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Helping wikis move away from Fandom

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Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#491

Post by danudey »

abustamam wrote: post #473
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, swi…

I've seen some interesting articles lately on Forbes' transition from news site to content farm. I couldn't find the one I originally read, but this one seems to be covering the same bases.

https://www.nearmedia.co/big-brand-problem-forbes-content-fa...

Edit: I think this is the article I originally read, but I'm not 100% certain. https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#492

Post by BlueTemplar »

iamacyborg wrote: post #482
BlueTemplar wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, so hardly anyone linking and so no presence on search engines yet.

(As a contributor for the wiki for PoE1 I really should have tried the obvious link... less obvious on the phone though !)

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#493

Post by BlueTemplar »

ruune wrote: post #465
BlueTemplar wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a minute, DDoSing is illegal, how come OpenAI et al. haven't gotten sued to the ground yet ??

Not a lawyer, I'm guessing here. I'd assume the intention matters a lot. Scrape bots don't intend to cause trouble, they intend to get your data (for free). Same way as when some famous person tells people on Twitter to visit a website or when some poor blog gets the hug of death from HN. The intention wasn't to bring down the site. Aside from that: is DDosing actually illegal (under US law)?

Right. Pretty sure it's illegal under EU law(s), and people were already condemned for it (but yes, in case ill intent was proven) - why wouldn't it be illegal under US law - it's basically akin to vandalism ?

(In other news, the Internet Archive got DDoSed today :(

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#494

Post by marxisttemp »

card_zero wrote: post #489
marxisttemp wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (mayb…

> 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".

Yes, just like “conservative portion” doesn’t talk about politics. The political ideology of anarchism, the mention of which is what triggered this entire discussion, is by definition about resisting power hierarchies, so your hair example is a bit contrived.

But why would I expect genuine political discussion on HN instead of semantic navel-gazing? Read some Kropotkin.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#495

Post by noen »

bawolff wrote: post #431
noen wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice!! Made my day. Not sure how they can move off of it, partly because there’s no alternative that has a fraction of the capability

The rumour i heard is they were making their own custom thing. There was some rumours that they were unhappy about mediawiki's response to patches they submitted (they made a bunch around accessibility). However i looked through their patches at one point when this rumour started flying around and it looked like most were merged. Those that weren't generally had code review comments with questions or pointing out mis…

Yeah the team running the platform internally was amazing to work with and did incredible work with just a handful of resources.

The efficiency for scale of mediawiki is hard to beat.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#496

Post by iamacyborg »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #492
iamacyborg wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, so hardly anyone linking and so no presence on search engines yet. (As a contributor for the wiki for PoE1 I really should have tried the obvious link... less obvious on the phone though !)

Yeah, lots of work to be done on the visibility front but we’re in a better place with this one than the fork was at the same time.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#498

Post by wpietri »

theoldways wrote: post #381
wpietri wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you say a bit more about that? Normally I think "have to support people stuck on old versions" is something that happens when you're selling enterprise software to insurance companies. This is the first I've heard of it in games.

This actually used to be the norm: you'd release slowly, and support old versions for years (which still isn't that long, all things considered). It wasn't until relatively recently that six months became some sort of unconscionable amount of time to support software, because it's friendlier to the companies and developers writing it, instead of the users using it.

It used to be the norm because releasing and installing stuff was hard and expensive.

I agree we should be focused on the users, but I think the solution there is not to leave them on various outdated software, but to make it so easy for them to be on the new thing that they are happy with frequent updates.

And I feel pretty strongly about this because I've met people whose entire lives are about keeping old, broken stuff limping along so that pathological bureaucracies can never get their acts together. Sure, it's a living, but it's also a colossal waste of human potential.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#499

Post by lobsterthief »

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 worked in media and digital advertising and, on multiple occasions, actually implemented ads on sites. The proper way to do it is to A/B test different ad SDK configurations (refresh rate, delay to initialization, etc) and measure the impact on various user engagement metrics (time on page, session duration, etc).

These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO.

Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least.

I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months.

A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts.

Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.

Re: Helping wikis move away from Fandom

#500

Post by [deleted] »

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'…

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