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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

391–400 of 503 posts

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an anarchist too, and I would also take offense to being lumped in with libertarians! I only meant to say that they often seem to have the seeds of an anarchism in some of their thinking e.g. individual liberty and volunteerism, but then immediately embrace contradictory positions due to their inability to critique property.

I was an anarchist as a child because I read a short dictionary definition, maybe describing it as meaning "without rules", and I figured that was what I wanted in life. Then I graduated to libertarianism as a teenager. Then in my 20s I encountered people who really called themselves anarchists, and they were all basically socialists with a sprinkling of individualism, which seemed incoherent because the socialism is…

There are sub-families of anarchism, and you would be correct that the predominant form at the moment is a flavor of socialist anarchy. The purported relation to anarchy is that the world would be split into tons of small, self-organized communities that individuals are absolutely free to join and leave at will.

I tend to agree that it makes far more sense to call it socialism with some individualist facets than anarchy with some socialist attributes.

What you’re describing would be closer to individualist anarchy or philosophical anarchy. Individualist anarchy believes the right of the individual is paramount, excepting when the rights of two individuals clash. Philosophical anarchy is the general belief that the desires of individuals should not never be co-opted because one person can never morally justify forcing another to do something and thus governments can never be moral as their entire reason to exist is to wield the monopoly on violence against individuals to override their will. Individuals are of course still free to join groups and abide their rules if they choose, but those groups would not be able to enforce any kind of agenda against its members.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#392

It's hard running and managing wikis, and anyone/org/group that does so outside of the auspices of fandom or similar trash-aggregation hosts should be celebrated. Love this for weirdgloop. On a related note, shoutout to liquipedia[1], which has been a great experience for so long (a number of years I refuse to recognize as it would prove I'm old), and I have always feared the possibility of it moving to or becoming a…

Can't see it ever happening, it's obviously not a service driven by revenue. The Dota2 non-esports wiki recently migrated from Fandom to Liquipedia too

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#393

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…

> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.

That's part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile vision and legacy have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level.

How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that's granted based on short term shareholder results.

And it doesn't help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn't seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is for the shareholders first and foremost, and what's a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we flip it? Some companies are explicitly structured to guarantee enshittification. Venture capital/private equity is what causes this. We've been poisoned to believe that websites should exist purely to achieve hyperscale and extract as much money as possible. When you look at the real physical world there are tons of small "mom and pop" businesses that are content with being self sustainable without some specia…

There are millions of websites like that. They don't show up on the first page of search results, so nobody finds them.

Mainly because our biggest search engine is owned by an ad agency.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#395
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull. If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (go…

Google search has totally craptastic'd out. Same with Amazon, it's now just sponsored spam. I just don't get why they think it's a good idea.

They don’t have to care ? That is the problem of monopolies.

There is no incentive to improve the product , there is every incentive to degrade quality because what are you going to do not shop at Amazon or not search with google ?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#396
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it's in the CDN's interest for you to get a DDOS What kind of conspiracy is this? As if anyone charging for bandwidth hopes to get their infrastructure attacked

The whole point of systemic incentives is that there is no conspiracy. Nobody wants a DDOS and every large provider will have people genuinely working to avoid them. But every time there is an opportunity to allocate resources, the team that gets to frame their return on investment in terms of real dollars will always have an edge over one whose value is realized only in murky customer satisfaction projections. Over the lifetime of a company, the impact of these decisions will add up with no need for any of the individuals involved to even be aware of the dynamic, much less conspire to perpetuate it.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#397

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…

To be fair a lot of wikis' and internet cultural places' continuity woes would be mitigated by making it easier to decentralize hosting or at least do a git pull. Wikis especially don't tend to be that large and their S/N is quite high, making them attractive to mirror.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#398

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?

That goes against Google's 2010 ranking factors. 2024 Google is all about pushing DoubleClick customers to the top of the front page.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#400
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years. Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular…

Their growth people emailed me again and again and tried to do the same with StrategyWiki decades ago. Here's one of their emails: > [Redacted] mentioned that your site was very cool - and that you're heading off to college. As you may know, Wikia is founded by Jimmy Wales (of wikipedia fame) and we are trying to become THE resource for all gamers > I was wondering if you'd consider moving over to wikia now that you'…

Ugh, this sits very close to ‘exploiting cheap labor’, and if the ads didn’t, it makes me want absolutely nothing to do with the site.

It’s so upbeat too. I can totally see someone that doesn’t know better being taken in.

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