411–420 of 503 posts
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I assume that Fandom pays Google for that placement
If Google were to have the astoundingly poor business sense to secretly allow payment for higher 'organic' search rankings: they'd hopefully at least have the good sense to not blow that secret on a fish as small as Fandom.
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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…
I'm assuming parent-poster means "publicly-traded corporations with limited-liability and low friction on transfers of ownership." However you're right that "capitalism" encompasses many potential different varieties and actors. For example, family-owned businesses are equally "capitalism", but they don't show up much in this kind of product-degradation story.
Family owned businesses can be sold to private equity just like any other. Instant Pot was a family owned business started by the inventor and it was famously sold to private equity who then proceeded to raid its assets and bankrupt the company.
does fandom prevent their wikis from mass-linking to the new wiki at the top of their pages?
Fun(?) fact – Fandom put even more restrictions right after Minecraft Wiki moved[2]. Now it doesn't even allow wikis to put a banner on their main page saying that there's a forking discussion unless they contact Fandom support and get permission.
[1]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy
[2]: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Forking_Policy?diff=375705...
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Every time I wind up on some garbage Fandom page I reminisce about the good old days of Wikia. I remember many a fun night trawling through pages while playing Fallout or Skyrim or whatever - all the information you could ever need, right there at your fingertips. It's an ethos you don't see so much on the modern net.
It’s funny that people are now looking back at wikia fondly because at the time most folks thought it was full of ads and shit. To the point where Curse/Gamepedia managed to get serious market share by not screwing with the community in the same way at the time. Funny how they somehow managed to make it worse.
Or the complete plot of “Harry Potter”, as seen in this 20 year old artifact:
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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…
"that is just what the owners usually decide to tell the company to do" 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.…
(Steam does try to do part of the job of the OS though, taking control over updates and even deciding what is acceptable on their platform and what is not.)
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I haven't played DCSS regularly since probably v0.24 or v0.25, so things may have changed - but if I recall correctly, it was not kept up to date very well, character guides are flat-out wrong, etc...
One of the Crawl design philosophies is that it should be possible to play without needing to consult a wiki. E.g. inspecting a monster shows you its spells and their damage ranges, there's a searchable in-game encyclopedia of all items/spells/monsters/etc., there's an extensive in-game manual with things like species skill aptitudes, examining an item tells you exactly what skill level you need to use it optimally,…
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Ah Cloudflare, where you constantly get captchas for attempting to read a web page .
That's up to the site owner. For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need. Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.
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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'…
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> with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective. sidetrack but how does cloudflare make things cost effective? wouldn't it be cheaper if i just hosted the wiki on a simple vps?
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…
By definition, very few wikis will have to deal with becoming one of the most popular websites. (And as you say, at that point one should be able to figure out funding.)
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…
One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it. For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha th…