Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche.
How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...
Gotta make the most profit possible. At any cost.
Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time your Internet connection would have come with some hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give you a space to put your content that's framed with ads.
As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game.
In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat.
Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.
On the other, the flip-side of free-flowing conversation is endless rounds of "hi guys, new here, <novice question>" "check the pins".
This was still a thing back during the days of forums.
No, reading comprehension in humanity hasn't improved over the last 20~30 years.
Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.
People used email lists for everything, then forums for everything, subreddits for everything and companies are now using slack for everything. It is not in anyone's interest to educate users on picking communication tool for their purpose.
I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.