The Hollow Knight wiki community is another in a long line of wiki communities choosing to leave Fandom behind. But why is that? What is it about Fandom that...
    • simple@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2061·
      8 months ago

      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:

      • 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)

      • A sidebar you can’t remove that promotes their content

      • Fandom hijacked the community’s Mcdonald’s wiki to turn it into a giant advertisement

      • Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages

      • 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…

      • 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.

        • buddhabound@lemmy.worldEnglish
          44·
          8 months ago

          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.

      • Th3D3k0y@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • Paradachshund@lemmy.todayEnglish
        4·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • ysjet@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          8 months ago

          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.

          • Paradachshund@lemmy.todayEnglish
            3·
            8 months ago

            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.

      • Zoidsberg@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages

        What can we do with this information, I wonder…

        • CoderKat@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          8 months ago

          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.

    • NightAuthor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      8 months ago
      • 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
    • T4UTV1S@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      8 months ago

      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:

      1. 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.

      2. 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.

      3. 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.

      • Pringles@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        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?

        • cherenkov@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          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.

      • Ey ich frag doch nur@feddit.deEnglish
        411·
        8 months ago

        No thank you they’d still get that click. Also i think i just don’t really like those clickbaitsocieties. It’s less the platform itself

        • H1jAcK@lemm.eeEnglish
          114·
          8 months ago

          Sorry, that’s the best summary I could come up with

        • snooggums@kbin.social
          5·
          8 months ago

          Did you stop using YouTube because of the intrusive ads and monetization?

          Same issue with Fandom.

          • Ey ich frag doch nur@feddit.deEnglish
            21·
            8 months ago

            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.

    • mrchampion@lemmy.worldEnglish
      49·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • cyanarchy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        35·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • mrchampion@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          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”.

  • TheNanaimoBarScene@lemmy.caEnglish
    33·
    8 months ago

    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/

  • w3dd1e@lemm.eeEnglish
    311·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • Flax@feddit.ukEnglish
    24·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • Smacks@lemmy.world
    English
    24·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • terrehbyte@ani.socialEnglish
    231·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • mana@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    222·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Jarmer@slrpnk.netEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      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

  • Vipsu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    223·
    8 months ago

    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.

      • Vipsu@lemmy.worldEnglish
        35·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • wildginger@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
          54·
          8 months ago

          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?

              • Vipsu@lemmy.worldEnglish
                12·
                8 months ago

                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.

  • dx1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    8 months ago

    I got special Stylish CSS blocking half the shit on Fandom. IDK about any politics about them but the site is borderline unusable.

      • Vipsu@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • stebo02@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      112·
      8 months ago

      for Minecraft, minecraft.wiki

      for others i don’t know, some will have alternatives and others won’t…

      • 1simpletailer@startrek.websiteEnglish
        5·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • XbSuper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      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.

  • xvlc@feddit.deEnglish
    171·
    8 months ago

    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.

  • g6d3np81@kbin.social
    142·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.netEnglish
      191·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • Stovetop@lemmy.worldEnglish
        161·
        8 months ago

        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”.

      • g6d3np81@kbin.social
        21·
        8 months ago

        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?