citricsquid

Joined 17 years ago

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Comment · 2 years ago
I could have the numbers wrong, archive.org is down otherwise I would check as we shared information publicly at the time. As far as I recall, we weren't taking money from the websites, we were spending on infrastructure alone with more than $10k in spend in the final month before the sites were acquired. I think it is easy to forget how much more expensive running things on the internet was back then along with the unprecedented popularity of Minecraft. Once archive.org is back online, I'll track down numbers.
Comment · 2 years ago
I was a teenager at the time. I'm in my mid 30s now, it feels like I was a kid back then.
Comment · 2 years ago
More than a decade has passed since then so I am stretching my memory. At peak we were serving in the region of 10 million page views per day which made us one of the most popular websites on the internet (Minecraft was a phenomenon and every Minecraft player needed the wiki). We were probably the highest traffic Wiki after Wikipedia. Nowadays Cloudflare could absorb most traffic because of the highly cacheable nature of it, but at the time, Cloudflare didn't exist, and every request hit our servers.
Comment · 2 years ago
As the person ultimately responsible for the Minecraft Wiki ending up in the hands of Fandom, it is great to see what Weird Gloop (and similar) are achieving. At the time of selling out, the Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forum cost tens of thousands of dollars per month to run and so it didn't feel too much like selling out, because we needed money to survive[1]. 15 years later, the internet is a different place, and with the availability of Cloudflare, running high-traffic websites is much more cost effective.

If I could do things over again, on today's internet, I like to believe Weird Gloop is the type of organisation we would have built rather than ending up inside Fandom's machine. I guess that's all to say: thank you Weird Gloop for achieving what we couldn't (and sorry to all who have suffered Fandom when reading about Minecraft over the years).

[1] That's a bit of a cop out, we did have options, the decision to sell was mostly driven by me being a dumb kid. In hindsight, we could have achieved independent sustainability, it was just far beyond what my tiny little mind could imagine.

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
As I understand it the 250,000,000 number refers to total streams of all tracks on the album[1], it does not refer to plays of the entire album, so the article is wrong. The album is 20 tracks which means we're looking at 12.5 million streams per track. There were (and still are) many offers for a free Tidal trial, which were shared all over the internet at the time the album became available, so I do think it's possible that Tidal could have had those numbers. Paying subscribers? No, but users? You could sign up to Tidal for free, and Kanye albums are very highly anticipated... Is it reasonable to expect ~3 million people to each listen to an album ~4 times through on average? I certainly listened to it at least a dozen times in the first 2 weeks and know many friends who did the same.

For comparison Taylor Swift's album Reputation did ~500,000,000 streams in the first few weeks after it launched, granted that was available on all services and not just Tidal: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42564917

I'm a little suspicious of the numbers, given Taylor Swift has a wider appeal than Kanye and her album was on all services but you could sign up for Tidal for free and the article is clearly wrong when it says "a claim that would have meant every subscriber played the album an average of eight times per day" so I'm inclined to say Tidal are telling the truth because if they did inflate the numbers then they would not have needed to inflate them from, say, 25 million to 250 million which is what the report seems to suggest.

[1] See the BBC Taylor Swift article for an example of how the figures are calculated

Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20180111023048/https://btcmiami....

    Due to network congestion and manual processing, 
    we have closed ticket payments using 
    Cryptocurrencies — Hopefully, next year there 
    will be more unity in the community about scaling 
    and global adoption becomes reality. 

    We have, and always will, accept cryptocurrencies 
    for our conferences, up to fourteen days before the 
    event. However, due to the manual inputting of data 
    in our ticketing platforms when paid in cryptocurrencies, 
    we decided to shut down bitcoin payments for last minute 
    sales due to print deadlines.
Comment · 8 years ago
https://www.propublica.org/article/nothing-protects-black-wo...

This is a longer article on the subject of poorer health outcomes for minorities, covering the situation for black women and one family's experience, which is very much worth reading, but here are the key points:

Statistics:

* A black woman is 22% more likely to die from heart disease than a white woman

* ...71 percent more likely to perish from cervical cancer

* ...243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes

Reasons:

* Black women are more likely to be uninsured outside of pregnancy, when Medicaid kicks in, and thus more likely to start prenatal care later and to lose coverage in the postpartum period.

* The hospitals where they give birth are often the products of historical segregation, lower in quality than those where white mothers deliver, with significantly higher rates of life-threatening complications.

* [Black women] are more likely to have chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension that make having a baby more dangerous.

* Black expectant and new mothers frequently told us that doctors and nurses didn’t take their pain seriously [...] numerous studies that show pain is often undertreated in black patients for conditions from appendicitis to cancer.

* An expanding field of research shows that the stress of being a black woman in American society can take a significant physical toll during pregnancy and childbirth.

* Black women are 49 percent more likely than whites to deliver prematurely (and, closely related, black infants are twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday).

Comment · 9 years ago

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