Hidden beneath concrete at San Pedro High School, construction workers found a buried secret — thousands of marine fossils echoing Palos Verdes Peninsula’s ancient geological past.
Researchers uncovered two distinct sites on campus where new buildings were under construction: a bone bed dating back 8.7 million years in the Miocene era and a shell bed about 120,000 years old from the Pleistocene era.
With construction of the buildings now completed, scientists are focusing on learning what they can from the fossils that date back several million years.
“There’s never been this type of density of fossils ever found at a site like this before in California,” said Wayne Bischoff, the director of cultural resources at Envicom Corp., who managed the collection of the fossils that were excavated. “It’s the largest marine bone bed found in Los Angeles and Orange counties.”
Bischoff said the marine fossils align with what researchers already knew: that for most of Los Angeles’s geological history, the land has been underwater.
“We’re kind of like detectives,” said Richard Behl, a geologist at Long Beach State.
Behl is testing the chemical and mineral composition of the fossil blocks, hoping scientists can learn more about these prehistoric environments including the atmosphere and the conditions that enabled animal remains to fossilize. “We got to find clues and piece those clues together.”
The fossils dating to the Miocene were encased in a type of fossilized algae called diatomite. Behl said the diatomite tells him that the area was nutrient rich with algae that supported a complex ecosystem including dolphins, fish and whales that crowded the area for food. Alongside the marine animals, Bischoff said he was excited to find an entire shore ecology that included skulls of sandpipers and pieces of driftwood in the bone bed.
“Once we started realizing that we had a mix of shore material ... I started thinking that there may have been an extinct island off the coast,” Bischoff said.
Bischoff hypothesized that during the Miocene era, a heavy storm washed plant and animal debris down from a prehistoric island into a submarine canyon before mud sealed the organic materials into a layer of sediment. Tectonic activity and receding ocean waters revealed those fossils after millions of years.
“After their experience on this site, [scientists] have started looking for other extinct islands,” Bischoff said. “It looks like there was a lot of islands that would form and then dissipate in the Channel Island zone.”
On campus, the construction of new buildings has beencompleted and 80% of the fossil blocks found in 2022 have been passed on to research and educational institutions, Bischoff said. Those fossils are now split among the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Cal State Channel Islands and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
This summer, Austin Hendy, an assistant curator at the Natural History Museum who specializes in invertebrate paleontology, spent hours sifting and sorting through thousands of fossilized shells found in the shell bed.
The discovery has inspired at least one high school student to study the past as a way to understand the present.
“It was sort of like gold panning,” said Milad Esfahani, a San Pedro High student, who helped Hendy sort the fossils by size. “I would be tasked with looking for tiny, microscopic fossils like an 8th to 16th of an inch in size.”
It was the first time that Milad, a 17 year-old senior, had held a 125,000-year-old fossil and now he hopes to study marine paleontology at a university as he applies to colleges this fall.
The Natural History Museum hasn’t announced plans to display the fossils found under the school but already has a marine paleontology section on display called L.A. Underwater.
Hendy hopes that next summer he can work with another student to develop a display at San Pedro High School as part of the efforts to educate and engage the public on L.A.’s prehistoric past.
“Discovery can continue to happen — these blocks, they erode very slowly,” Hendy said of the fossil blocks extracted from the school. “We hope that the students and the public will be able to sort of clamber over these rocks in the years to come and be inspired by what they find.”
Although the work can be laborious and may seem pedantic to others, scientists such as Behl are drawn to this work because it reveals how our present is still being shaped by the Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history.
“It’s a real window into what the geography of the oceans and land were at the time when this occurred,” Behl said. “Even though that seems a long time ago, that has real impact upon everything we got today.”
In fact, many Angelenos rely on fossils to run everyday errands — they fuel our gas tanks.
“Those diatoms in that diatomite is what gives rise to the oil in Los Angeles” and the automobile and aeronautical industries, Hendy said. “The city owes its history to geology.”
On Monday, chipmaker Qualcomm confirmed that hackers exploited a zero-day — meaning a security flaw that was unknown to the hardware maker when it was abused — in dozens of its chipsets found in popular Android devices.
The zero-day vulnerability, officially designated CVE-2024-43047, “may be under limited, targeted exploitation,” according to Qualcomm, citing unspecified “indications” from Google’s Threat Analysis Group, the company’s research unit that investigates government hacking threats. Amnesty International’s Security Lab, which works to protect civil society from digital surveillance and spyware threats, confirmed Google’s assessment, Qualcomm said.
U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA included the Qualcomm flaw in its list of vulnerabilities that are known to be, or have been, exploited.
At this point, there aren’t many details about who was exploiting this vulnerability “in the wild” — meaning that whoever was using the zero-day was targeting individuals in real hacking campaigns. It also is not yet known which individuals were targeted, or why.
Qualcomm’s spokesperson Catherine Baker told TechCrunch that the company commends “the researchers from Google Project Zero and Amnesty International Security Lab for using coordinated disclosure practices,” allowing the company to roll out fixes for the vulnerability.
The chipmaker referred to Amnesty and Google for more details about the threat activity.
Amnesty spokesperson Hajira Maryam told TechCrunch that the nonprofit will have research about this vulnerability “due to be out soon.”
Google spokesperson Kimberly Samra said TAG has nothing to add at the moment.
Qualcomm’s spokesperson said that “fixes have been made available to our customers as of September 2024.” It’s now up to Qualcomm’s customers — the Android device makers that use the vulnerable chipsets — to release the patch to their customers’ devices.
In its advisory, Qualcomm listed 64 different chipsets affected by this vulnerability, including the company’s flagship Snapdragon 8 (Gen 1) mobile platform, which is used in dozens of Android phones, including some made by Motorola, Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, and ZTE — meaning millions of users around the world are potentially vulnerable.
That being said, the fact that Google and Amnesty are investigating the use of this zero-day under “limited, targeted exploitation” suggests the hacking campaign was likely used against specific individuals, rather than a large number of targets.
Brian Heater contributed reporting.
UPDATE, October 9, 1:07 p.m. ET: This story was updated to include Amnesty’s comment.
On Wednesday, NYC-based software developer Nick Spreen received a surprising alert on his iPhone 15 Pro, delivered through an early test version of Apple's upcoming Apple Intelligence text message summary feature. "No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment," the AI-penned message reads, summing up the content of several separate breakup texts from his girlfriend—that arrived on his birthday, no less.
Spreen shared a screenshot of the AI-generated message in a now-viral tweet on the X social network, writing, "for anyone who’s wondered what an apple intelligence summary of a breakup text looks like."
This summary feature of Apple Intelligence, announced by the iPhone maker in June, isn't expected to fully ship until an iOS 18.1 update in the fall. However, it has been available in a public beta test of iOS 18 since July, which is what Spreen is running on his iPhone. It works akin to something like a stripped-down ChatGPT, reading your incoming text messages and delivering its own simplified version of their content.
On X, Spreen replied to skepticism over whether the message was real in a follow-up post. "Yes this was real / yes it happened yesterday / yes it was my birthday," Spreen wrote. In response to a question about it being a fair summary of his girlfriend's messages, he wrote, "it is."
We reached out to Spreen directly via email and he delivered his own summary of his girlfriend's messages. "It was something along the lines of i can’t believe you just did that, we’re done, i want my stuff. we had an argument in a bar and I got up and left, then she sent the text," he wrote.
How did he feel about getting the news via AI summary? "I do feel like it added a level of distance to it that wasn’t a bad thing," he told Ars Technica. "Maybe a bit like a personal assistant who stays professional and has your back even in the most awful situations, but yeah, more than anything it felt unreal and dystopian."
The parents of a 19-year-old Connecticut honors student accused of taking part in a $243 million cryptocurrency heist in August were carjacked a week later — while out house-hunting in a brand new Lamborghini. Prosecutors say the couple was beaten and briefly kidnapped by six young men who traveled from Florida as part of a botched plan to hold the parents for ransom.
Image: ABC7NY. youtube.com/watch?v=xoiaGzwrunY
Late in the afternoon of Aug. 25, 2024 in Danbury, Ct., a married couple in their 50s pulled up to a gated community in a new Lamborghini Urus (investigators say the sports car still had temporary tags) when they were intentionally rear-ended by a Honda Civic.
A witness told police they saw three men exit a van that was following the Honda, and said the men began assaulting the couple and forcing them into the van. Local police officers spotted the van speeding from the scene and pursued it, only to find the vehicle crashed and abandoned a short distance away.
Inside the disabled van the police found the couple with their hands and feet bound in duct tape, the man visibly bruised after being assaulted with a baseball bat. Danbury police soon reported arresting six suspects in the kidnapping, all men aged 18-26 from Florida. They also recovered the abandoned Lamborghini from a wooded area.
A criminal complaint (PDF) filed on Sept. 24 against the six men does not name the victims, referring to them only as a married couple from Danbury with the initials R.C. and S.C. But prosecutors in Connecticut said they were targeted “because the co-conspirators believed the victims’ son had access to significant amounts of digital currency.”
What made the Miami men so convinced R.C. and S.C.’s son was loaded with cryptocurrency? Approximately one week earlier, on Aug. 19, a group of cybercriminals that allegedly included the couple’s son executed a sophisticated phone-based social engineering attack in which they stole $243 million worth of cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C.
That’s according to ZachXBT, a frequently cited crypto crime investigator who published a lengthy thread that broke down how the theft was carried out and ultimately exposed by the perpetrators themselves.
ZachXBT’s post included a screen recording of a Discord chat session made by one of the participants to the $243 million robbery, noting that two of the people involved managed to leak the username of the Microsoft Windows PCs they were using to participate in the chat.
One of the usernames leaked during the chat was Veer Chetal. According to ZachXBT, that name corresponds to a 19-year-old from Danbury who allegedly goes by the nickname “Wiz,” although in the leaked video footage he allegedly used the handle “Swag.” Swag was reportedly involved in executing the early stages of the crypto heist — gaining access to the victim’s Gmail and iCloud accounts.
A still shot from a video screenshare in which one of the participants on the Discord voice chat used the Windows username Veer Chetal. Image: x.com/zachxbt
The same day ZachXBT published his findings, a criminal indictment was issued in Washington D.C. charging two of the men he named as involved in the heist. Prosecutors allege Malone “Greavys” Lam, 20, of Miami and Los Angeles, and Jeandiel “Box” Serrano, 21, of Los Angeles conspired to steal and launder over $230 million in cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C. The indictment alleges Lam and Serrano were helped by other unnamed co-conspirators.
“Lam and Serrano then allegedly spent the laundered cryptocurrency proceeds on international travel, nightclubs, luxury automobiles, watches, jewelry, designer handbags, and rental homes in Los Angeles and Miami,” reads a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
By tracing the flow of funds stolen in the heist, ZachXBT concluded that Wiz received a large percentage from the theft, noting that “additional comfort [in naming him as involved] was gained as throughout multiple recordings accomplices refer to him as ‘Veer’ on audio and in chats.”
“A cluster of [cryptocurrency] addresses tied to both Box/Wiz received $41M+ from two exchanges over the past few weeks primarily flowing to luxury goods brokers to purchase cars, watches, jewelry, and designer clothes,” ZachXBT wrote.
KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Veer Chetal, and from his parents — Radhika Chetal and Suchil Chetal. This story will be updated in the event that anyone representing the Chetal family responds. Veer Chetal has not been publicly charged with any crime.
According to a news brief published by a private Catholic high school in Danbury that Veer Chetal attended, in 2022 he successfully completed Harvard’s Future Lawyers Program, a “unique pre-professional program where students, guided by qualified Harvard undergraduate instructors, learn how to read and build a case, how to write position papers, and how to navigate a path to law school.” A November 2022 story at patch.com quoted Veer Chetal (class of 2024) crediting the Harvard program with his decision to pursue a career in law.
It remains unclear which Chetal family member acquired the 2023 Lamborghini Urus, which has a starting price of around $233,000. Sushil Chetal’s LinkedIn profile says he is a vice president at the investment bank Morgan Stanley.
It is clear that other alleged co-conspirators to the $243 million heist displayed a conspicuous consumption of wealth following the date of the heist. ZachXBT’s post chronicled Malone’s flashy lifestyle, in which he allegedly used the stolen money to purchase more than 10 vehicles, rent palatial properties, travel with friends on chartered jets, and spend between $250,000 and $500,000 a night at clubs in Los Angeles and Miami.
In the photo on the bottom right, Greavys/Lam is the individual on the left wearing shades. They are pictured leaving a luxury goods store. Image: x.com/zachxbt
WSVN-TV in Miami covered an FBI raid of a large rented waterfront home around the time Malone and Serrano were arrested. The news station interviewed a neighbor of the home’s occupants, who reported a recent large party at the residence wherein the street was lined with high-end luxury vehicles — all of them with temporary paper tags.
ZachXBT unearthed a video showing a person identified as Wiz at a Miami nightclub earlier this year, wherein they could be seen dancing to the crowd’s chants while holding an illuminated sign with the message, “I win it all.”
It appears that all of the suspects in the cyber heist (and at least some of the alleged carjackers) are members of The Com, an archipelago of crime-focused chat communities which collectively functions as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network that facilitates instant collaboration.
As documented in last month’s deep dive on top Com members, The Com is also a place where cybercriminals go to boast about their exploits and standing within the community, or to knock others down a peg or two. Prominent Com members are endlessly sniping over who pulled off the most impressive heists, or who has accumulated the biggest pile of stolen virtual currencies.
And as often as they extort and rob victims for financial gain, members of The Com are trying to wrest stolen money from their cybercriminal rivals — often in ways that spill over into physical violence in the real world.
One of the six Miami-area men arrested in the carjacking and extortion plot gone awry — Reynaldo “Rey” Diaz — was shot twice while parked in his bright yellow Corvette in Miami’s design district in 2022. In an interview with a local NBC television station, Diaz said he was probably targeted for the jewelry he was wearing, which he described as “pretty expensive.”
KrebsOnSecurity has learned Diaz also went by the alias “Pantic” on Telegram chat channels dedicated to stealing cryptocurrencies. Pantic was known for participating in several much smaller cyber heists in the past, and spending most of his cut on designer clothes and jewelry.
The Corvette that Diaz was sitting in when he was shot in 2022. Image: NBC 6, South Florida.
Earlier this year, Diaz was “doxed,” or publicly outed as Pantic, with his personal and family information posted on a harassment and extortion channel frequented by members of The Com. The reason cited for Pantic’s doxing was widely corroborated by multiple Com members: Pantic had inexplicably robbed two close friends at gunpoint, one of whom recently died of a drug overdose.
Government prosecutors say the brazen daylight carjacking was paid for and organized by 23-year-old Miami resident Angel “Chi Chi” Borrero. In 2022, Borrero was arrested in Miami for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
The six Miami men face charges including first-degree assault, kidnapping and reckless endangerment, and five of them are being held on a $1 million bond. One suspect is also charged with reckless driving, engaging police in pursuit and evading responsibility; his bond was set at $2 million. Lam and Serrano are each charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to launder money.
Cybercriminals hail from all walks of life and income levels, but some of the more accomplished cryptocurrency thieves also tend to be among the more privileged, and from relatively well-off families. In other words, these individuals aren’t stealing to put food on the table: They’re doing it so they can amass all the trappings of instant wealth, and so they can boast about their crimes to others on The Com.
There is also a penchant among this crowd to call attention to their activities in conspicuous ways that hasten their arrest and criminal charging. In many ways, the story arc of the young men allegedly involved in the $243 million heist tracks closely to that of Joel Ortiz, a valedictorian who was sentenced in 2019 to 10 years in prison for stealing more than $5 million in cryptocurrencies.
Ortiz famously posted videos of himself and co-conspirators chartering flights and partying it up at LA nightclubs, with scantily clad women waving giant placards bearing their “OG” usernames — highly-prized, single-letter social media accounts that they’d stolen or purchased stolen from others.
Ortiz earned the distinction of being the first person convicted of SIM-swapping, a crime that involves using mobile phone company insiders or compromised employee accounts to transfer a target’s phone number to a mobile device controlled by the attackers. From there, the attacker can intercept any password reset links, and any one-time passcodes sent via SMS or automated voice calls.
But as the mobile carriers seek to make their networks less hospitable to SIM-swappers, and as more financial platforms seek to harden user account security, today’s crypto thieves are finding they don’t need SIM-swaps to steal obscene amounts of cryptocurrency. Not when tricking people over the phone remains such an effective approach.
According to ZachXBT, the crooks responsible for the $243 million theft initially compromised the target’s personal accounts after calling them as Google Support and using a spoofed number. The attackers also spoofed a call from account support representatives at the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, claiming the target’s account had been hacked.
From there the target was social engineered over the phone into resetting multi-factor authentication and sending Gemini funds to a compromised wallet. ZachXBT says the attackers also convinced the victim to use AnyDesk to share their screen, and in doing so the victim leaked their private keys.
Starting a new car company isn't easy—just ask Henrik Fisker, whose second bite at that particular cherry ended the same way as his first when it filed for bankruptcy this July. At the time, Fisker said it wanted to try to "preserve certain customer programs," but Ars wondered what this actually meant, particularly now that electric vehicles are so dependent on software support and cloud connectivity. Now, thanks to a recent court filing spotted by TechCrunch, we know the answer: nothing good.
Car publications were already warning consumers to steer clear of the Ocean as early as this March, despite massive price cuts that saw these electric SUVs being offered for less than $25,000. A New York-based company called American Lease was less deterred by this warning and in June agreed to purchase the remaining Fisker inventory—approximately 3,300 cars for a total of $46.3 million dollars. By October, American Lease had paid Fisker $42.5 million and had taken delivery of about 1,100 Oceans.
That was the plan until the end of last week, at least. Last Friday evening, Fisker informed American Lease that the Oceans "cannot, as a technical matter, be 'ported' from the Fisker server to which the vehicles are currently linked to a distinct server owned and/or controlled by" American Lease.
Hi! You may have seen that Weird Gloop is now hosting the official League of Legends Wiki. We’ve spent the last couple months working with the Riot folks and the League wiki editors to move it off of Fandom, and turn it into something the players will (hopefully!) really dig. I also love that it got started because one of the Riot guys plays a ton of Old School RuneScape and thinks our wiki is awesome. How cool is that??
I want this to kick off a new era where communities and developers take control from Fandom, and make some really great wikis. We’ve already been doing a bit of this, starting when we helped the Minecraft Wiki leave Fandom, but I think it’s time for me (and the rest of our group) to be more explicit about what we want to do.
So if you’re any of these things:
A frustrated wiki editor trying to figure out your options
A community manager trying to get internal support for an official wiki
Someone contemplating making a new wiki
I will give you (free, very specific) advice on how to get your wiki off Fandom, and make a kickass wiki somewhere else. We might even be able to host you ourselves.
This post (and many others) have done a much better job than I could, explaining from a reader’s perspective why Fandom is bad place to host a wiki, but I thought it might be useful to give my take on it as a long-time wiki editor.
I love wikis. I think it’s unbelievably cool that this completely insane idea (“what if we just had a website that anyone can edit?”) doesn’t descend into anarchy, and instead self-organizes into a fun, project-oriented community. I think that despite its flaws, Wikipedia is the single coolest thing the internet has ever done. And wikis on niche topics feel like some of the last remnants of a friendlier, more collaborative, early 2000s web. I loved contributing to wikis, building something with other people, and feeling a sense of ownership (and pride that so many people were using stuff I made).
Which is why it’s so concerning that Fandom has taken this wonderful concept and turned it into one of the most dreadful parts of the internet. Being deeply involved with the RuneScape Wiki on Fandom had a huge psychological cost – what wonderful thing did they add today that made our wiki harder to use? Scammy green link ads? Comically bad videos on the top of our most popular pages? Garbage AI-generated Q&A? Ads that take up literally 100% of the content window?
I (and so many others) had spent countless nights trying to make the best possible resource for RuneScape, and it was brutal to realize that it didn’t matter how hard we worked or creative we were – our wiki was never gonna be that great, because Fandom was in charge. That sense of ownership and pride…slowly turned into feeling like my passion was being exploited by a company that didn’t want the same things I did.
We weren’t the only ones feeling this way, of course – some wiki communities got fed up and moved somewhere independent. But here’s the key thing you need to understand: even when a wiki community unanimously wants to leave, Fandom keeps their copy of the wiki up, even though it no longer has a community. Google remembers years of people searching, linking, and visiting the Fandom wiki URLs, and continues to rank the increasingly stale Fandom results first. Since roughly 85% of a wiki’s traffic comes from Google, it’s nearly impossible for the new wiki to win without fixing this ranking disparity. It’s an extremely draining thing to do – nobody likes to spend their waking hours competing against the thing they helped lovingly build.
Historically, independent wikis have had an extremely hard time winning this battle. Most of the traffic stayed on the Fandom wiki, and the independent wikis often fizzled out. This had a chilling effect on the remaining communities, and emboldened Fandom to further prioritize revenue extraction.
That’s the key takeaway: if leaving Fandom was easy, they wouldn’t be able to enshittify as much as they have.
But don’t lose hope! Google has gotten much friendlier to independent wikis over the last decade. With a large, sustained effort, we were able to recover 95% of RuneScape Wiki traffic within the first year.
Why ditching Fandom is cool and based
The main advantage of leaving Fandom is likely clear to anyone who’s ever visited one of their wikis without an ad blocker. But there’s more than that! When you have a site that people are happy to go to (instead of something they’re forced to grimace and use), you get all these wonderful secondary effects that are worth mentioning.
For starters: on average, moving away from Fandom doubles the number of people editing. I’ve seen the pattern across every wiki we’ve ever moved off Fandom, but here’s a pretty striking graph from OSRS Wiki:
It’s incredibly consistent: way more people show up and want to help, when they feel like they’re contributing to something that isn’t taking advantage of them.
It’s not a coincidence that OSRS Wiki got really good once we left Fandom in 2018. Once we had way more people wanting to contribute (and the only objective was “make the best possible wiki for the game”) the wiki magically got way better! Crazy!
Departing from Fandom has also opened the door for a number of custom technical projects that otherwise would have been downright impossible to implement on the old wiki. In-game item lookup, WikiSync and real-time prices are core parts of our offering now, with hundreds of thousands of users. They’re all made possible by the new flexibility we gained when we took control of the hosting.
What I’m offering
I think a lot of people would love to get their wiki off Fandom, but it’s extremely not obvious what that even involves, so it’s hard to formulate a plan. I will help you figure out a viable, detailed strategy for you to get your wiki off Fandom, and bring the traffic along.
In the next couple weeks, we’ll be posting some general advice on this blog that goes through the main steps and pitfalls involved with leaving Fandom. Most of it should be broadly applicable, but the real power comes from looking at the specifics of your topic (how big is it? does it change frequently? is it a game? are you the rights-holder?) and tailoring the plan to fit.
As far as where you host it…there’s plenty of decent options. Wiki hosting is not nearly as hard as Fandom makes it out to be – for example, if you’re the Path of Exile devs and you already host a bunch of PHP web stuff, then hosting the wiki yourself is objectively a really good option.
Sometimes Weird Gloop will be the good option for your situation, and being totally honest, sometimes it won’t be. And that’s okay! I want to help communities get away from Fandom, regardless of who’s running the servers.
I will say, I don’t think we would ever do a “self-service” thing where you could just sign up and immediately make a wiki. We want to do projects where we get to know the community, and closely support every wiki we host.
How to not turn into Fandom 2.0 (with these 2 simple tricks)
As we’ve started hosting more wikis besides RuneScape, some people have asked a pretty reasonable question: what’s stopping us from eventually getting enshittified, just like Fandom (or the other wiki farms that eventually sold to Fandom)?
From my perspective, there are two key choices that Fandom made that have had major negative consequences for communities. And we’re just going to do the exact opposite on both points.
Point 1 - wiki communities need to be able to freely leave their host
You can probably tell that I think wiki editors (as opposed to hosts) are the ones who create the vast majority of the value on a wiki. So the premise is simple:
If a wiki community is unhappy, and they have a better option somewhere else, they should be able to leave and take their stuff with them. We won’t prop up the old wiki, Weekend-at-Bernie’s style, abusing the dominant Google position that the wiki editors built up while they were on our platform.
In my opinion, this is really the only rule that matters. If you have the ability to leave (and take your revenue-driving wiki with you) when things go to shit, then your host has an extremely strong incentive to not let things completely go to shit.
There’s a long history of wiki farms vaguely handwaving that they’d agree to something like this, and then backtracking later. So why believe us?
It helps that Weird Gloop literally only exists because we were on the losing end of this sort of situation with Fandom back in 2018, and that we have no outside investors or debt (the company’s owned by wiki nerds)…but I don’t think that’s convincing enough on its own. So we’ve been voluntarily entering into agreements with the wikis we host (here’s an example) where we set very clear obligations for what happens if the wiki community wants to go somewhere else (hint: it’s all about the domain). If we ever start going down the same path as Fandom, everyone can just leave! I would love to see other wiki platforms start to do this, because I think it’s the only way you really solve the problem.
Point 2 - global branding is extremely negative value for wiki farms
If you go to any page on a Fandom wiki, even if you’ve got an ad blocker…you’ll be greeted by an absurd amount of Fandom-related branding: a gaudy sidebar that links to Fan Central (whatever that is), a bunch of other links to wikis that aren’t relevant to you, buttons to follow Fandom on Instagram, TikTok, to take “Fan Quizzes”. The brand strategy seems like it was cooked up by a bunch of market researchers who think that people are fans of…media properties in general? It’s super cringey and totally irrelevant to the people who are on Fandom wiki to, say, look up the stats of a new pickaxe they got.
It’s easy to laugh about how bad the branding and identity is, but there’s a bigger issue: the fact that it’s so overwhelmingly branded as “Fandom” (as opposed to, say, the Warframe Wiki) makes it way harder for each of the individual wikis to develop an public identity, because anything they do will be subordinate to the (very loud) global brand. These individual wikis are the only popular thing that Fandom has ever operated, and the focus on global branding makes each individual wiki worse.
Our position: the actual wikis should be front and center, because it’s way more important for the wiki itself to have a great reputation, rather than sucking all the oxygen out to make sure people know who owns the platform. We have extremely minimal branding (can you even find it?), and I can’t imagine ever trying to put wikis on subdomains of <a href="http://weirdgloop.org" rel="nofollow">weirdgloop.org</a> (or anywhere else) unless there were no decent domain options. We don’t actually get anything out of everyday readers knowing who we are.
That’s all I’ve got right now. If you liked this and want to talk to me about wiki things, please come say hi – it doesn’t matter if you have a big wiki or a small wiki (or no wiki at all!) – I really just love talking to people about this stuff.
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