Comment on Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter?

• rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  • The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.

  • Donations only “work” if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don’t see a penny out of it.

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t see that big a difference there tbh. The WMF nowadays also has a paid trust and safety team like a social media platform.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      • The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.

      • Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.

      • The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.

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      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        • most data on WMF servers is media files, most of them photos; Wikimedia Commons has at this point nearly 100 million of those; probably still less than many social media sites, though
        • this is true, but many people on social media are also only lurkers
        • the WMF projects get lots of changes every minute, just look at the recent changes page

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  • renormalizer@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Isn’t that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don’t see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don’t see why small donations shouldn’t cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      (on reddit) content creators and mods don’t see a penny either.

      Yeah, but since when is this considered fair? Facebook has one million faults, but at the very least they pay their moderation and safety teams.

      The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.

      Is there any donation-based instance where the admins can make a living out of their labor? Even mastodon.social with more than 6 million users can only manage to have two developers on payroll, and they pay themselves a ridiculously low salary.

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