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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#361

Post by treefarmer »

Dwedit wrote: post #129
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…

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

And god forbid you use a VPN and try to do anything on a Cloudflare site

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#362

Post by rifty »

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…

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#363

Post by HDThoreaun »

paradox460 wrote: post #333

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

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#364

Post by Rygian »

johnklos wrote: post #247

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 increa…

I think the technical term is enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#365

Post by immibis »

owyn wrote: post #164
citricsquid wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 natur…

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 bee…

How much of your server load was Grand Exchange Market Watch?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#366

Post by treflop »

mossTechnician wrote: post #131
ryukoposting wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#367

Post by paradox460 »

EcommerceFlow wrote: post #12

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?

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

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#368

Post by hendersonreed »

xahrepap wrote: post #324
johnklos wrote: post #247

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 increa…

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.

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#369

Post by AlienRobot »

YoshiRulz wrote: post #335
AlienRobot wrote: post #50

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 a…

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.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#370

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

Kiro wrote: post #224
jl6 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.
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