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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

I am slightly on the fence about this. If the goal is simply to provide a good platform for people to create and share information with each other, then it shouldn't matter if the wiki is indexed in Google or not, in fact "invisibility" might even increase the quality of contributions.

OTOH if the goal is to monetize other people's contributions then yes, I totally get why the "Google jail" would be bad for that, but I'm just not sure that its a cause worth fighting for- that road basically leads to a new Fandom.

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That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google "<game> <place where I'm stuck>" and completely miss the wiki. Or "<game> <mechanic>". Etc. So reachability and proper indexing by search engines is a must.

I've hit this on a few wikis where, for some (at the time inexplicable) reason, I'd get only the crappy Fandom wiki with above queries, and a good wiki when searching only for "<game> wiki" after seeing a link to it on reddit.

When the reason is to move away from Fandom, get people what they are looking for, and perhaps attract contributors, this is an issue. Your average gamer won't route through the Wiki's main page, rather rely on the top Google search result for their issue.

> That's ignoring how video game wikis are used. People will google "<game> <place where I'm stuck>" and completely miss the wiki. Or "<game> <mechanic>". Etc. So reachability and proper indexing by search engines is a must.

Well, it's a "must" because over the years people have been trained to do this, instead of going directly to a quality website they trust. However, this has also trained website owners to neglect their brand and focus only on SEO, leading to the ad-infested wiki sites we have today.

Google went through all of this many (many) years ago with the "content farm" problem, so this is nothing new, really.

I think this logic falls apart if you realize that wikis only "work" when you're able to get some of the readers to turn into long-term contributors, and losing 90% of your traffic by not showing up on Google is a great way to kill that funnel.

There's a ton of historical evidence of wiki migrations (1) starting out with all of the editors and none of the readers, (2) not doing anything to get those readers to the new site, and (3) ultimately losing the whole war because the reader->editor flow was still happening on the Fandom wiki. "Invisibility" is absolutely not desirable here, even if your only goal is maximizing the amount of good contributions.

Yes, but the point is that maybe in 2026 we should be looking at ways to pay contributors/creators, rather than steal from them (slightly hyperbolic, but you get the gist)

The financialisation of all hobbies is extreemely toxic and that's what you're perpetuating here.

Interestingly since people brought up the RuneScape wiki, RuneScape is a demonstration. They financialised the game around 2011, it went down the shitter, player numbers dropped, then plummeted once they turned it into a shitty WoW clone. They revived an old backup one day as an experiment and it grew to actually have 5 times more players than the enshittified original. It's not still running the backup - they've evolved it alongside the main game but with players having veto power over almost every single decision. Turns out they know what they like in the game, who knew.

I think it's fair to say that if the wiki's intent is to share information with people, you want people (and not just the inner circle of those in the know) to be able to find it. And the way most people find things is on Google.

Personally I liked it 10 years ago when I searched for something and Google actually delivered useful results that were related to what I was searching. Nowadays, when I search for anything, I mostly get blogspam, ai slop and useless articles or in the very best scenario, good content on a page infested with ads (luckily there's ublock origin).

So yeah, when my goal is to search for content that would be in a wiki, I'm ecstatic when I get an independent wiki over fandom. The Google Jail is the opposite of what I'd want.

Nowadays, I use Kagi which is better than Google but it's still not to the level of Google in 2010.

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