[ryukoposting]

I remember reading the Minecraft wiki back in the early 2010s, back when Fandom was still Wikia. It would have been much more appealing at the time than it is today - not just for the reasons you list, but because Wikia actually kicked ass in the early 2010s. It was sleek, modern, and easy to use. And today, it isn't.

[epiccoleman]

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.

[iamacyborg]

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.

[ogurechny]

And before that, Wikipedia itself was Wikia, with lists of cheat-codes for games or paragraphs of inspired “original research” in articles.

Or the complete plot of “Harry Potter”, as seen in this 20 year old artifact:

https://harryfansowned.ytmnd.com/

[Aeolun]

I remember thinking that wikia sucked at the time, but at least it didn’t actively hinder me from finding what I was looking for. I just don’t open fandom pages because it locks up my phone.

[hinkley]

How did Curse end up making money?

[yifanl]

I assume they didn't, which is why they were bought by Twitch.

[iamacyborg]

Lots of ads across their wiki and other community websites and D&D Beyond was remarkably successful.

[mossTechnician]

Wikia is a great example of enshittification - provide great value to users, then take it away from users and hand it to other businesses (eg advertisers), then take it away from businesses too.

Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.

[diggan]

> Will Weird Gloop inevitably suffer the same fate? I hope not.

Unless explicitly structured to prevent it, my bet is it will. If it's backed by a for-profit entity, it'll eventually need to turn a profit somehow, and users/visitors are the first to lose their experience at that point.

However, if Weird Gloop is a properly registered non-profit with shared ownership between multiple individuals, I'll be much more likely to bet it won't suffer the same fate.

I skimmed around a bit on the website to try to get an answer to if it is an non-profit, but didn't find anything obvious that says yes/no.

[cookmeplox]

We're already turning a profit! And there are no third-party investors (or debt) – it's all controlled by wiki people[1]

[1] https://meta.weirdgloop.org/w/Weird_Gloop_Limited

[diggan]

Aw, I take that as it is in fact a for-profit company already.

Regardless, I wish you luck for the future! May you not go down the almost inevitable enshittification hole.

[robotnikman]

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.

[ChadNauseam]

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 shareholders don't like it they can kick rocks. This is pretty much the same situation that people imagine is the case with privately traded companies, even though facebook is obviously publicly traded.

[mossTechnician]

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

[sph]

s/are/aren't/ required to make constant profit

[adw]

It’s a company limited by guarantee, which is the structure you use in the UK for non-charity non-profits.

[cinntaile]

If it started that way, I'd say it's less likely to end up "bad". Compared to non-profit websites that get sold to ad businesses.

[Imustaskforhelp]

How is it making money?

[cookmeplox]

We have services agreements with the League of Legends and RuneScape developers, and we run 1 ad (below-the-fold, not in EU/UK) on the RuneScape wikis. This covers all expenses (including 5 staff) by a pretty healthy margin

[hiatus]

It is described in the linked article.

> The company primarily relies on three streams of revenue: user donations, serving ads on select Weird Gloop wikis, and a contract with Jagex that includes a fee to cover hosting and administration costs.

[dingnuts]

I didn't see anything in the article about setting up incentives to keep the same thing from happening to Weird Gloop that happened to Fandom, which means the blog post is just empty marketing.

The only difference is that Weird Gloop is the little guy. Competition is good! That might be a good enough reason to choose them if you're in the market for wiki hosting!

But the moral posturing won't last if they become dominant, unless they set up incentives fundamentally differently than Fandom did, which doesn't seem to be the case.

As long as advertising is one of their revenue sources, the user experience will get crappy as soon as the network effects make it hard to leave. The cycle continues.

[madeofpalk]

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 special corporate structure to legally require that.

Maybe websites could be the same?

[SoftTalker]

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

[godshatter]

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

[Aeolun]

I work for private equity, and while we have a lot of layoffs, we don’t necessarily pursue short term gains (at least, as far as I can determine not as a factor of being PE anyway)

[zellyn]

The article explicitly covers this question. Looks like they're setting up explicit legal(?) agreements. One key point is the domain name: minecraft.wiki, for example, not a subdomain of something owned by Weird Gloop. So the wiki can leave if it wants to.

[mossTechnician]

Does that mean that to the users of these wikis, the switching costs[1] of the backend would basically be zero (one day they might just end up on a different server with the same content), while on the administrators' side the switching costs are at a reasonable minimum?

[1] a variable in whether something can be enshittified, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#History_and_d...

[Nadya]

To my understanding wikis can take all their data, host it themselves, point the domain to their new hosting, and the move would be entirely invisible to end users if done properly and the quality of the hosting infrastructure wasn't considerably worse.

Observant users might notice the removal of any Weird Gloop branding but otherwise the only way people would know if the wiki itself announces the move or performance of the wiki becomes noticeably worse.

And Weird Gloop won't do what Fandom does and keep a zombie copy of your wiki online. So you won't be competing with Weird Gloop wiki traffic to reclaim your traffic. In fact, the obligations they agree to forbid it.

Reading the Minecraft.wiki Memorandum: https://meta.minecraft.wiki/w/Memorandum_of_Understanding_wi...

Upon termination by either party, Weird Gloop is obligated to:

- Cease operating any version of the Minecraft Wiki

- Transfer ownership of the minecraft.wiki domain to the community members

- Provide dumps of Minecraft Wiki databases and image repositories, and any of Weird Gloop's MediaWiki configuration that is specific to Minecraft Wiki

- Assist in transferring to the community members any domain-adjacent assets or accounts that cannot reasonably be acquired without Weird Gloop's cooperation

- This does not include any of Weird Gloop's core MediaWiki code, Cloudflare configuration, or accounts/relationships related to advertising or sponsorships

This sort of agreement means Weird Gloop is incentivized to not become so shit that wiki would want to leave (and take their ad revenue with them) because they've tried to make leaving Weird Gloop as easy as possible.

[mossTechnician]

This is very reassuring. Usually, I assume agreements between different groups will inordinately benefit one party, but this particular agreement sounds like it creates a more level playing field.

And besides, it's not like non-profits are exempt from restructuring and becoming worse. There is no silver bullet.

[cookmeplox]

Yeah - it would be on the same domain, so way users access it wouldn't change at all.

If any of the wikis we host want to leave, we'd provide them with a database dump. The admins would have to configure all of their own MediaWiki stuff of course, but I figure that's a pretty reasonable switching cost.

[treflop]

I find this tends to happen when something passes on from its creator to someone else. Wikia/Fandom has passed hands a bit.

Other people just have very different values and the direction of an organization reflects this.