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Comment by yellowapple | Hacker News Reader

Not just news sites, either. A lot of fandom wikis run on the same platform, fandom.com. That site is a pain in the absolute fucking ass to use on any mobile device, specifically because of the autoplaying video that takes up half the screen on every page load. Weirdly, desktop is fine; no autoplaying videos or any such nonsense. It's only on mobile that Fandom has seemingly made a deliberate effort to make the user experience as frustrating as possible. And not once has the video had even a tangential relationship to the article being viewed.

The worst part is that uBlock Origin's element picker doesn't work on Firefox for Android (or if it does, I haven't figured out how to use it), so on the one platform where it's maximally annoying I can't do anything to block it.

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Angela Beesley hasn’t been associated with Wikia since 2012. I don’t know when this happened to you but the site has gone through a lot of ownership changes over the years.

And I don’t care what else Jimmy Wales has done, for profit or otherwise — Wikipedia is a goddamn gift and the world would be hurt tremendously if it ever shut down. It’s probably the only non-profit I donate to regularly.

Wikia was never actually good, but they were never this bad, as when they sold out to some capital and start squeezing every penny from every pixel on the screen.

Right now, fandom.com is basically unusable. Unfortunately, as some info that is there is nowhere else.

As long as people keep giving their free time to private websites who host the content they create ransom, it'll continue.

I never realized wikia was so closely connected to the wikimedia. I'm a bit shocked.

Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona? I'm not defending what happened to you. It's surprising to me that even someone like Jimmy Wales, who pioneered the most impactful knowledge-sharing project in the world, is vilified by some people.

> Who in tech do you hold up as an ideal persona?

For me it is mjg59 and maybe Miguel de Icaza, also maybe Linus Torvalds

Kelsey Hightower

No one. Every name I can think of has had some great ideas, and some truly cockeyed are-you-kidding-me-seriously" moments.

Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from.

Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.

Tim Berners-Lee

If you're using Firefox on Android then under settings > site permissions. Set block auto play to video and audio. For some unknown reason video is set to play by default. This seems to work at blocking the fandom crap for me. I also have ublock origin installed.

Hosted mediawiki isn't cheap, so I don't see another player coming into the market. The consolidation of gamepedia into "Fandom" is the worst in this respect.

Hosted mediawiki is plenty cheap. When wikicities became Wikia they added some ads. They eventually redesigned it to look like a monstrosity because the $. I moved my very large wiki, which eventually became dnd-wiki.org, off of it at this point and self hosted it for a $10/mo virtual machine. Then Wikia became fandom and somehow became even worse.

It is cheap. Plenty of us left at the time Wikia became garbage and went independent. It just requires technical know how that most people don't have.

For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.

For me - no problem. I have a few side projects and I shell out around 15 - 25 Euros each month.

But I know a lot of people who would love to do stuff like that and have no way of at least being easily reimbursed by the community for their efforts.

A community of 50 people could be financing this with 20 cents each per month.

But as privacy intrusive advertising became the norm no solution ever grew enough to become feasible for the masses.

I remember the flattr button. I used flattr for a while. But in the end I stopped.

tl;dr 10 bucks are not cheap to anybody. I wish easy micropayments were a thing.

> For a lot of people 10 dollars a month isn't cheap.

I'm aware of this, but you need to keep in mind that we were one of the largest wikis on Wikia (in the top 30 iirc). That's the only reason it cost $10/month.

Most of the wikis on Wikia were tiny, got small traffic, and could have probably been hosted with mine on my VM without even affecting mine.

The last metric that I calculated to host a small wiki on Gamepedia was about $3 USD per month. It is probably a bit higher than that now. That included costs for hosting through AWS next to large wikis like Minecraft Wiki that would easily be a large majority of the monthly costs.(Game updates would vastly skew the monthly costs for each of the large wikis.)

It was always fun seeing the traffic spikes during large game updates though

Memory Alpha (primary Star Trek wiki) is another one that was self-hosted and as a user of it I mostly just accepted that sometimes it would be down due to Mediawiki upgrades or traffic reasons or otherwise. They also migrated to Wikia when shared hosting seemed like a better deal than hosting Mediawiki themselves, and now in the "Fandom" age it's just irritating that it is no longer just disconnected shared hosting (which Wikia had briefly promised to Memory Alpha that it would stay independent) and is now such a blatant advertising infested cash grab. I don't directly know who runs that wiki, but I do sometimes wonder (as a user) if they regret the consolidation (and if they have any escape plans).

I'd say the worst part is that Firefox has a feature for blocking auto playing video. But it never works.

I don't understand why there isn't a browser feature that would simply disable all and any support for <video> and <audio> elements, or ask you a permission before a website can create any. It's really that simple. No need to try, and fail, to figure out which videos are "safe" to autoplay and which aren't. Let the user decide.

I've seen sites that autoplay video by implementing a JS h264 decoder that renders to a <canvas> element. Developers will go to significant lengths to work around browser permissions.

That's... actually viable? You can decode h264 in real time in JS with a single thread that also runs the UI?!

Sometimes I have this crazy thought that we maybe, just maybe, should undo all the JS performance optimizations in browsers. So JS again becomes the macro language for hypertext documents it's meant to be, not an "application platform".

Oh, there's worse. Some video chat apps encode in software. The magical browser APIs don't always give you enough control to do what you want with the video stream, so they just output the video stream into a hidden canvas, screenshot the canvas 20 times a second, and throw the frames at ffmpeg.js ...

Or just have browsers disable javascript by default and require explicit permission to use it.

90+% of web pages shouldn't need it for anything.

Or make a dead-slow subset that doesn’t eat cpu cycles, but schedules 10-20 ops every 1ms. And then enable full-speed if the user asks. Ads guys would then resurrect a demoscene spirit out of it. Ah, dreams.

I'd be a lot more in favour of ads if they had more copper effects and shadebobs.

That's... actually viable?

Developers who do things like that probably aren't checking whether their code works well on any machines besides their own.

Easy, install Edge.

https://therecord.media/microsoft-silently-enables-super-dup...

Although I guess this isn't the answer you're looking for.

lol. This reminds me of IE's "Enhanced Security Mode" where they disabled pretty much everything in the browser. This was pre-configured on Windows Server (probably still is). The browser is pretty much useless in this state, so the only way to get what you needed from a browser was to make it "unsafe." Too unsafe for servers with experienced tech people using them, but just fine for the general public on a desktop.

Makes me miss the days of Flash because I could block everything video, audio and animation related with FlashBlock.

uMatrix can do that, but it is unmaintained. uBlock Origin uses the same engine as it and probably can do that too.

I suspect that's because you can programmatically start video playback from within event handlers. That's necessary because otherwise any site that use custom playback controls will break. However, that also means malicious sites can implement "autoplay" by adding a onmousedown/onscroll/touchstart event handler and starting playback from there. Video playback will start the moment you try to interact with the page in any way.

> any site that use custom playback controls will break

Is that actually a bad thing?

I have no idea about video playback controls, but in every other instance I've noticed where sites implement their own custom versions of browser controls, it's been absolutely terrible.

Custom scrollbars, or lack thereof. Custom drop-down lists, which never support keyboard input properly. And so on.

And even if I'm wrong, and custom video playback controls are somehow desirable, why should they be supported for any event except onclick?

>why should they be supported for any event except onclick?

obvious example would be articles with scrolling effects (eg. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-...), and need to autoplay videos when they scroll into view. That said, even if you restricted it to onclick, I don't imagine it's too hard for a page to receive a stray click (eg. if you're randomly selecting stuff) to trigger playback.

Why, as a user, would I want a page to begin playing a video as a result of scrolling?

> articles with scrolling effects

That is not a legitimate example of a good thing. That's a legitimate example of something that shouldn't be a thing

In your opinion. Being someone who hates these autoplay videos on news sites I can also see that examples like OP's are a valid and when done well interesting new firm of story telling.

It is imho very valid to experiment with new forms of multimedia mixed stories.

And just because some people abuse features that enable this we should not try to stifle innovative ideas as a whole imho.

I just don't use sites that do this anymore. I mean the abusal part.

That seems solvable, for example by blocking programmatic control of playback until you allow it for a given video element. That way it only "breaks" when the user wants it to be "broken".

With some ad blocking I can at least get the videos to stop playing. The black rectangles are only slightly less annoying, though.

It is incredibly annoying. My other "favorite" is AMP reddit which will autoplay some video with sound completely unrelated to the link you clicked on somewhere down the page. How the hell autoplaying video leads to ACCELERATED mobile pages I have no clue.

A few months back I opened a link to a new article using an in-app browser (no ad-blockers). I kid you not, upon initial load the entireiy of the screen was ads or "annoyances". The one thing missing was the entire reason I clicked on the link.

Every time I use Fandom without logging in, I will be faced with similar experience. A pop-up video with ads about the content it tried to promote (sometimes related to the content of the Wiki I visited, but mostly not) will play automatically, and I have to stop it every time.

As I am a contributor to some of the Fandom Wiki, I have to log in in order to make the promoted video goes away, which it did. But logging in in order to get rid of it is not a solution to this. Video shouldn't be popped up like this, let alone played automatically. I would tolerate a static ad to some degree, but this is not what I'm willing to.

Isn't most (all?) of the content on fandom.com under a Creative Commons license? Is there anything stopping someone from scraping all the content and forking the projects, giving it a more humane and user-friendly interface?

I’m currently working with a number of folks to fork a wiki off of Fandom.

Forking the content itself is easy but good luck beating Fandom on a search page.

The origin story for this is reminiscent of how AO3 got going. Maybe if you partner with them, make a "Wiki Of Our Own" sister project, it would get more traction and then move up the search rankings organically?

Although checking the AO3 wiki page, man I didn't expect them to have hosting costs that high.

Do you have a project site? I might be interested in contributing.

We’re not doing badly for ranking, because we’ve engaged with the wider community and got many of the larger sites to link to us instead of Fandom, but for folks that want to fork all this stuff it is worth thinking about.

The site in question is https://www.poewiki.net

This is really a problem with google, overvaluing big sites with many subsections/articles compared to independent sites.

Still sucks to have to add "overwiki" or "uesp" to search terms all the time.

Yeah, its significantly worse with a fork though as you’ll be hit with duplicate content penalties

Yeah that mobile experience is just about as bad as you can make it. Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing crypto mining in the browser...at least that's what my device temperatures are implying.

I'm always thankful for the game communities that still have independently hosted wikis so that I can avoid that fandom/wikia mess.

uBlock Origin's element picker mode works just fine for me on Firefox Android.

uBlock Origin's element picker works fine for me in Firefox for Android, and always has, try again! Thank you, gorhill and co.

How do you activate it?

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