I have been running a wiki for more than a decade for people to use as they see fit. Its no longer possible because for each person visiting you have ten thousand bots scrapping indiscriminately. Effectively I must pay for a server for the "AI" bros to build LLMs to serve the same information in chatbot format (and collect payment 😡 )
The wiki is now behind a login. But even that will not survive. LLM's impersonating real people (e.g by filling forms) is getting easier by the day.
@openrisk sorry to hear that, how much has the traffic load reduced ever since you implemented that feature?
@madeindex oh, the bot traffic is substantially gone.
But once behind a login, old style search engines (google, bing etc.) don't index you either, so you effectively vanish.
Now the users are only people who already had bookmarked the wiki (and bother to request an account).
And since 95% have an gmail accounts, its again down to mama Google 🤦
You couldn't design a worse internet if you tried really hard.
@openrisk how about making the intro without login and then login to read more? :)
@madeindex yep, the landing page is like that already (and maybe there is more to think along this direction, like have some dedicated namespace that is public etc.)
But wikis (like wikipedia itself) were designed to be open. For a friendly collaborating internet, not a hostile one...
Not clear to me how we could ever restore that environment. People have not realized that it was not a given and if you don't nurture your nice things they die.
