Helping wikis move away from Fandom • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#241

Post by jchw » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:38 PM UTC

tempest_ wrote: post #216

jchw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#242

Post by marxisttemp » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:38 PM UTC

mardifoufs wrote: post #240

marxisttemp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#243

Post by mardifoufs » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:39 PM UTC

Ukv wrote: post #230

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…

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#244

Post by cookmeplox » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #189

cookmeplox wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#245

Post by edflsafoiewq » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:42 PM UTC

mjamesaustin wrote: post #165

yakz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 s…

Fandom is unusually bad even in a sea of bad ad-laden websites.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#246

Post by Destiner » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#247

Post by johnklos » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:42 PM UTC

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#248

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:45 PM UTC

theamk wrote: post #140

Dwedit wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page .

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 wh…

[deleted]

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#249

Post by ykonstant » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:45 PM UTC

paranoidxprod wrote: post #161

ykonstant wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#250

Post by cookmeplox » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 4:45 PM UTC

mossTechnician wrote: post #197

zellyn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.