<story><title>Helping wikis move away from Fandom</title><url>https://weirdgloop.org/blog/why-were-helping-more-wikis-move-away-from-fandom</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnklos</author><text>This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see.&lt;p&gt;People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn&amp;#x27;t like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up!&lt;p&gt;What they don&amp;#x27;t see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they&amp;#x27;re too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increase, but of course they don&amp;#x27;t take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads.&lt;p&gt;If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn&amp;#x27;t do these things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MetaWhirledPeas</author><text>&amp;gt; If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn&amp;#x27;t do these things.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile &lt;i&gt;vision&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;legacy&lt;/i&gt; have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level.&lt;p&gt;How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that&amp;#x27;s granted based on short term shareholder results.&lt;p&gt;And it doesn&amp;#x27;t help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is &lt;i&gt;for the shareholders&lt;/i&gt; first and foremost, and what&amp;#x27;s a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).</text></comment>
<story><title>Helping wikis move away from Fandom</title><url>https://weirdgloop.org/blog/why-were-helping-more-wikis-move-away-from-fandom</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnklos</author><text>This illustrates a problem that I wish more people would see.&lt;p&gt;People, usually businesspeople, consider adding some craptastic thing such as intrusive ads, to make more money. Who doesn&amp;#x27;t like more money? They add the thing, and revenue goes up!&lt;p&gt;What they don&amp;#x27;t see is the effect that comes when fewer people visit the site because they&amp;#x27;re too annoyed to come back over time. They see and take credit for the small increase, but of course they don&amp;#x27;t take credit for the gradual decline afterwards, a decline that often enough leaves the site making the same or less money than it did before the craptastic ads.&lt;p&gt;If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn&amp;#x27;t do these things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zhobbs</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s usually due to incentives and the time horizon you&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you&amp;#x27;re probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).&lt;p&gt;The reality is that some businesses shouldn&amp;#x27;t take VC money and shouldn&amp;#x27;t get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.</text></comment>