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Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have com

Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server, but they're utter black boxes to the outer world. I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.

chx 4y ago
The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games. [0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche. How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.
    - piperswe 4y ago
      There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your community (they will ban you if you link to the new community) and having more SEO juice than you.
      - Arcorann 4y ago
        Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).
      - EamonnMR 4y ago
        Someone will copy your wiki's content into Fandom and Fandom will starve you voa SEO.
        antifa 4y ago
        If that's really happening, then DCMA take-down?
        EamonnMR 4y ago
        Most Wikis use permissive licenses. Also, has anyone actually
- nerdponx 4y ago
  The Dota 2 wiki is pretty much the canonical "technical reference" for the game.
  - joe-collins 4y ago
    There are a few games, mostly high-profile ones, with exceptional wikis or fan sites, but they are exceptions.
    - mjr00 4y ago
      There's probably more than you think -- they can just hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of Google, as has been discussed here recently [0]. As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game. In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 [1] https://rabidb.com/ https://rabidb.com/
      - Sharparam 4y ago
        What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"? Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check various technical details on games and any tricks that can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older games.
    - wishfish 4y ago
      I don't know that they are exceptions. The wikis for moderately popular but kinda niche games are often in good shape. For example, wikis for The Long Dark and the Kingdom series are two I've used in the recent past. Detailed information. Even the comments are good. Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
- Arcorann 4y ago
  There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations). [1] https://miraheze.org/ https://miraheze.org/
- FemmeAndroid 4y ago
  Completely agree. Since I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the good community run wikis others have posted, I’ll shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging into the lore of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.
insightcheck 4y ago
The more fragile presence of the information is actually a feature to some. If messages are more permanent and accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of having a free-flowing conversation. I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.
- joe-collins 4y ago
  On the one hand, I met my partner in a community that uses Discord, so I can't disagree that developing relationships there can work. On the other, the flip-side of free-flowing conversation is endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>" "check the pins".
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>" "check the pins". This was still a thing back during the days of forums. No, reading comprehension in humanity hasn't improved over the last 20~30 years.
    - antifa 4y ago
      But back then you could google it.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Yes, but not for e.g technical help channels. I don't want a personal relationship with another user of xx OSS tool - I want to search for the error message and find previous answers.
holler 4y ago
Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im and I'm interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...
throwaway1851 4y ago
Discord’s UX is a disaster for most of the things I’ve seen Discord used for. Lately, I don’t even bother trying.
- Nowado 4y ago
  It just keeps happening. People used email lists for everything, then forums for everything, subreddits for everything and companies are now using slack for everything. It is not in anyone's interest to educate users on picking communication tool for their purpose.
conductr 4y ago
Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People were helping others and I could find it later. Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Expert sex change! Blast from the past. Pen Island too!

chx 4y ago

The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.

insightcheck 4y ago
The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games. [0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche. How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Greed & platform lock-in with no good alternatives.
  - piperswe 4y ago
    There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your community (they will ban you if you link to the new community) and having more SEO juice than you.
    - Arcorann 4y ago
      Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).
    - EamonnMR 4y ago
      Someone will copy your wiki's content into Fandom and Fandom will starve you voa SEO.
      - antifa 4y ago
        If that's really happening, then DCMA take-down?
        EamonnMR 4y ago
        Most Wikis use permissive licenses. Also, has anyone actually
nerdponx 4y ago
The Dota 2 wiki is pretty much the canonical "technical reference" for the game.
- joe-collins 4y ago
  There are a few games, mostly high-profile ones, with exceptional wikis or fan sites, but they are exceptions.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    There's probably more than you think -- they can just hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of Google, as has been discussed here recently [0]. As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game. In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594010 [1] https://rabidb.com/ https://rabidb.com/
    - Sharparam 4y ago
      What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"? Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check various technical details on games and any tricks that can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older games.
  - wishfish 4y ago
    I don't know that they are exceptions. The wikis for moderately popular but kinda niche games are often in good shape. For example, wikis for The Long Dark and the Kingdom series are two I've used in the recent past. Detailed information. Even the comments are good. Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
Arcorann 4y ago
There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations). [1] https://miraheze.org/ https://miraheze.org/
FemmeAndroid 4y ago
Completely agree. Since I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the good community run wikis others have posted, I’ll shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging into the lore of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.

insightcheck 4y ago

The more fragile presence of the information is actually a feature to some. If messages are more permanent and accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of having a free-flowing conversation. I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.

joe-collins 4y ago
On the one hand, I met my partner in a community that uses Discord, so I can't disagree that developing relationships there can work. On the other, the flip-side of free-flowing conversation is endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>" "check the pins".
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>" "check the pins". This was still a thing back during the days of forums. No, reading comprehension in humanity hasn't improved over the last 20~30 years.
  - antifa 4y ago
    But back then you could google it.
lazyasciiart 4y ago
Yes, but not for e.g technical help channels. I don't want a personal relationship with another user of xx OSS tool - I want to search for the error message and find previous answers.

holler 4y ago

Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im and I'm interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...

throwaway1851 4y ago

Discord’s UX is a disaster for most of the things I’ve seen Discord used for. Lately, I don’t even bother trying.

Nowado 4y ago
It just keeps happening. People used email lists for everything, then forums for everything, subreddits for everything and companies are now using slack for everything. It is not in anyone's interest to educate users on picking communication tool for their purpose.

conductr 4y ago

Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People were helping others and I could find it later. Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.

jamiek88 4y ago
Expert sex change! Blast from the past. Pen Island too!