Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

minecraft.wiki

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 210 posts

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#201

Post by majewsky »

adeon wrote: post #70

NetHack did this when Fandom was still called Wikia. Luckily, the new forked site won search engines over easily and nethackwiki.com easily comes on first results if you search for NetHack stuff. Unlike NetHack, the Minecraft Fandom site is probably a lot more lucrative in ad revenue. I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, G…

> I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones.

Katamari Fandomcy.

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#202

Post by majewsky »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #26
nnadams wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The side-by-side view in that article is the key user experience reason to leave. The Fandom wiki sites tend to be slow and covered in ads. I avoid them if possible. I'm glad to see more and more groups take their wikis back. The Runescape wikis left Fandom a few years ago. The improvement to quality and features has been massive. I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets, but the Runescape wikis got over…

> I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets A lot . Its the 800lb gorilla of gaming, and it requires a lot of reference to play. I used to joke that 1/4 of Youtube is Minecraft videos, and I'm not even sure thats a hyperbole.

It is probably not true today, but it may well have been true in 2010 or so, when Youtube started prioritizing watch time over raw views for the very first time. Back then, let's-plays were the cheapest content to produce in large volume, so the algorithm pushed it hard. And it just so happened that Minecraft released around that time. It's quite possible that Minecraft would not have become the phenomenon that it has become without this lucky coincidence.

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#203

Post by RockRobotRock »

mschae23 wrote: post #57
RockRobotRock wrote: post #40

Wasn't the Minecraft wiki first a MediaWiki site?

The Minecraft wiki was always (and still is) using MediaWiki.

What do you mean? Does Fandom use MediaWiki? I remember them having their own independent website. Maybe I'm thinking of the MC Fandom wiki before the theme changed. It used to look exactly like Wikipedia.

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#204

Post by cookmeplox »

Reubachi wrote: post #188
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSRS also moved to oldschool.runescape.wiki and AIUI jagex pays for their hosting and provides some kind of content access to make updating/syncing easier. Plus they have RuneLite cooperating with crowdsourcing things like droptables and drop rates. (And of course mods often will outright tell them what certain droprates are or how they function).

OSRS wiki isn't the best example. Jagex does not fund it, and is recommending they move to fandom/ad based support. Despite the OSRS wiki being legitimately the best website I use every day, it's leadership has been sounding the death knell every few months, always to an alarmingly quiet response. They have no money, have no revenue generator, and have a full staff that needs to be paid. The last post they put to the…

I think you might have some of the facts wrong here - the post you're talking about never mentioned moving back to Fandom (nobody would ever entertain that option), and we ended up putting one pretty small ad in a pretty non-disruptive place, not "injecting ads at a pretty insane volume".

In reality, we are doing fine on revenue, and more than covering the full-time labor costs by serving one ad to about 35% of users (really more like 20% after you account for ad blockers). It's still a bit icky compared to doing something donation-based or working directly with the studio, but neither of those would pay the bills. It turns out that a pretty small amount of advertising pays the bills just fine, which really puts into perspective how insane Fandom's monetization is.

You can read more specifics/numbers in my post here: https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Forum:Mid-2023_business_update

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#205

Post by ghotli »

fomine3 wrote: post #53
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not default. My mother doesn't know how to turn off the phone, toggle airplane mode/wifi or use the app switcher... She refuses to learn because its not worth her time. I have family, friends and such that similarly refuse to learn basic things, much less go seek out an ad blocker and learn how to use it for an interface (the web browser) they think they rarely use. Also, on mobile, it is kinda tricky because you…

Agree that it's not very easy for average user. Also it sometimes causes problem due to false positive or ad blocker blocking. On Android, WebView provider can be changed. On iPhone, SafariView supports ad blocking so it's a problem for apps that uses iOS WebView. Most apps should use SafariView for displaying external websites.

I just use Firefox Focus when I want to keep it simple. Works fine on both android and ios.

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#206

Post by yoyohello13 »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #146
yoyohello13 wrote: post #95

UESP is the gold standard for wikis. https://uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page

And yet Fandom outranks them, and "steals" contributors: https://www.google.com/search?q=lydia+skyrim

Yeah, Fandom just has better SEO unfortunately.

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#207

Post by thrdbndndn »

terracottalite wrote: post #177

Nice. Before this, I was using BreezeWiki[0], which is frontend for Fandom. [0]: https://breezewiki.com/

Search seems to be totally broken?

https://breezewiki.com/dota2/search?q=Chaos+Knight

Exception raised in Racket code at response generation time: string::2: bytes->jsexpr: bad input starting #"You are not allowed to access this resource " context...: /home/cadence/racket/collects/syntax/readerr.rkt:15:2: -raise-read-error /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/breezewiki/src/page-search.rkt:70:2 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/contract/private/arrow-higher-order.rkt:375:33 /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/dispatchers/dispatch-lift.rkt:11:0 /home/cadence/racket/collects/racket/private/more-scheme.rkt:163:2: select-handler/no-breaks [repeats 9 more times] /home/cadence/racket/share/pkgs/web-server-lib/web-server/private/dispatch-server-with-connect-unit.rkt:141:2

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#208

Post by somesoftdev »

apohak wrote: post #55
jjice wrote: post #43

Fandom (I really prefer their old name, "Wikia") is a great concept. Deal with hosting the wiki so you can focus on content. The problem is that they need to make money, and to do that, they do it with some of the most obnoxious ads on any reputable site on the modern internet. Using their site on a mobile browser is one of the worst web experiences I've ever had. Autoplaying video ad banners on the top with a smalle…

"The problem is that they need to make money" Stupid question, why do they need to make money? I thought they are maintained by volunteers. For hosting?

The content is created by volunteers. But fandom is a for-profit company. In its early days when it was known as Wikia, they maintained a fairly small team of people running the site. So they just had to make enough money for paychecks and bills. Here's my take on what went wrong. Throughout the years they grew. Because the company grew, they hired more hr people - more money needed. So they hired marketing teams, data science and so on. The costs skyrocketed. So now they're putting ads everywhere because they don't have that much more traffic than 10 years ago but the company is much larger.

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#209

Post by somesoftdev »

bronson wrote: post #141
zeroCalories wrote: post #109

I've always wondered why a wiki needs to monetize so hard. Most of their content easily cacheable and produced by volunteers, plus the technology hasn't really changed in 20 years. The whole site could probably be maintained by a single dev and a few admins. It seems natural that these sites are going to eventually be replaced because of this. Maybe I have an incorrect view of the costs/revenue.

Because Fandom is owned by these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Inc .

That's a good point. It's very likely that TPG demands constant growth meaning more profits each year. So Fandom has to put ads everywhere to meet the goals.

Re: Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

#210

Post by Fnoord »

majewsky wrote: post #200
n6h6 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this not illegal / grounds for having the channel deleted?

Why is Twitch not blocking a method for delivering their embedded video ads onto unrelated websites? Yeah, no idea.

The Twitch drops literally cause people to watch for X hours when they don't voluntary want to. I often have it running in my browser because I want the exclusive, yet I don't listen or watch.
Post reply on HN