[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.

[atomicnumber3]

"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." Also remember these shareholder are seldom John Smith principled human retail investor. It's firms whose entire purpose themselves is to seek maximum return.

"The owners of a privately traded company could decide to"

Meanwhile this DOES actually happen sometimes. See: Valve. We all know there's ways Valve could put up really great growth numbers for about 2-3 years while completely destroying all of the things that make Steam so god damn compelling to users that they can command the same cut as Apple, on an OPEN platform (vs Apple fighting utterly tooth and nail to keep iOS 100% airtight locked down). But they don't.

"For example, zuckerberg controls 53% of the voting stock of facebook, so whatever zuck says goes"

TBC most founders/CEOs are NOT majority voters in their companies. They answer to the board. Most company founders lose voting control. The fact that Zuck is still in control is incredibly unusual and is a testament to how fast Facebook has grown that he's been able to keep hold of the reins.

[basicallybones]

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 corporations as being entities that simply strengthen executive control at the expense of shareholders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

About Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.:

Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919),[1] is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers. It is often taught as affirming the principle of "shareholder primacy" in corporate America, although that teaching has received some criticism.[2][3] At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule, leaving Ford an extremely wide latitude about how to run the company.[citation needed]

The general legal position today (except in Delaware, the jurisdiction where over half of all U.S. public companies are domiciled and where shareholder primacy is still upheld[4][5]) is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive.[citation needed] Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.

[immibis]

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

[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

[lupire]

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.

[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.

[35skill]

Did you read the post? There's a whole section talking about how they are entering into binding agreements that let communities leave (and take the domain) if they have a better option

[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.