281–290 of 503 posts
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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.
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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.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18ll7y6/i_have_you...
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> 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.
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
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laughs in ublock origin
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.
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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.
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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…
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.
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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 s…
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.
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.
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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.
I'm very curious to hear how others are seeing the terms used, though.
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…