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

Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 503 posts

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#221

Post by Dwedit »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #158
whstl wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#222

Post by jorams »

philipov wrote: post #43
ta1243 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#223

Post by citricsquid »

Arch-TK wrote: post #166
citricsquid wrote: post #38

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…

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.

I was a teenager at the time. I'm in my mid 30s now, it feels like I was a kid back then.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#224

Post by Kiro »

jl6 wrote: post #163
rideontime wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#225

Post by languagehacker »

owyn wrote: post #185
languagehacker wrote: post #74

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…

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 i…

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#227

Post by dpedu »

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 " " 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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#228

Post by chongli »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #150
rideontime wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#229

Post by citricsquid »

tredre3 wrote: post #201
misode wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#230

Post by Ukv »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #54

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 rando…

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.

Post reply on HN