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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#471

Post by immibis »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #263
robotnikman wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any shareholder who doesn't will be replaced by one who does. Zuckerberg is an extremely rare exception, for now.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#472

Post by immibis »

lupire wrote: post #279
mossTechnician wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't it be worrying that companies are required to make consistent gains* for shareholders and investors? At some point, a company will naturally reach a market saturation point. * ETA: I meant "growth" here, not profit

If it can't generate profit, it's worth more liquidated than operating. Employees should buy out investors if they want to keep operating for their own personal profit.

Where should the employees get a billion dollars?

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#473

Post by abustamam »

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…

Unrelated but I put Forbes on a blocklist on my Google News feed because they almost intentionally epitomize the enshittification of the web. I can only imagine the horrors of browsing Forbes without an ad blocker, but even with an ad blocker, Forbes does some weird shit with my browser history. On Android, if I swipe, I either do a browser Go Back action, or if nothing to go back to, exit the browser. On Forbes, swiping takes me... Right to the page I was already on. I check my history stack, there's like five Forbes records. If I find the article interesting enough to share, I'd copy the URL... But for some reason, the URL is not even for the article I'm reading. It's for some totally unrelated article. How do I get the URL of the article I'm reading? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know!!

Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#474

Post by abustamam »

manquer wrote: post #395
mattmanser wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Fortunately for there are competitors for Google now, like Perplexity[0], ddg, and that one I always see on hn that costs money but everyone is happy to pay because it's that good. They may not have the mindshare Google has, but if Google continues the enshittification of search, people will flock towards better things.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart?

[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#476

Post by csmcg »

kibwen wrote: post #385
csmcg wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I mean yeah, I agree, I'm a longtime player. I appreciate DCSS's in-game discoverability. I find wikis useful for more in-depth explanation of game mechanics though. How combat rolls are calculated, etc. Ideally a wiki would provide that kind of deeper level of information, guide materials, etc.

Interestingly, DCSS's best source of info is the IRC bots/learndb.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#477

Post by wolpoli »

echelon wrote: post #336
Svip wrote: 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'…

This is basically an offer to buy your business for $0 and we might hire you as a contractor. It's a bad deal. I mean Jimmy Wales himself wouldn't have accepted this for Wikipedia.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#478

Post by massysett »

abustamam wrote: post #474
manquer wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Fortunately for there are competitors for Google now, like Perplexity[0], ddg, and that one I always see on hn that costs money but everyone is happy to pay because it's that good. They may not have the mindshare Google has, but if Google continues the enshittification of search, people will flock towards better things. Unfortunately, I can't think of a similar competitor to Amazon. Ebay? Walmart? [0] https://www.per…

Amazon has many competitors. Grocery stores, warehouse clubs, apparel stores, home goods stores, the list goes on.

I do shop at Amazon, but there are many goods that I could buy there but that I get elsewhere - food, cleaning supplies, clothes, home goods of all kinds, on and on. Some I get when I go grocery shopping each week, while others I get from other online sources.

I don't intentionally avoid Amazon specifically; the reason is that shopping at Amazon is an unpleasant experience ridden with ads, no-name goods of unreliable quality, and sometimes unreliable shipping. I just don't think to get these things from Amazon, the same way I don't have to think about not going into a dirty old store with high prices. I just don't go there.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#480

Post by tylervigen »

I've always wished that more games would self-host a wiki. Gamers love wikis with detailed data about the game, and I hate it when I go to play a game which has poor wiki coverage. This can happen with small titles that don't have a big enough player base, titles where the player base didn't "align" on one wiki, or with games where the information is inconsistent across game versions/platforms (Don't Starve is notorious for this). But the biggest issue is competing, hard-to-use, user-unfriendly wikis - and this would be solved if more game studios were willing to self-host a wiki.
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