CriticalResist8

twitter went wild because the guardian published an essay with the headline "we each have a nazi within us" and this is my response to that article (from aaron maté's dad no less)

We're very open about our stats because we don't have anything to hide. In fact, openly publishing (curated) analytics about website visits is actually helpful to gauge the impact ProleWiki is having, where it's going, where it can improve and where it's expected to change, etc.

Current stats on the English-language instance, which is by far the most lively:

On daily visits:

• around 1000 daily visits
• this amounts to 30k visits per month!
• Unique visits represent 2/3rds of the above figure, which means very few repeated visits during the same month.
• >100k pageviews per month
• Comes out to around 3 pages viewed per visit (not necessarily homepage -> search -> final page)

On geographic provenance:

• Almost half (but below half) of all visits come from the USA, though virtually all countries of the world are represented over a yearly period. This makes sense as the English instance mostly interests English speakers, of which the USA is the most prominent country of origin on the Internet.
• The only countries that did not originate any visits this year so far is the DPRK, Turkmenistan, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea. 2 Asian countries and 8 African countries. Every other state/country/territory (we use a wider map than the 196 UN states) generated at least 1 visit this year. This is still only for the English-language instance.

On charting evolution:

Since we started tracking visits (anonymously and with non-proprietary, self-hosted software) some 695 days ago, we see an increase in daily visits by 1.09 per day. This seems low, but consider that:

1. We still register almost 1000 visits per day, the 1.09 figure is the durable increase over time.
2. It's a positive increase, meaning the website is becoming more popular regardless.
3. This amounts to 30 extra daily visits by the end of the month. By the end of 2024, if this trend continues, we would see a durable increase of 121 daily visits, going from 1000 to 1100 daily.

• We finished 2023 on December 31st at 959 thousand pageviews.
• We expect to reach 1 million pageviews for the year in early October.
• At this same rate, we will end 2024 with 1.163 million pageviews.
• This is a 121% difference from 2023.

On the pages visited:

• Without surprise the most visited pages day after day are the index/homepage and the recent changes page.
• After that, the most visited content pages generally revolve around patsocs. Pizza index has been popular recently because of Iran's retaliation. Whatifalthist is also a big one because he keeps saying dumb shit on Twitter.
• This shouldn't be too surprising especially as these visits mostly come from Google searches. This means we rank generally well for these terms.
• Overall, over 850 wiki pages are seen each day. These can be any content type: library books, plain wiki pages, special pages, categories, etc.
• While many pages only register between 1 and 3 clicks per day (the vast majority of our pages in fact; over 80% of all visits go to those), these are still important: it's information that we were able to provide to readers that they otherwise wouldn't have read on ProleWiki!
• We see that specific pages also receive interest which correlate with wider news. Claudia De la Cruz's page for example was a contender for top-visited for a few days in a row when she announced her candidacy for presidency of the USA.

Hope you found this interesting.

(yes I also wrote one lol)

You can request an account here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:RequestAccount

all whities (the so-called Romans) ever did was grill their meat in the circus when they were watching a gladiator match and then afterwards drink watered down wine. At least they knew that you should cook food before eating it.

Aqueducts?? They didn't even know about germ theory. What would they need all this fresh water for? (To power underground nuclear plants aliens gave them the blueprints for). Sewers?? They shared a single sponge to wash their ass with. They didn't even know about pants ffs, are you seriously implying this bunch of femboys conquered the Celts in skirts?

Get real. Aliens took pity on these pasty crackkkers and beamed them some basic 101 tech that other greater civilizations had figured out CENTURIES prior. All their pantheon of like 100 gods are the different outer space aliens that came to visit them at various points in history -- nobody needs 100 gods, let me tell you that much. "Phoebus" pulls the sun with his chariot?? Yeah right. That's an alien that came to them in a spaceship (the chariot) and taught them not to stare at the sun. Then they stole a story from the Greeks because all Roman culture was stolen from other places and counterfeit and gave it a different name to represent their alien and explain it to their pagan asses.

How come Phoebus doesn't burn when he's pulling the Sun around?? That's because he's an alien and had advanced technology to combat the radiating heat of the Sun, which modern humans still don't have.

Now Iran, that's a real civilization. At least they knew about soap.

I recently cracked my 3ds (which is super easy to do now that they've stopped updating it) and you can use it to play any previous generation games (up to PS1). Wish I knew that before I bought a purpose-made console lol

I have a huge catalog of games but since I'm switching out my SD card for a bigger one, I'm looking to basically just download whatever seems interesting. What's your favorite 3ds and nds games? (Please don't say Pokémon)

Self-promotion is seen on the internet as underhanded and suspicious but I really don't mind it when it comes to creating links between communists. What's the difference between self-promotion and other promotion? Submitting a link to your own work is bad, but asking your friend to do it is good? That doesn't make any sense.

This is why I've been pro-self-promotion for years, and allow it in every community I've moderated as far back as antifastonetoss on Reddit. There we even worked with antifascist artists to promote their work on the subreddit.

The only limitation I would put on it is that you have to interact with the questions and comments to some extent. But that's about it. This creates trust and is the basis of social media: interaction (it it only went one way then you'd act more like a TV or radio channel).

Stamping down on self-promotion only shows that you're scared of being one-upped or eclipsed as a mod. We rarely have had issues with self-promotion, and if it helps other comrades boost their work, then that's great.

Reddit is terrible for this. Most subreddits hate self-promotion of any kind and will remove your posts over it, or even ban you from the start. Why? Your community doesn't care that someone posted their own work. They will open the post, comment and vote on it by themselves. Why do you need to be so controlling? It's ludicrous to remove a post that has say 15 upvotes, signalling people like it, just because you want to control the flow of information in your subreddit.

I've honestly rarely had excesses. Excesses are hard to define but like I said, I do expect you interact at least a little bit with the community. This lets us know a little bit more about you and vet you organically. I've had on Discord a person who only wanted to recruit for their party and never interacted with anything outside of that. They would only talk about their party and post links to their newspaper, ignoring any question pinged to them that wasn't about their party. That was fine for a long time and we didn't really moderate on it either, but eventually other members started feeling like they were just using us and weren't interested in the work we were doing. When we brought this up to them they simply stopped using the server but remained in it.

In this case yes it can feel suspicious, like you're just using an existing community. But it also allowed us to learn more about their party and their work.

And we've had self-promoters who didn't really interact on Lemmygrad too, but eventually the community organized to discuss what to do with them, forcing them to reply. Like I said the only limitation I would put on self-promotion is that you at least show you're not just spamming everywhere.

But even then people will end up discussing your posts regardless of mod involvement. They will ask questions under the post and others will reply. So what's the actual problem? That the OP is posting and not interacting? Why does that matter?

Really the only thing that should matter is why they are posting and where to. We had someone here who posted to a sort of incel blog if you remember and eventually took action against that. If it's a website I don't know then I might ask questions and need an answer from OP, but if it's a source I know then what's the harm?

Basically think of it this way. In lib spaces people willfully and readily post to the New York Times, Wikipedia, CNN, etc. We don't ask them if they're self-promoting. These organizations have a huge contingent of fans ready to post their links everywhere at a moment's notice. When you don't have that, you have to do it yourself. The first one is apparently not a problem, the second is almost always seen as one.

This is the contradiction most places, especially Reddit, find themselves in. They create large communities and it's super easy to get noticed on Reddit because the work of creating a following has already been done. But they are able to create this community because people post in it and interact with it, leading to more people joining it. Without these members posting, they would have nothing to moderate. It then leads to another contradiction between moderatorship and community as they have opposite interests.

This is also why we rely on community self-management on Lemmygrad and often take time to respond to controversies on the platform, to soften that contradiction. We can't make it disappear, but we can soften its effects.