Could you give a summary? I stopped using youtube.
The video pretty much describes why Fandom is so bad and why many games are moving their wikis to alternative services, and why you should stop using it in general. Some examples include:
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Ads everywhere, including autoplaying video ads that play another ad when they’re done. There are also ads sneakily inserted in the middle of articles that are related to the wiki, like a Gamespot review (Gamespot is owned by Fandom)
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A sidebar you can’t remove that promotes their content
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Fandom hijacked the community’s Mcdonald’s wiki to turn it into a giant advertisement
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Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages
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Fandom sometimes introduces things nobody wants, such as AI generated answers that are usually wrong, take up the top half of the page, and with no way for wiki admins to remove it. They removed it after a lot of backlash but still…
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When people fork their wikis to other sites, fandom refuses to let admins delete their old wikis. This makes new wikis difficult to start because Fandom usually ends up as the top result on search engines, even if they’re old abandoned wikis.
Fandom seems like my experience on Fextralife
And then you learn about Fextra’s embedded twitch player that artificially inflates their twitch view count and pushes out smaller content creators who are actually trying to engage with a game’s audience.
God, I hate constantly seeing their channel with 50k+ views on Twitch. It’s insane that embedding the player throughout their entire website isn’t against TOS.
The good thing is that they are going to stop abusers of the embed system like Fextralife, the new policy was announced at TwitchCon https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/10/20/everything-we-announced-at-twitchcon-las-vegas/
Thank you
Seems like on that last one someone could go through and change all the content in every page to a link to the new wiki. A PIA? Certainly, but at least it would get the ball rolling and use the built up SEO from fandom to help your new site get views.
Unfortunately they just use a bot to revert those. You’re not allowed to truly migrate off fandom, all you can do is fork your own data and try to out-SEO the fandom wiki, because as soon as you put it.on fandom, fandom owns it too.
I wonder if you could use a bot and AI to write fake information and post that instead. Seems like fandom wouldn’t have enough game specific info to judge the accuracy, especially if it happened over time.
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Oh yeah… Gamespot, that place existed and it was terrible always. Then you look at the other things Gamespot own and realize they all got butchered in terms of reliability and impact.
When the OG crew left, so did I.
Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages
What can we do with this information, I wonder…
The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.
The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.
You’re the best, thanks
Nice write-up, I appreciate it
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- Hyper aggressive ads
- Restricted access to moderation and admin features of wiki
- Restrictions in layout/formatting to maintain compatibility with ad placements
- Forced addition of an AI generated section in wikis which contained gibberish or straight up wrong information
Worst TL;DR:
Fandom is a wiki farm, meaning it hosts a bunch of wikis. Also they run on freely available software mediawiki.
Fandom has a couple main problems:
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Barriers to entry are super low, verification for users takes place 4 days post account creation, with no other steps needed by the user. Paired with the limited options that moderators have for editing access on wikis and you have a wiki that is much tougher to moderate.
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Ads. Fandom is for-profit. And that means super obtrusive ads that we’ve come to expect. But fandom also shoved ads in the middle of wiki pages, with admins having no control of where those should be placed. There’s also the matter of sketchy ads that are served to minors. Also, some of the ads are outdated but are for subsidiary companies of Fandom.
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The Grimace Incident. Basically Fandom took over and turned the McDonald’s and grimace wikis into huge advertisements, wiping out the hard work that the actual wiki maintainers did. They also put in a bunch of factually incorrect information, literally going against the whole purpose of a wiki and really worrying other wikis, because what’s stopping Fandom from getting paid again and repeating the event with their wikis?
I’m sure I glossed over a bunch of the details but that’s the best I can do from memory.
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How about an alternative Link to the same video? https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=qcfuA_UAz3I
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What does this even mean
Where’s that bot w the fedi links for videos?
Be the change you want to see.
You want me to be pipedbot ?
Yes, integrate yourself with the digital world! Translate the videos for us!
Stop using Fandom
Why?
Did you stop using YouTube because of the intrusive ads and monetization?
Same issue with Fandom.
Tbh mainly because of dumb content. I grew up with free TV so i understand and can life with some ads if the content can be used for free. Also tbh i still sometimes use it for music and that one video gaming magazine’s channel that i really like.
I feel like I’ve become somehow allergic to youtubers and such.
Sorry, that’s the best summary I could come up with
summarize.tech
I loath this site. It’s rarely loads well and the images never load for me. And it’s always so slow. It’s probably because I have an adblocker.
It is slower without the adblocker since it waits for the ads to load if they are not blocked.
I have been preaching abandoning it for YEARS. It’s even worse on mobile because the formating is so messed up some links just don’t work. And even without adblock, there’s so many ads that THEY slow down the site. Just because it’s ‘free’ everyone defaults to fandom and I hate it so much
I think the Doom community successfully avoided fandom.
What’s to stop someone else from scraping their site and hosting a better one? I’ve never heard of anyone who actually likes Fandom.
Minecraft just moved to an official site recently
Terraria (and also most of the bigger terraria mods) is another big one that moved off of fandom a while ago. Wiki.gg is so much better.
I’ve found the best way to browse Fandom(if necessary) is to use a VPN set to Nordic countries. Ads are very generic and in a language I can’t read. So they are very easy to spot.
Why not use Breezewiki?
My easy solution, whenever I land on a fandom page, is to add “anti” in front of the domain name, “antifandom” will filter out the crep out of the original page and present a clean version of the wiki. This is powered by BreezeWiki
Example:
edit: typo, added example
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That’s really cool!
Not watching a YT video.
Anyone got a synopsis?
Fandom is for-profit and making their service ever more shitty in pursuit of that. Use https://getindie.wiki/
Or maybe check other comments in this thread
It’s called enshittification
Thanks for the trendy buzzword :D
Didn’t know nerd at DEFCON can create a trendy buzzword. Wonderful time we live in, isn’t it?
It’s a shoe-in for Merriam Webster’s word of the year, I reckon.
Search Cory Doctorow if you wanna know what that term really means.
Thank you, I already watched his talk on DEFCON.
You could always use Invidious or Piped (instance list here) to avoid using YT directly if you want. You won’t get any ads or anti-adblocker bullshit with Invidious, so I usually use that. I’m not sure about Piped, but it seems good too. Unless your point is to simply stop using YT for anything, in which case just ignore what I said.
I think it’s the fact that not everything needs a 20 minute video. There’s a lot of topics that I’m interested in but skip because I don’t have 20, 30, 40, 60 minutes for it.
I agree with the premise; fandom sucks. But does it really require a 20 minute exposé though?
I’ve seen a few links to the Indie Wiki Buddy extension page. I’m not too interested in installing a browser extension to find new wikis, but I bookmarked their listing page: https://getindie.wiki/listings/
An extension called Indie Wiki Buddy can also help with this by helping direct you to known alternatives to fandom for specific franchises or falling back to Breezewiki-based instances that rehost Fandom content without all of the Fandom bloat. It also provides this filtering and hinting to search results too, so you don’t have to change your workflow too much to use it.
You might have heard of alternative frontends to services such as YouTube (Piped, Invidious), X/Twitter (Nitter), etc.
Something similar exists for Fandom: Breezewiki. This instance seems to occasionally result in errors, other instances seem to work more reliable.
This is one of the main reasons I use Kagi. I have sites like fandom and fextralife blocked in my search results.
One of the things I miss about early internet years was all the independent fan sites and forums people had. Now, so much is just posted to these garbage platforms that control everything.
Yes!! Gotta love Kagi and the ability to tailor search results to be exactly what you want.
and recently the AI written garbage “gamer” websites have become a problem as well. You can tell instantly that some ai just collected and regurgitated a bunch of text that doesn’t even make sense.
Now I pretty much stick just to the fan created wikis. Stuff like bg3.wiki and uesp.net
I use Metager instead - it’s FOSS and also has an option to filter out choosen domains from the search results.
What’s wrong with fextralife? I’m ootl
Fextralife embeds their twitch stream into their site, artificially inflating their twitch viewer numbers, which in turn hurts smaller streamers since fextralife will be sorted first by viewer count.
They game SEO to flood search results with articles that are pure, useless placeholders which most of the time will never be written. Even when they’re more than a placeholder page, they’re often wrong outside of a few games because they’re just there to get clicks. Downvote bots were used against links to competing wikis, and while Fextralife denies it, they were conveniently spared.
There is more shady behavior out there around Fextra, but the most important thing for a user is there is almost always a better wiki that’s being suppressed in the search results. If you blacklist the site you’re a lot more likely to find something useful.
Oh wow. Is it still worth using on games like elden ring where they have a good amount of info on every page?
Still haven’t gotten around to playing Elden Ring so I don’t know if there are better alternatives.
Fandom hosts a lot of wikis for long forgotten nich’e games and with these games there usually isn’t enough interest to move to another wiki. When it comes to these wikis theres rarely if ever a team behind updating the wiki and more often than not the content is just being updated and maintained by random invidividuals who just happen to be engaging with the content at given time. The very low barrier of entry makes this possible as you don’t really need to join a team to edit pages or even coordinate with other people.
When playing one of these games I like to record and share some my observations and findings about games mechanics etc but more often than not the only wiki I can find is fandom wiki that is either incomplete and possibly even abandoned. I cant be bothered to create my own Wiki for these games so I’ll just start editing that one instead because it’s easy, the foundation is usually already there and I don’t need to bother taking any sort of responsibility/mantle of maintainer or admin.
While Fandom may not be the most optimal choice and there may be better ways to host wiki out there its still better than some obnoxious google document or poorly formatted steam guide that no one else can edit.
The reason you often cannot find smaller wikis is because this site killed them off.
All too common within attention economy for people to go for the more popular choice.
Search engine algorithms tend to make things even worse.But there are games out there that might not even have wikis if Fandom didn’t make the barrier of entry so low.
What games are so small as to not be capable of generating a non fandom wiki, but are large enough that the wiki is not completely empty and factually incorrect?
Well old games like The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut or Moero Chronicles.
Neither of these where completely empty when I found them. Been updating them and filling some gaps in the wiki for the fun of it.Many would consider both of these games “dead” by many metrics but people can still buy them, play them and have fun with them.
And wiki.gg wouldnt host them?
The problem is that the content is already in wiki fandom and there are no contributors invested/interested enough to migrate all the information to alternative wiki. These fandom wikis have no teams just random individuals making contributions of various sizes.
If I do ever get invested enough to a game to actually create a wiki I’ll definately use something else than fandom.
… Didnt you just say you made those 2 examples? Or did I misread
Whats the alternative?
Aside from self-hosting your own wiki, https://wiki.gg/ seems to be the popular option. Terraria’s official wiki is now https://terraria.wiki.gg/ and it’s great.
I’ve also used miraheze (https://miraheze.org)
Independent wikis for those media franchises that have them.
Does this mean self-hosting the wiki?
Because that increase the barrier of entry by tenfold as a lot of publishers/game studios do not host their own wikis.Or use a wiki host that’s not affiliated with Fandom.
But they did buy out Gamepedia too…
for Minecraft, minecraft.wiki
for others i don’t know, some will have alternatives and others won’t…
It really just depends on the fandom. Three more I know of are Bulbapedia for Pokemon, The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages for the Elder Scrolls, and Wookiepedia for Star Wars. They are all very comprehensive and functional.
Edit: Forgot about the Super Mario Wiki too.
Unless the game your playing made their own, or someone else decided to self host and actually fill it with content (and finding it can be a pain), there isn’t one.
Hoping someone knows a good fallout wiki, I hate using fandom, but it’s the only one I can find with good info.
Self-hosting using MediaWiki
I got special Stylish CSS blocking half the shit on Fandom. IDK about any politics about them but the site is borderline unusable.
Mfw you want to check some quick Minecraft details and you get a pop up then half your screen covered with one video. Thank heavens that they created minecraft.wiki as a wiki is basically essential for playing that game.
Regarding SEO, What’s stopping maintainers from vandalizing their own fandom page?
It would not be difficult to make a bot to update fandom page with a convincing but slightly wrong info, after a few hundred iterations, it’s all useless. Go look at what google recommend and do complete opposite. I’m convinced this will bomb ranking and put whatever wiki they migrated to at the top.
The disinformation doesn’t really matter. The fandom wiki’s naturally become incorrect over time, since they’re typically no longer maintained after a community switches, so vandalizing it after the fact won’t really change anything. For Path of Exile, it took the developers linking to the new wiki, and about two years of the community sending new players to the correct wiki, before it even started to show up in searches. Even then, I believe the fandom wiki still shows up first if you look at some of the very old entries.
UESP has also been the best information resource for Elder Scrolls since forever but that doesn’t stop Fandom’s Elder Scrolls Wiki from being the first result if you Google “Dunmer”.
Misinformation may reduce repeat visit, that part, I have no idea if google take into account when they rank the result. Domain/page age also plays a role. But what about other “problems”? If I try to de-optimize every items on that guide, will it speed up the de-rank as well?
For just about every single pokemon fan game I play, the fandom wiki pages have pretty much been utter garbage. Either they’re out of date, contain almost no useful info, or have a slew of other problems making it as painful as falling in a bunch of cacti. Same for most other ones I used to visit.
Will admit, Pokemon Empire having their own site for their fan game is still infinitely better than the fandom pages for it.
Given the criticism of Fandom, why not use a Piped link instead of YT? It’s like criticizing YT on YT.
YT isn’t fandom-level bad.
