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/
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Thank you
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.
You’re the best, thanks
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.
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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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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!
How about an alternative Link to the same video? https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=qcfuA_UAz3I
How do you find these? You search alternative video players or is there some site where you enter a youtube url and it gives you alternatives?
Personally I use a browser extension called LibRedirect.
It is called individious, there are many hosts you can choose from. In any instance, a youtube link you paste in the search bar gives you that video in individious. If a certain video is not working, you can use “Switch Individious Instance” to quickly jump to another.
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Stop using Fandom
Why?
Sorry, that’s the best summary I could come up with
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.
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.
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
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
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.
EDIT: To the now 8 of you who downvoted me, just, why? No, seriously, why. If you downvote me, please at least tell me why you are instead of downvoting and leaving. It makes me anxious to think that I was a dick or spreading misinformation or just being rude and not even noticing it, and would much rather have someone say something to me so I can at least know what people don’t like. That’s not to say I would agree with it, I might not, but I’d rather know what the problem is so I can agree or disagree.
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.
That makes sense. I just thought he had something against Youtube (and for good reason), since he only said “Not watching a YT video” instead of “Not watching a 20min video”.
TLDR; Fandom has a lot of QAnon articles written to make the scams seem legitimate to less computer savvy people.
My mom has fallen in a Qanon conspiracy world. The people from that world write Fandom articles about themselves to make it seem legitimate. I found them when I started investigating these people trying to convince her to steer clear.
I don’t trust a single thing on Fandom anymore.
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/
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.
I’ve always advocated against using Fandom. Not much customization and so many ads it makes the platform downright unusable.
A much better alternative is Wiki.gg, created by some of the original founders of Fandom.
Great suggestion, thanks.
Okay, I will stop using the thing I have never used once in my life
You probably did use it if you’re a nerd under its old name, Wikia, back before it got enshittified.
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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.
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no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
There was a time, long ago, where companies actually cared about their customers, and wanted to sell them good products while making a profit, and they strived for the win - win, and the “customer is always right” philosophy. They took their fair share, and they didn’t triy to squeeze every last dime out of their customers with crappy products.
Not that that they were saints by any stretch of the imagination (there were definitely bad players back then too) but there used to be a sense of ethics with Capitalism, in America at least, a sense of products being warrantied to work the way they should be and advertised as how they would actually work.
I have no effing idea how to get back to that state, as it seems like the “lunch for wimps” crowd are running the c-suites these days.
Regulation. Take the money out of governing, both national government and private directors. If someone makes decisions that affect many people, make that person accountable, either through a competitive market or a functioning justice system.
The problem is that the fantastically efficient tool that is capitalism will try to increase it reach as much as possible. Killing competition and undermining laws will always be the end goal, so long as they are in anyway allowed.
The reason companies used to care is because not caring drove customers to the competition. But then there was no competition, and the care evaporated. As long as they are allowed, they will take. Civility can only be guaranteed if profits are on the line.
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Or we could just… host our own wikis. There’s plenty of open source software for them. It’s not hard. Not everything needs to be federated.
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food?
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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)
The main WoW wiki has moved to wiki.gg too :)
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…
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
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.
Does serebii.net or bulbapedia only cover the original franchise games? Just curious. Haven’t played a Pokémon game in a long time.
I think bulbapedia cover just about any official content as far as I’m aware, so long as it’s licensed or made by nintento directly. Anything from the games to the anime to the trading cards to things like obscure licensed Japanese arcade games based on the franchise.
Don’t know if serebii does all that or if it just focuses on the games since I don’t use it.
I got special Stylish CSS blocking half the shit on Fandom. IDK about any politics about them but the site is borderline unusable.
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.
