Camestros Felapton

Two Time Hugo Award Finalist

Incredibly, Voxopedia is still running

There is apparently moaning in the ranks of the far-right that the Brave web browser has Vox Day’s vanity version of Wikipedia “down ranked” so that it only appears on the second page of results. Time to have a look at the place again.

Amazingly, it is still going and there are people still editing it. However, it is mainly the same four people. One guy (I’m assuming their gender but in the circumstances…) who does a lot of neutral art, history and bios, one guy who does a lot of far-right topics and a couple of others who do more adminy things.

Here’s what 16 June 2022 looked like in terms of activity:

I cherry-picked a particularly bad day and the five entries actually understate the amount of activity, what you have to notice is that first line. Two editors between them and 223 imports of articles — all of them from Wikipedia. I almost feel sorry for them, stuck in a sort of Sisyphusian task of manually copying Wikipedia but at a rate that means they progressively fall further behind. There’s a different guy who yesterday uploaded 1,451 images from Wikipedia into Voxopedia, taking 15 hours to do so. I assume that was a largely automated process but still, that’s the bulk of the activity.

Why are they still bothering?

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21 responses to “Incredibly, Voxopedia is still running”

  1. The problem here is that no mere mortal can grasp VD’s infinite-dimension chess strategy. We only look foolish when we try.

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  2. Never doubt the ability of a fanatic to convince themselves that their transparently useless, inefficiently-performed task is vital to the cause, and so must be performed indefiintely.

    Liked by 3 people

  7. Of all the things these guys could have been doing in their spare time, this is probably one of the least destructive. We should cheer them on.

    (Or maybe it’s better for their morale if we threaten to cancel them.)

    Liked by 4 people

    • True on the one hand.
      On the other hand it was clear that this project was doomed from the beginning.
      There are other wikis for fictional universes that work, but they have more people behind it, mostly fans. It is a project that was doomed from the beginning and this is funny (and shows how much Vox cleverness is fake)

      Liked by 4 people

  9. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Stalin.

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      • It’s Widdle Bwad Stompy-Foot. Of course it’s embarrassing. And pathetic.

        Also, have they heard of this thing called Amazon, where you can buy a lot of books rather than wandering the shelves of your local store, hoping they’ve given their limited shelf space to things you personally like? Why, a portion of your money there even goes towards helping a SWM build phallic rockets! I thought Braddles was a big rocket fan!

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        • Even if you don’t want to buy via Amazon, you can order books from most booksellers. That even works in Germany for Books in English, if they aren’t obscure.
          Of course Amazon and for my my ebook gave me the freedom to buy what I want and not what I see on the shelves.
          Now choice is the problem.

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    • These are the same people who say to let the free market take care of things, because it will eventually cause the best (i.e., most profitable) things to rise to the top. So does this mean that the books Brad likes are not profitable, or that B&N is a non-profit enterprise, happy to sell Woke ideology without making any money?

      Actually, I remember using this argument for Sad Puppies. I guess they only have one idea, and no amount of logic will pry it loose.

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      • I don’t know about the books Brad likes but the books he writes aren’t. At least not where I sell books. I have returned more Brad Torgersen books than I have sold. They had a fair turn on the shelves and almost no-one bought any. There was one time during The Debarkle when I decided to calculate the ratio of Scalzi to Torgersen sales to see if there was any substance to one of Brad’s blatherings so I added up how many Scalzi books we had sold.

        Liked by 2 people

    • I was thinking that the leadup to the whole RWA mess a few years ago rather spoke against the idea of the large chain book buyers all being ‘woke’… though I double-checked and Sue Grimshaw (who from what I recall was known for actively not buying black romance books or shelving them in other places than the romance section of the bookstore) was a buyer for Borders, not B&N.

      Liked by 1 person

      • Borders apparently had a persistent problem, not only in romance but throughout genre fiction, with sidelining books by black authors into an African American section (thus turning it into an actual segregated ghetto) or just tossing them into the general fiction section instead of placing them in the genre sections, even when the books came from a genre publisher whose sales reps would be offering them to the chain for the genre shelves with the rest of their list. It occurred quite a lot with SFF category titles.

        I didn’t learn about this until very late in the game, a few years before Borders went under due to executive mismanagement, but it was a widespread corporate culture problem at Borders — a corp that was also of course mainly run by men — rather than just one buyer. And it is a problem throughout book-selling. We had a number of high profile cases in the 21st century, particularly in YA, where publishers put out titles with POC protagonists where a human image was put on the cover but whitewashed to not seem brown, black, Asian, etc. And the reason the publishers did it was always because the big booksellers — like Borders and B&N — told them that putting people on the covers helped sell the books (especially in YA) but not if the people on the covers weren’t white looking. Open racism, and not based on actual sales data, but on bigoted marketing myths they simply pushed as policy.

        Basically, up until maybe the last ten years and even now it’s still frequent, folk with some power in book-selling have had a strong belief that fiction written by POC with POC main characters in the English language market are mainly only of interest to POC readers and thus more of a niche market because they think that POC readers don’t read much fiction (even though black women are some of the biggest book buyers.) Some major hits, including translations, have proved this theory wrong again and again and there’s renewed interest in the last decade in more diverse lists, but POC writers run into bigoted folk myth all the time with publishers and book-sellers.

        So yes, the majority of the folks who work in book-selling are liberal leaning and about 60% of them are women, but they’re 90% white (B&N has about 65% white staff and their execs are mainly white,) the women are way below 50% in the major, executive offices and they offer an enormous amount of conservative books for sale. And they are frequently, openly racist, sexist and anti-queer in policy decisions. B&N has plenty of Monsterhunter books for sale in most places, plus e-books (Nook, etc.) So Brad is just doing what right wingers like to do — take a correlation/anecdote and pretend it’s causation.

        Liked by 1 person

    • Yeah, this is the usual sexist twaddle. Barnes & Noble does have a lot of women employees because it’s part of a low paying industry (and stays low paying in part because they pay women less than men.) Women have made up the (slight) majority of publishing and book-selling employees since the 1990’s (this sexist complaint is not a new one.) But the executive team is only 18% women. The CEO, CFO, COO, etc. are all men. (And they got bought a few years ago by a private equity firm also mainly run by men.) Men run the purchasing and marketing/sales display divisions, so they are the ones curating primarily and they also increasingly try to use non-individualistic sales “stats” algorithms even when they don’t work very well for books, especially fiction. (And one of the things that does sell well in bookstores and they stock is conservative non-fiction, because conservative organizations buy those in bulk.)

      In the stores, the managers and employees push and recommend what B&N central management tells them to recommend because publishers pay B&N for that as part of co-op advertising agreements. Every square inch of a B&N store is paid for and specifically allocated from what books will be face out on the shelves, to riser displays to posters to the “employee picks.” Store managers have a little leeway when it comes to local authors but even there, B&N central designates what each store should have and push based on regional sales for the area. There’s much less freedom for the staff of individual stores of B&N than there was in 1999. So employees in stores can’t “curate” selections even if they wanted to. They certainly don’t control what’s up on the shelves of the stores.

      Instead, B&N takes a chance on things like new fiction debuts, but their primary decision making factors are A) past sales history for non-debuts and B) what sales/purchasing terms publishers will give them, including price discounts, favorable returns policies and the money from publishers for co-op advertising and marketing strategies. You pay to play, on each title. So Baen Books has a lot of right-wing SFF authors, including Monster Hunters. But Baen Books can’t offer terms as good as larger presses like Random House to B&N. It can pay for some co-op advertising and marketing with B&N for some of its titles but it strategically chooses. And if Larry’s sales figures for his older series have been drooping over time? Well, he gets less co-op money from Baen to big chains like B&N for at least that series. So B&N orders his latest — Bloodlines — and it’s on their site and in some of their stores, but maybe not as many copies and not as many stores, concentrating on stores in the regions where his series does best.

      As a medium sized publisher, Baen has to do less co-op on all its titles, especially after the wild ride of the pandemic years, and so the big chains order copies of Baen books but fewer of them. This is happening to lots of other small and medium presses too in dealing with B&N, but the Baen authors will claim it’s only happening to them and so it must be their conservative politics. And then they claim the usual sexist bigot myth — that inferior feminist women have gotten uppity, taken over and are conspiring against them.

      Any author who’s had to deal with Barnes & Noble or have what’s happening to their book with B&N explained to them by their publisher knows how B&N works. I guess it works for Brad as a sales tactic for his new self-pubbed collaboration series to lie about it and cape for Larry, but it mainly just makes him look ignorant on top of being bigoted.

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