended effect of GDPR would have been easily gotten with legally binding do-not-track and similar automated means. Very few people want to be tracked, but most of them are against their true consent.
> The GDPR is specific that consent must be as 'easy to withdraw as to give'
We all know what it means, but it isn't specific enough. "Single click no" or something to that effect. And don't get me started on "legitimate" interest...
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.
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).
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'
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
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.
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.
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…
When RuneScape and Old School RuneScape Wikis forked, the license was changed from CC-By-SA to CC-BY-SA-NC. As a result, all new changes come under the new license. To copy changes back to Fandom, they'd need to update their license to match and as I understand it so forfeit some of their ability to use so much advertising. I'm not sure if that license update was also applied to Minecraft or LoL, but it's a possibility.
The only use of CC-BY-SA-NC on Fandom I can recall is Memory Alpha (Star Trek Wiki) which was acquired with that license. There were some extra hoops to jump through to be able to advertise there - I think they granted themselves the ability to do so through Terms of Use that override the license.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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/)
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.
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.
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 :-(
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…
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The Oldschool Runescape and Guild Wars wikis are still some of the best wikis I've experienced. Both of them are even implemented into the game. In GW1&2 you can just type /wiki <insert subject> and it'll open a browser tab to the wikipage.
In OSRS there's a button next to the minimap that you click on first and then on the subject and it opens the wikipage for it.
I wish Warframe would move to a osrswiki model. A theorycraft heavy game almost requires a good, performant wiki.
Somewhat recently Wowpedia moved away from fandom to wiki.gg, dunno yet if it'll be another fandom, we'll see.
What I super love about Guild Wars 2 wiki is that it embraces the API that the game has - enter your personal API code and get personalized Achievement, Item progress and etc. tracking. Super cool!
Oh, and, yeah, I probabbly have "/wiki et" as a muscle memory now - it's so fast and easy to check in-game events using this chat command.
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.
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%
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.
I've always wished that more games would self-host a wiki. Gamers love wikis with detailed data about the game, and I hate it when I go to play a game which has poor wiki coverage. This can happen with small titles that don't have a big enough player base, titles where the player base didn't "align" on one wiki, or with games where the information is inconsistent across game versions/platforms (Don't Starve is notorious for this). But the biggest issue is competing, hard-to-use, user-unfriendly wikis - and this would be solved if more game studios were willing to self-host a wiki.
I'm working with a game studio that's self-hosting their most recent game (Cyber Knights: Flashpoint)'s wiki for the first time: https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/
It's going well content-wise, but it's insane how hard it's been to get it ranking in search results at all, much less outrank Fandom.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
— A $POPULAR_THING Wiki is swiftly created, some freelancers are hired to create article stubs. Links to it spread through other popular wikis.
— People trying to learn something about that topic get a lot of search results directing them to that new wiki. They assume that it's some kind of “community”, try to participate, and never realize that they're making love to an inflatable doll. Real activity, links and clicks now force the pages to stay on top, and attract even more naive visitors.
Of course, it's not specific to that site. “Social” sites often make people believe that they “interact” with thousands or millions of others, when in fact they shout into an empty box, and watch the movements of a primitive mechanism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
Yes. They consider it a violation of their "forking policy"[1].
Fun(?) fact – Fandom put even more restrictions right after Minecraft Wiki moved[2]. Now it doesn't even allow wikis to put a banner on their main page saying that there's a forking discussion unless they contact Fandom support and get permission.
The sidebar link on the Minecraft wiki taught me about the extension "Indie Wiki Buddy," https://getindie.wiki/ which among other things prioritizes non-Fandom search results.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.
In contrast, I've never heard a complaint about a previously-respected product run by a private-equity firm that became ruined after it was taken private by a closely-held family business.
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.
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.
> These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do
I'm sort of without, in the sense that they are for profit, so the CEO is going to attempt to increase profit. The problem arise when short-term profit is priorities over all else. I don't see the point in trying to have a record year, in terms of profit, if that means that customers/users are leaving your business long term.
Part of it might be the whole misguided SV startup mentality where we burn a ton of money and then sort of hope that profit will appear when volume is reached. Imgur is a pretty good example, not once did the founder stop to think about why all their competitors sucked. In the long run Imgur was forced down the same dark path because the idea is, and always was, going to be unprofitable.
I don't think Fandom is unprofitable necessarily. They have a lot of original content, written by unpaid users, and which has been increasing in popularity. The problem is how profitable they need to be vs. how profitable they want to be. They don't need to be a billion dollar company, there's nothing wrong with being a 100 million dollar company, or how much they are able to sustain without pushing users away. They just have to not lose money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours.
Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.
The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.
Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.
Ah OK, that's basically exactly the setup I'd use as well. Surprising that the server alone couldn't handle the traffic, as the sibling says, 4 rps isn't that much when you cache (cache hits are basically free).
I imagine 90% of the traffic (or more) is anonymous users, which can be cached, doesn't Varnish handle that without breaking a sweat?
4 requests per second is absolutely something even a cheap VPS should be able to handle, even if you double that for peak load. You just need to put caching in front of everything dynamic.
Disappointing for people just carelessly giving Buttflare the keys to the kingdom and effectively excluding alternative Browser users without considering other options.
An off-hand reference to "350k/day" shouldn't be naively translated to "4 per second"
350k/ day likely means sometimes it's 3.5 million, all smashed into a 30 minute period of time, because some nitwit linked to my site.
And then, I get paged about "my site being down" and I have to stop hanging out with my friends or family and fiddle around with things I don't want to fuzz with. Or maybe it just breaks and doesn't self heal and it is offline for a week until I notice it and fix it, and by then people all think the site's gone.
Anyhow, sure, maybe people not wanting to devote their lives to devops fanfic is something that can "just be solved with this simple trick cloudflare hates" but maybe not.
To keep it simple, this is also a response to your sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41807715
It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.
But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.
Though this post and response so far have given me hope.
[0] https://theinfosphere.org/Table:Server_news! (the exclamation point is part of the URL, in case HN ignores it)
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 :-)
This is basically an offer to buy your business for $0 and we might hire you as a contractor. It's a bad deal. I mean Jimmy Wales himself wouldn't have accepted this for Wikipedia.
Ugh, this sits very close to ‘exploiting cheap labor’, and if the ads didn’t, it makes me want absolutely nothing to do with the site.
It’s so upbeat too. I can totally see someone that doesn’t know better being taken in.
Cripes, that sounds creepy and exploitive. I'm pretty sure it would have raised more than a few red flags in my mind, even as a teenager about to head off to college. (Granted, I was a wee bit uptight at that age.)
We would like 2 squeeze what u made until all the money runs out + underpay u :-)
> As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame)
And Jimmy should be ashamed about being involved with Fandom/Wikia. Then again, he's also not ashamed about begging from third-world people and others much less well off as himself.
the way this is phrased reminds me so much of IOI from Ready Player One
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)
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.
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.
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.
And before that, Wikipedia itself was Wikia, with lists of cheat-codes for games or paragraphs of inspired “original research” in articles.
Or the complete plot of “Harry Potter”, as seen in this 20 year old artifact:
https://harryfansowned.ytmnd.com/
I remember thinking that wikia sucked at the time, but at least it didn’t actively hinder me from finding what I was looking for. I just don’t open fandom pages because it locks up my phone.
How did Curse end up making money?
I assume they didn't, which is why they were bought by Twitch.
Lots of ads across their wiki and other community websites and D&D Beyond was remarkably successful.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
You just explained one reason why Steam is like this. Because they do not control the OSes Steam runs on. (Arguably, even not in the case of SteamOS.)
(Steam does try to do part of the job of the OS though, taking control over updates and even deciding what is acceptable on their platform and what is not.)
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.
When he took over twitter he owned 100% of the stock.
Yes, that's what "take over" means.
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.
This doesn't contradict what I said. In fact it supports it. I said that the owners of the company are the ones who determine what it does. The shareholders are the owners. If the owners of the company want it to do a certain thing, and the directors do a certain thing, and it does that thing, no court is going to stop them. There is a rule that says that shareholders aren't allowed to try to screw over other shareholders, but I don't think "The other shareholders decided to pursue the public benefit rather than maximum profit" would quality.
Actually, you pointed out a true inaccuracy in my comment, because when I said:
> zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks
This is only true in cases where zuckerberg's actions are not intended to benefit his interests at the expense of other shareholders'. I think in the Ford case, there was not a majority of shareholders who wanted to expand the business and increase wages at the expense of profit, So it was essentially two minority shareholders fighting.
Any shareholder who doesn't will be replaced by one who does. Zuckerberg is an extremely rare exception, for now.
Why would they necessarily be replaced? they would need to willingly sell their stock
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
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.
>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.
Where should the employees get a billion dollars?
s/are/aren't/ required to make constant profit
It’s a company limited by guarantee, which is the structure you use in the UK for non-charity non-profits.
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.
How is it making money?
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
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.
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.
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
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?
There are millions of websites like that. They don't show up on the first page of search results, so nobody finds them.
Mainly because our biggest search engine is owned by an ad agency.
I work for private equity, and while we have a lot of layoffs, we don’t necessarily pursue short term gains (at least, as far as I can determine not as a factor of being PE anyway)
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.
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/Enshittification#History_and_d...
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.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...
Upon termination by either party, Weird Gloop is obligated to:
- Cease operating any version of the Minecraft Wiki
- Transfer ownership of the minecraft.wiki domain to the community members
- Provide dumps of Minecraft Wiki databases and image repositories, and any of Weird Gloop's MediaWiki configuration that is specific to Minecraft Wiki
- Assist in transferring to the community members any domain-adjacent assets or accounts that cannot reasonably be acquired without Weird Gloop's cooperation
- This does not include any of Weird Gloop's core MediaWiki code, Cloudflare configuration, or accounts/relationships related to advertising or sponsorships
This sort of agreement means Weird Gloop is incentivized to not become so shit that wiki would want to leave (and take their ad revenue with them) because they've tried to make leaving Weird Gloop as easy as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 reasonably ask why Mojang/Microsoft didn't (and I'm assuming don't) foot the bill for the manual that is an essential part of their game.
[0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Minecraft_Wiki_(website)
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. ヾ(≧▽≦*)o
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.
> 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.
I'm more curious at the state of things before online and gamefaqs.com ?
I do remember downloadable (and maybe also bundled with game magazines ?) game tricks encyclopedias in the Windows help file format.
Magazines and guidebooks.
Video game magazines would regularly publish short walkthroughs and maps, as well as tips on common places to be stuck in popular games, and cheat codes.
Guidebooks were found in stores next to the games, they were typically slim, full-color affairs full of screenshots and production art, with complete lists of all the stuff you could do in the game. Full walkthroughs, item statistic charts, locations of the 52 Secret Gears you need to collect to build the Wind-Up Sword to achieve the secret ending, etc, etc. Here's a photo of someone's collection of a bunch of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/comments/12rsvll/seems...
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.
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.
With emphasis of both free and easily accessible ones... can you still even buy third party game guides in book form ?
> 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?
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.
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.
How much of your server load was Grand Exchange Market Watch?
I bet, being by some counts the most popular video game ever - but which also makes it kind of a bad example to use when talking about wikis.
By definition, very few wikis will have to deal with becoming one of the most popular websites. (And as you say, at that point one should be able to figure out funding.)
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
And then you have someone like the founder of Fly.io who has been explicit about that mindset at least once:
> putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company
Found the source for more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24699292
That's sound logic. In this specific case of capitalistic incentives, I haven't noticed that it's working out in a way that make one more vulnerable to DDoS when one pays for bandwidth
Why not? They have the capacity they could absorb nearly any kind of attack without blinking.
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.
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?
> 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?
Usually you have something like a platform/tool/service that is mostly static requests that could be cached, with some dynamic requests that couldn't, as they're CRUD requests or similar.
If your struggling to serve static content, then do go ahead and slap Cloudflare on top of that bad boy and probably your visitors will be a bit happier, instead of upgrading from a cheap VPS.
If you're struggling to serve the dynamic requests, Cloudflare/CDN won't matter because these things actually need to be processed by your backend.
So instead of trying to shave 50ms off from my simple static requests with a CDN, I'd much happier to optimize for all the requests, including the "dynamic requests" that need to hit the backend anyway.
I'll still go for a dedicated server with proper connection and performance rather than a shitty cheap VPS with a CDN in front off it.
> If you want to pay for bandwidth then yeah, CloudFlare is a great option.
The free plan is a lot bigger than you think.
> dedicated server with unmetered connection
And where have you found one of those with reasonable pricing?
Hetzner is pretty cheap, but only offers Europe location for their dedicated servers last time I checked. For more locations, DataPacket is nice, although a bit more expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Nice!! Made my day. Not sure how they can move off of it, partly because there’s no alternative that has a fraction of the capability
The rumour i heard is they were making their own custom thing.
There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mistakes which were never replied to. I sort of suspect the patch thing was some sort of internal excuse because the team involved wanted to make their own thing.
Regardless, im really happy they decided to open source their extensions and it was nice to see that they put in effort to upstream core patches.
Yeah the team running the platform internally was amazing to work with and did incredible work with just a handful of resources.
The efficiency for scale of mediawiki is hard to beat.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Have any of Intels server offerings been "premium" since epyc hit the scene?
I just assumed they were still there based on momentum.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
"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.
I was a teenager at the time. I'm in my mid 30s now, it feels like I was a kid back then.
To be fair a lot of wikis' and internet cultural places' continuity woes would be mitigated by making it easier to decentralize hosting or at least do a git pull. Wikis especially don't tend to be that large and their S/N is quite high, making them attractive to mirror.
holy crap that minecraft wiki is fast now. I actually stopped going to fandom because it was so slow.
Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page.
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.
Wait a minute, DDoSing is illegal, how come OpenAI et al. haven't gotten sued to the ground yet ??
Not a lawyer, I'm guessing here. I'd assume the intention matters a lot. Scrape bots don't intend to cause trouble, they intend to get your data (for free). Same way as when some famous person tells people on Twitter to visit a website or when some poor blog gets the hug of death from HN. The intention wasn't to bring down the site.
Aside from that: is DDosing actually illegal (under US law)?
Right. Pretty sure it's illegal under EU law(s), and people were already condemned for it (but yes, in case ill intent was proven) - why wouldn't it be illegal under US law - it's basically akin to vandalism ?
(In other news, the Internet Archive got DDoSed today :(
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 :(
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.
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.
AFAIK most of those just pay a human in a low income country.
Even better, you can get a captcha before you're allowed to see 404 Not Found.
The other side of the coin is lizards trying to literally end the internet era with their irresponsible behavior, and hell, making a nice living in the process
And god forbid you use a VPN and try to do anything on a Cloudflare site
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
The checkboxes are also captchas.
but there are more user-friendly captchas than the hydrants, which on average could be better that a total block on the tablets?
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.
[flagged]
The Mediawiki software is not a static webpage
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is better off learning how to setup caching properly than continue to pay tens of thousands dollars per month. It's not rocket science.
> Mediawiki involves edits that users expect to propagate instantly to other pages. Sometimes this can easilt result in cache stampedes if not setup carefully.
Most users should not even be hitting MediaWiki. It's ok to show cache entries that are a couple of seconds or even minutes out of date for logged out users.
> MediaWiki supports extensions. Some of the less well architectured extensions add dynamic content that totally destroies cachability.
Again, nothing reasonably needs to update all that often.
> For all intent and purposes most hits will be cache hits, and thus "static" content
That's not what static means in the context of hosting. Static means you upload files by FTP or WebDav or some other API and that's it. Something like hosting on S3. If users can log in, even if they usually don't, it's nothing like static any more.
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?
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?
[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.
Thanks!
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.
> 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.
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.
Woof. Yeah, you're right. That was not great.
Fandom runs on media wiki too.
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.
That's me! I also wrote the blog :)
Factorio and Rimworld have amazing wikis as well. And they're both maintained by the developers AFAIK...
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
Factorio has a similar goal, which actually works really well. It lets the wiki focus on strategies and things that aren't well described in-game, but for quick "how does this work" you can just stay in game.
I mean yeah, I agree, I'm a longtime player. I appreciate DCSS's in-game discoverability. I find wikis useful for more in-depth explanation of game mechanics though. How combat rolls are calculated, etc. Ideally a wiki would provide that kind of deeper level of information, guide materials, etc.
Interestingly, DCSS's best source of info is the IRC bots/learndb.
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.
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.
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://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Release_information
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.
It used to be the norm because releasing and installing stuff was hard and expensive.
I agree we should be focused on the users, but I think the solution there is not to leave them on various outdated software, but to make it so easy for them to be on the new thing that they are happy with frequent updates.
And I feel pretty strongly about this because I've met people whose entire lives are about keeping old, broken stuff limping along so that pathological bureaucracies can never get their acts together. Sure, it's a living, but it's also a colossal waste of human potential.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This all comes down to one phrase I’ve grown to hate. “It must be measurable”.
Maximizing revenue over the next 12 months is measurable.
Creating an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever is _not_ measurable.
So, all these big brain MBAs end up forcing myopia on everyone below them because number go up. They seem so proud of themselves to have mastered inequalities.
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.
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 ?
Fortunately for there are competitors for Google now, like Perplexity[0], ddg, and that one I always see on hn that costs money but everyone is happy to pay because it's that good. They may not have the mindshare Google has, but if Google continues the enshittification of search, people will flock towards better things.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart?
[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/
Amazon has many competitors. Grocery stores, warehouse clubs, apparel stores, home goods stores, the list goes on.
I do shop at Amazon, but there are many goods that I could buy there but that I get elsewhere - food, cleaning supplies, clothes, home goods of all kinds, on and on. Some I get when I go grocery shopping each week, while others I get from other online sources.
I don't intentionally avoid Amazon specifically; the reason is that shopping at Amazon is an unpleasant experience ridden with ads, no-name goods of unreliable quality, and sometimes unreliable shipping. I just don't think to get these things from Amazon, the same way I don't have to think about not going into a dirty old store with high prices. I just don't go there.
I'm not sure if "search engine that was good and is now sometimes crappy and full of ads" is worse than "AI-powered plagiarism factory"[0].
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2024/06/11/why-perp...
> it's now just sponsored spam
Is it? I get a lot of product recommendations from Amazon that aren't sponsored. For example, we bought a countertop dishwasher a few years ago, and then for two months afterwards Amazon kept showing us other countertop dishwashers that we might want to add to our collection.
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.
> 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).
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.
> It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty buses.
But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you
1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people
2. Run more buses emptier than you were before
But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost.
In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of.
(Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.)
Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.
A couple states in Australia have experimented with fee reductions for public transport.
In Western Australia, right now public transport is free for all students, and is free on Sundays for everyone. They also capped the cost of cross-zone travel to 2 zones, i.e. you'll never pay more than $5ish for a ride. Furthermore, unlike a lot of places, the airport train does not have any extra fare.
In Queensland, right now all public transport is capped at 50c. Not sure how long this will last, seems it's a bit of cost-of-living relief, and a bit of an election sweetener.
My point with this comment is that ridership increased with both initiatives. Build it and they will come, as they say.
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.
> Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.
Good systems do; most systems don't, for lots of reasons.
1. Public transit is for poor people, and poor people don't fund re-election campaigns
2. Subsidizing public transit is spending the public's money, and the public has spent decades being told that "socialism" is going to take away their freedom and choice; in this case, the government is going to put more of YOUR tax dollars into public transit and then TAKE AWAY your cars.
It becomes a vicious cycle:
1. Transit is under-funded (or the funding is maintained but not increased to match rising ridership and costs)
2. Service has to get cut in areas with low ridership (e.g. areas with a lot of retirement communities get cuts to route frequency)
3. People get mad because now their buses run less often so they have to leave earlier or later than they wanted to
4. Why are we paying these people when they're just giving us worse and worse service?
In the end you wind up with a scenario where people are voting no to additional transit funding, and pointing to the direct results of under-funding as their explanation - look how bad service is, why would we give them more money? [0]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-refe...
does public transport even work without heavy subsidies?
The way I heard it, trains in Japan aren't (state) subsidized, but rather they are real estate businesses where "subsidized" cheap traffic into and between train stations drives increased real estate value and thus commercial rents.
If you think about it, the same could be said of state subsidized public transport, where increased economic activity due to improved traffic (getting people to/from jobs, shops and their homes) can increase tax revenue which can then be spent on public transport subsidies, turning them revenue positive. Of course whether most state subsidized systems actually live up to those aspirations is a bit more questionable.
Do public roads work without heavy subsidies?
Something can just be a public good without delivering profit.
No form of transport works without subsidies, except maybe walking.
I’ve worked in media and digital advertising and, on multiple occasions, actually implemented ads on sites. The proper way to do it is to A/B test different ad SDK configurations (refresh rate, delay to initialization, etc) and measure the impact on various user engagement metrics (time on page, session duration, etc).
These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO.
Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least.
I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months.
A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts.
Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.
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).
> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.
Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification.
Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.
Unrelated but I put Forbes on a blocklist on my Google News feed because they almost intentionally epitomize the enshittification of the web. I can only imagine the horrors of browsing Forbes without an ad blocker, but even with an ad blocker, Forbes does some weird shit with my browser history. On Android, if I swipe, I either do a browser Go Back action, or if nothing to go back to, exit the browser. On Forbes, swiping takes me... Right to the page I was already on. I check my history stack, there's like five Forbes records. If I find the article interesting enough to share, I'd copy the URL... But for some reason, the URL is not even for the article I'm reading. It's for some totally unrelated article. How do I get the URL of the article I'm reading? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know!!
Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.
I've seen some interesting articles lately on Forbes' transition from news site to content farm. I couldn't find the one I originally read, but this one seems to be covering the same bases.
https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-fa...
Edit: I think this is the article I originally read, but I'm not 100% certain. https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
I think the technical term is enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
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.
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.
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.
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.
I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is, but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...
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.
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.
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.
Aren't those types of prompts the MOST likely to generate hallucinations?
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.
They tried this on a wiki and the community rightfully went and got their pitchforks out
Imagining?
https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-to...
https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x...
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.
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.
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.
Fandom PoE still pollutes the top of Google searches :(
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)
That's good info.
You may also want to install: https://getindie.wiki/
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.
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.
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.
And we just launched the wiki for PoE2 which GGG are hosting for the community.
I think you mean "we are about to launch", since there is no information about it anywhere ?
(I'm guessing it does technically exist online, but access to it is limited to closed beta players (under NDA) for now ?)
Hasn’t been announced by GGG yet but it’s up and available. No NDA breaching content, editors are only adding information that is publicly available.
https://www.poe2wiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_2_Wiki
Right, so hardly anyone linking and so no presence on search engines yet.
(As a contributor for the wiki for PoE1 I really should have tried the obvious link... less obvious on the phone though !)
Yeah, lots of work to be done on the visibility front but we’re in a better place with this one than the fork was at the same time.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Just as an example - the stardew valley offical wiki is massive and complete, and nearly everyone uses that, but google still directs users to the fandom site for almost any specific search. Its one of the main things that has led me to think that using Google gives far less useful information than competitors.
That goes against Google's 2010 ranking factors. 2024 Google is all about pushing DoubleClick customers to the top of the front page.
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
https://getindie.wiki/ this has been a really helpful extension for me.
I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement
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.
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.
The black box leaked recently.
https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousa...
> 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.
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.
a relative of mine worked for a company who were explicitly paying Google for higher "organic" search results
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.
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.
> 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
Super confusing as to why not? How else would they achieve their goal.
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/
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
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.
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.
Why can't they replace the old pages with a link to the new page? Or otherwise remove the contents from the old site?
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. ;)
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
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.
Good point
I tried adding some helpful links to the new Runescape wiki back when the split happened, and within a few hours Fandom had permabanned my decade-old account across their entire network.
Not a huge loss, although it still feels like a bitter ending after I spent years sprucing up a bunch of their wikis.
Usually attempts to advertise migration efforts on high visibility wikis away from Fandom will be deleted by Fandom staff.
And they will remove rights from wiki admins who take steps to advertise alternate resources.
> [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
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
nope.
Thanks, I had the same problem.
Yeah, the site is down (502 status)
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.
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.
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.
Are they turning their brains off or on?
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.
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
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.
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!
What has objectivism got to do with anarchism? I take offence at being put in the same pile as Rand fanatics.
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.
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.
> 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.
I was an anarchist as a teenager. Then I stopped thinking about politics until recently, when I rediscovered it, with a much more critical look. Then I read the Tao Te Ching, fell in love with its positive view of humanity and nature, and more importantly because Laozi can be described as the first anarchist but more grounded, as a large part of his work was advising actual monarchs, not academic posturing that's prevalent today.
Anarchism today means everything and nothing. One thing I have learned to loathe in my adult age is any form of anarcho-communism, as communism is nothing more than dictatorship of the proletariat. The much maligned anarcho-capitalism, and even early American libertarianism is more compatible with the ideas of freedom and "don't tread on me nor impose any rules on me" than any anarcho-communism that has been so popular in the past 100 years. Why should proletariat decide that I cannot have any private property?
On the other side, Randian and modern day libertarians are just conservative republicans with a different name, but libertarianism at the end of the 19th century had its root firmly in anarchist ideals.
> Why should proletariat decide that I cannot have any private property?
The whole point is they don’t, there is no state to enforce this, you are free to go off and enjoy your private property. Anarcho-communism means believe that our communities are better organized around sharing and collaboration than striving for individual gains, and that pursuing private property is fundamentally hierarchical in nature.
Have any of you “anarcho”-capitalists actually read any anarchist theory? Proudhon, Kropotkin, etc?
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.
> so I sadly had to stop using the word “anarchy”
Thanks! Anarchism is about removing hierarchy, of which the most potent in our modern times is the hierarchy of capitalism. Anarchism is also opposed to the state; you’ll find there’s a lot of us at protests of police brutality and other instances of the hierarchy of the state.
The word has potential to mean "without rule", following its etymology. Once in a while, especially in art criticism, it can be unambiguously used that way. If a review of Dude, Where's My Car calls it an anarchic comedy, that doesn't mean it attacks hierarchies. It just means it defies established rules, such as "a successful movie must be any good". But historically, early anarchists were class-struggle types (maybe Irish or Spanish?) with those round cartoon bombs with the lit fuse sticking out, so it's always going to carry both meanings.
I notice this raises the question of the similarities or differences between hierarchies (of people, not html tags or whatever) and rulership. Certainly management, or government, or the church (going etymological again), has a hierarchy of higher-up hierophants issuing commands to lower-down losers, and it's all full of stinking rules, and there's some connection. And, say, HN, has a hierarchy which consists of Dang, and us, and below us, noobs, and that's about enforcing the rules, which I have to admit might not stink in this particular case. But sometimes there can be a hierarchy without a connection to rules. For instance, how fancy is your hairstyle? Do you shave it off as irrelevant, or just let it grow like a hippie, or cultivate dreadlocks, or have a bowl cut, or trim it with clippers, craft it with scissors, or perhaps opt for dye, a perm, a beehive, or Roman braids? In the hair hierarchy there are people, the owners of the hair, but no chain of command or enforced rules. Capitalism, seen as simply people having money, has potential, perhaps, to be as benign as people having hair.
> If a review of Dude, Where's My Car calls it an anarchic comedy, that doesn't mean it attacks hierarchies. It just means it defies established rules, such as "a successful movie must be any good".
Yes, just like “conservative portion” doesn’t talk about politics. The political ideology of anarchism, the mention of which is what triggered this entire discussion, is by definition about resisting power hierarchies, so your hair example is a bit contrived.
But why would I expect genuine political discussion on HN instead of semantic navel-gazing? Read some Kropotkin.
Also, objectivism isn't libertarianism.
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.
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.
> I'd somehow installed All The Viruses
maybe at that moment, you did.
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.
> 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.
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.
I can understand the urge and frustration level.
Just wish there was a more centralized / good alternative to promote rather than just wrecking fandom.
>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).
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.
> 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?
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.
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)
A big blocking modal with "Privacy Notice We & our 726 technology partners ask you to consent"?
Love the UESP, probably my favorite wiki.
UESP is amazing, and is a great example of what the non-fandom wikis are trying to be
Fandom is perfectly usable with adblockers and the "Cleaner Fandom" userscript. But only with those extensions!
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.
I don't use it out of principle.
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.
agreed. the good thing is, it teaches a new generation why adblockers are great.
What are these 'ads' of which you speak?
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
For some reason you're assuming the owners of the website have your interests at heart, and not the interest of their bank account.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
laughs in ublock origin
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember that Google has established a pattern of hiding their true motivations so well that even lawyers can't find them (internal chats "off the record"), and they're in trouble with the law as a result.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "fan" in "Fandom" means the fan in your computer.
And the “dom” refers to how it completely dominates that fan.
Or how they use every square pixel of the dom
The dom comes from some of the tame ads...
...I like you. I'm gonna keep you around... hahaha
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.
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.
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.
To they can. See the Minecraft wiki for example: https://minecraft.wiki
Currently, every wiki they host is on its own domain (besides the meta one)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Also don't forget that any large gaming wiki will want significant amounts of either Cargo, Semantic MediaWiki, or (god forbid) DPL
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.
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...
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.
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.
Also, the site is really slow. The only thing that the site manages to turn on is the computer fans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, that adds a new perspective to what appeared happened (basically Wikia simply buying off a competitor).
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...
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".
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...
what is required is not the same as what happens in practice. Visit any wiki.gg site and see what they're doing.
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.
The law is not enforced. The non-enforcement is largely by design/lobby though.
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...
It took EU enforcement eight years to enforce obvious violations of the law for a few companies. The illegal nags are still rampant.
And e.g. Meta (and many newspapers) already has a new obviously illegal tracking scheme with the "pay to not track".
The intended effect of GDPR would have been easily gotten with legally binding do-not-track and similar automated means. Very few people want to be tracked, but most of them are against their true consent.
> The GDPR is specific that consent must be as 'easy to withdraw as to give'
We all know what it means, but it isn't specific enough. "Single click no" or something to that effect. And don't get me started on "legitimate" interest...
I've been seeing more and more sites with a "Subscribe/pay to decline cookies" option
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.
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.
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).
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'
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
It’s particularly dumb given it was literally entering the lexicon as a generic term in a lot of instances.
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.
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.
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…
When RuneScape and Old School RuneScape Wikis forked, the license was changed from CC-By-SA to CC-BY-SA-NC. As a result, all new changes come under the new license. To copy changes back to Fandom, they'd need to update their license to match and as I understand it so forfeit some of their ability to use so much advertising. I'm not sure if that license update was also applied to Minecraft or LoL, but it's a possibility.
The only use of CC-BY-SA-NC on Fandom I can recall is Memory Alpha (Star Trek Wiki) which was acquired with that license. There were some extra hoops to jump through to be able to advertise there - I think they granted themselves the ability to do so through Terms of Use that override the license.
There's a browser extension that provides links to Fandom alternatives on various topics: https://github.com/KevinPayravi/indie-wiki-buddy
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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-...
That's interesting to know... and quite a trap. Interesting to watch and see how they scale this across communities.
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.
> 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
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/)
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.
Given that Jimmy Wales is president of Fandom, I don't know if that's a good idea for WMF to get involved.
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.
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 :-(
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.
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…
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Oldschool Runescape and Guild Wars wikis are still some of the best wikis I've experienced. Both of them are even implemented into the game. In GW1&2 you can just type /wiki <insert subject> and it'll open a browser tab to the wikipage.
In OSRS there's a button next to the minimap that you click on first and then on the subject and it opens the wikipage for it.
I wish Warframe would move to a osrswiki model. A theorycraft heavy game almost requires a good, performant wiki.
Somewhat recently Wowpedia moved away from fandom to wiki.gg, dunno yet if it'll be another fandom, we'll see.
What I super love about Guild Wars 2 wiki is that it embraces the API that the game has - enter your personal API code and get personalized Achievement, Item progress and etc. tracking. Super cool!
Oh, and, yeah, I probabbly have "/wiki et" as a muscle memory now - it's so fast and easy to check in-game events using this chat command.
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.
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%
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.
https://weirdgloop.org/feed.xml should do it
Would love to read that post. Thank you for these tips. I’ll subscribe to your feed and wait for it.
Path of Exile was so keen to host the community Wiki[0] back in the days because Fandom just sucks.
0. https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_Wiki
Thank god. Fandom is the most unusable website I have ever landed on.
I've always wished that more games would self-host a wiki. Gamers love wikis with detailed data about the game, and I hate it when I go to play a game which has poor wiki coverage. This can happen with small titles that don't have a big enough player base, titles where the player base didn't "align" on one wiki, or with games where the information is inconsistent across game versions/platforms (Don't Starve is notorious for this). But the biggest issue is competing, hard-to-use, user-unfriendly wikis - and this would be solved if more game studios were willing to self-host a wiki.
I'm working with a game studio that's self-hosting their most recent game (Cyber Knights: Flashpoint)'s wiki for the first time: https://cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com/
It's going well content-wise, but it's insane how hard it's been to get it ranking in search results at all, much less outrank Fandom.
> 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.
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/
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.
Does anyone know of an iOS Safari extension that allows to freely configure such substitutions?
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.
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.
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.
Ehm. This is nothing new.
https://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forked_wikis
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Wiki:Departure_from_Wikia
https://www.niwanetwork.org/
etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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/
Very cool, thank you.
I'd say if you cannot tell what its hosted at, its "good". If it shouts "fandom" in your face, its "bad". Easy!
I mean.. you can use your eyes to tell if it's a good wiki or not.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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
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
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...
In theory, great, but nobody here is doing it out of the goodness of their heart either.
But, smart on the publishers to take (even more) control of the "community projects" this way.
Does anyone predict Discord might end up going down the same path?
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.
They should promise not to become wikimedia board members. That is the main thing that allows fandom to be so bad.
How so? I mean I don't disagree, but more out of concern for what they'd do to Wikipedia is given the chance.
The travelling mobile sim guide is/was useful. Maybe esim has made it redundant
The author does miss out on the idea that Fandom only runs shitty wikis.
They own TVGuide now.
What are people's thoughts on putting wikis on web3 infrastructure
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.
I’m one of the folks whose fans go wild. Are they running crypto?
Dont give them any ideas
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.
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.
The system is way simpler.
— Something becomes popular.
— A $POPULAR_THING Wiki is swiftly created, some freelancers are hired to create article stubs. Links to it spread through other popular wikis.
— People trying to learn something about that topic get a lot of search results directing them to that new wiki. They assume that it's some kind of “community”, try to participate, and never realize that they're making love to an inflatable doll. Real activity, links and clicks now force the pages to stay on top, and attract even more naive visitors.
Of course, it's not specific to that site. “Social” sites often make people believe that they “interact” with thousands or millions of others, when in fact they shout into an empty box, and watch the movements of a primitive mechanism.
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.
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.
Archive.org is awfully slow, and more importantly, the archived pages are not indexed by Google, hence aren’t discoverable.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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!
does fandom prevent their wikis from mass-linking to the new wiki at the top of their pages?
Yes. They consider it a violation of their "forking policy"[1].
Fun(?) fact – Fandom put even more restrictions right after Minecraft Wiki moved[2]. Now it doesn't even allow wikis to put a banner on their main page saying that there's a forking discussion unless they contact Fandom support and get permission.
[1]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy
[2]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy?diff=375705...
can someone explain why weirdgloop is better/more secure long-term?
The sidebar link on the Minecraft wiki taught me about the extension "Indie Wiki Buddy," https://getindie.wiki/ which among other things prioritizes non-Fandom search results.
Yes
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?
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.
Self hosting is also relatively uncomplicated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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...
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.
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.
to put a finer point on it: capitalism.
"then the MBAs got involved" is a cop-out, it's a systemic issue.
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.
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.
For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.
I mean they don't know up as perpetrators.
In contrast, I've never heard a complaint about a previously-respected product run by a private-equity firm that became ruined after it was taken private by a closely-held family business.
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.
Fandom is unusually bad even in a sea of bad ad-laden websites.
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.
> These guys are doing what any for-profit enterprise would do
I'm sort of without, in the sense that they are for profit, so the CEO is going to attempt to increase profit. The problem arise when short-term profit is priorities over all else. I don't see the point in trying to have a record year, in terms of profit, if that means that customers/users are leaving your business long term.
Part of it might be the whole misguided SV startup mentality where we burn a ton of money and then sort of hope that profit will appear when volume is reached. Imgur is a pretty good example, not once did the founder stop to think about why all their competitors sucked. In the long run Imgur was forced down the same dark path because the idea is, and always was, going to be unprofitable.
I don't think Fandom is unprofitable necessarily. They have a lot of original content, written by unpaid users, and which has been increasing in popularity. The problem is how profitable they need to be vs. how profitable they want to be. They don't need to be a billion dollar company, there's nothing wrong with being a 100 million dollar company, or how much they are able to sustain without pushing users away. They just have to not lose money.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I loved the Dark Souls wikidot. Sad to see the Elden Ring "official" wiki is the Fextralife one.
Is darksouls.wikidot.com not the initial Dark Souls wikidot page? Was there something else that was closed down?
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.
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.
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.