Live data from Hacker News

Helping wikis move away from Fandom

weirdgloop.org

481–490 of 503 posts

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

does public transport even work without heavy subsidies?

Do public roads work without heavy subsidies?

Something can just be a public good without delivering profit.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we just launched the wiki for PoE2 which GGG are hosting for the community.

I think you mean "we are about to launch", since there is no information about it anywhere ? (I'm guessing it does technically exist online, but access to it is limited to closed beta players (under NDA) for now ?)

Hasn’t been announced by GGG yet but it’s up and available. No NDA breaching content, editors are only adding information that is publicly available.

https://www.poe2wiki.net/wiki/Path_of_Exile_2_Wiki

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not totally accurate. For reference, here is the Wikipedia entry for Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919) (copy and pasted at bottom). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co . In fact, the relatively new concept of a "public benefit corporation" is (at least in part) an effort to allow for-profit entities to pursue goals other than shareholder enrichment. However, some have criticized public benefit c…

This doesn't contradict what I said. In fact it supports it. I said that the owners of the company are the ones who determine what it does. The shareholders are the owners. If the owners of the company want it to do a certain thing, and the directors do a certain thing, and it does that thing, no court is going to stop them. There is a rule that says that shareholders aren't allowed to try to screw over other shareho…

Actually, you pointed out a true inaccuracy in my comment, because when I said:

> zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes and if other shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks

This is only true in cases where zuckerberg's actions are not intended to benefit his interests at the expense of other shareholders'. I think in the Ford case, there was not a majority of shareholders who wanted to expand the business and increase wages at the expense of profit, So it was essentially two minority shareholders fighting.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#484
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.

> it's now just sponsored spam

Is it? I get a lot of product recommendations from Amazon that aren't sponsored. For example, we bought a countertop dishwasher a few years ago, and then for two months afterwards Amazon kept showing us other countertop dishwashers that we might want to add to our collection.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would they necessarily be replaced? they would need to willingly sell their stock

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#486

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…

I'm not sure if "search engine that was good and is now sometimes crappy and full of ads" is worse than "AI-powered plagiarism factory"[0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2024/06/11/why-perp...

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why don't we try to induce demand on public transit? Make it cheaper, subsidize it like we subsidize roads/parking, add additional routes.

Good systems do; most systems don't, for lots of reasons.

1. Public transit is for poor people, and poor people don't fund re-election campaigns

2. Subsidizing public transit is spending the public's money, and the public has spent decades being told that "socialism" is going to take away their freedom and choice; in this case, the government is going to put more of YOUR tax dollars into public transit and then TAKE AWAY your cars.

It becomes a vicious cycle:

1. Transit is under-funded (or the funding is maintained but not increased to match rising ridership and costs)

2. Service has to get cut in areas with low ridership (e.g. areas with a lot of retirement communities get cuts to route frequency)

3. People get mad because now their buses run less often so they have to leave earlier or later than they wanted to

4. Why are we paying these people when they're just giving us worse and worse service?

In the end you wind up with a scenario where people are voting no to additional transit funding, and pointing to the direct results of under-funding as their explanation - look how bad service is, why would we give them more money? [0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/transit-refe...

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#488

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.

> It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty buses.

But there's the counterpoint: if you increase service on a route that isn't full already, then you

1. Create more frequent, more reliable transit for people

2. Run more buses emptier than you were before

But if you don't increase service, then you have people complaining that service isn't frequent enough or reliable enough for them to use, regardless of the cost.

In my old college town, I had a job that was on the other side of the city - not a huge distance, as it was a small town, and I'd often walk home from work. Still, I looked at my public transit options one day, and found that my only two choices were to arrive at work two hours early or four hours late. No amount of fare cutting would induce me to take the bus to work. The area I was traveling to was more of an office park type of area, so 90% of commuting wanted to arrive by 8-9 PM and leave by 4-5 PM and outside of those times there was almost no demand, so it makes perfect sense, but there are always examples like that that people will base their experience off of.

(Side note: I lived in that town for several years, was a broke college student/broke minimum wage employee the entire time, and never once took the bus. In fact, I don't think I remember even seeing one.)

Cutting fares entirely will help get more people onto transit, but that also leads to political pushback as people who drive instead of taking transit complain that non-drivers are getting subsidized! Ignoring the fact that fewer cars, trucks, and taxis on the road means a better driving experience for them.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> so I sadly had to stop using the word “anarchy” Thanks! Anarchism is about removing hierarchy, of which the most potent in our modern times is the hierarchy of capitalism. Anarchism is also opposed to the state; you’ll find there’s a lot of us at protests of police brutality and other instances of the hierarchy of the state.

The word has potential to mean "without rule", following its etymology. Once in a while, especially in art criticism, it can be unambiguously used that way. If a review of Dude, Where's My Car calls it an anarchic comedy, that doesn't mean it attacks hierarchies. It just means it defies established rules, such as "a successful movie must be any good". But historically, early anarchists were class-struggle types (maybe Irish or Spanish?) with those round cartoon bombs with the lit fuse sticking out, so it's always going to carry both meanings.

I notice this raises the question of the similarities or differences between hierarchies (of people, not html tags or whatever) and rulership. Certainly management, or government, or the church (going etymological again), has a hierarchy of higher-up hierophants issuing commands to lower-down losers, and it's all full of stinking rules, and there's some connection. And, say, HN, has a hierarchy which consists of Dang, and us, and below us, noobs, and that's about enforcing the rules, which I have to admit might not stink in this particular case. But sometimes there can be a hierarchy without a connection to rules. For instance, how fancy is your hairstyle? Do you shave it off as irrelevant, or just let it grow like a hippie, or cultivate dreadlocks, or have a bowl cut, or trim it with clippers, craft it with scissors, or perhaps opt for dye, a perm, a beehive, or Roman braids? In the hair hierarchy there are people, the owners of the hair, but no chain of command or enforced rules. Capitalism, seen as simply people having money, has potential, perhaps, to be as benign as people having hair.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#490
post #345

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…

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…

This all comes down to one phrase I’ve grown to hate. “It must be measurable”.

Maximizing revenue over the next 12 months is measurable.

Creating an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever is _not_ measurable.

So, all these big brain MBAs end up forcing myopia on everyone below them because number go up. They seem so proud of themselves to have mastered inequalities.

Post reply on HN