Games @lemmy.world

1y ago

Stop using Fandom

149 comments

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:
  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.
  
  Fandom seems like my experience on Fextralife
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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...
  
  Nice write-up, I appreciate it
- 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:
  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.
  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.
  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.
- 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?
- Where’s that bot w the fedi links for videos?
  
  Be the change you want to see.
- Stop using Fandom
  
  Why?
- 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.
- 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:
before: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Infect
after: https://mtg.antifandom.com/wiki/Infect
edit: typo, added example
- Thanks for sharing, didn't know that.
- 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
- 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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
we have to use a decentralized open alternative (like lemmy) to take back control, switching to a proprietary solution by yet another company will only delay the problem further.
- 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.
  
  that was my suggestion, sort of.
  it can be bigger than that too ofc.
- decentralized open alternative (like lemmy) to take back control
  which unfortunately still require capital to run
  
  of course it does.
  and better if that capital comes from a network of companies/volunteers instead of one monolithic corporation that can just bully everyone into their will.
- 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.
  
  No way of going back to that state unless we start from scratch, power is too consolidated as it is. And capitalism would soon evolve back to something like this eventually anyway.
  We are on late stage capitalism now, as predicted by Marx.
  e: also those better times werent that good either if you werent white/from somewhere rich, not long ago kids were working in coal mines.
  
  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.
- food?
  
  Nestle.
  
  We can't just get out of capitalism, but you can work to improve your situation. If you have a yard, grow a garden.
  Also, see if there's a mutual aid group in your area, and if not consider talking with your neighbors about what you can do to help each other out. One person might be good with car Maintanance. Another might be a good gardener. Everyone can contribute something.

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

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.
  
  The main WoW wiki has moved to wiki.gg too :)
  
  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.
- 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

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.
- 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.

Honestly, fuck Fandom. Do we have a Fediverse alternative?
- Just use dokuwifi or media wiki or any of the already made OSS self-hosted solutions...
  
  There's Fossil which is a version control system with a wiki, so you can just straight up fork and mirror existing wikis.
- I learned about this plug in the other day. Indie Wiki Buddy. It's not a fediverse alternative, but it's the next best thing. It can redirect your Fandom results to their independent alternatives.

Given the criticism of Fandom, why not use a Piped link instead of YT? It's like criticizing YT on YT.

I don't seem to run into a lot of Hollow Knight fans around here yet so I popped over to the HK community on that other website. Confirm: this video is one of the top trending on YouTube today lol. I figured, mossbag is...shall we say a very well-known figure in the community, if you're not in the know.
I absolutely still rely on the wiki for HK shit I can't remember like boss HP scaling and where tf was that last item I need for that one upgrade god dammit?? Glad to see them move to somewhere independent. Will donate.

Another comment without watching so I might be repeating something in the video, but did they mention how poor bloated the site is? I was trying to use the Forgotten Realms wiki and after a few tabs it would grind my browser to a halt. For something that really just needs to be serving text and a few images it's wild how badly the site performs.
- Yah. Fandom is an Adblock-required site. And even then it's pretty hard to browse.

I used to have the app, but that was ad galore. Now when I browse it, usually for some book series, with firefox and some ad blockers, it's perfectly fine to read and browse. So I don't really get the hate, but that might be because I don't usually browse it for new content, but as a reference for finished series, like the wheel of time.

Who knows of a good Final Fantasy wiki?

Saw this yesterday. Great video that informed me on something I was completely oblivious to. Fuck fandom

I only use it for WoWpedia, because it has a lot of information from years ago. I still remember when they added so many unnecessary interface elements and the website became slower. Luckily, I found https://userstyles.world/style/5722/clean-fandom-wiki, which made it usable again.
- The wow wiki has recently moved to wiki gg and they ported everything over so definitely Check it out!
  
  Thanks! Didn't know they tried to leave fandom for a while. https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Warcraft_Wiki

I wish I could, but I like browsing Logopedia which is hosting on Fandom and has announced no plans to leave the site. If they did, I'd completely abandon that place and block everything that has to do with them.
And no, it's not easy to migrate a database of hundreds of thousands of logos to another wikifarm, especially if new stuff arrives all the time.

Starting up wikis is so easy nowadays that there's no excuse. I maintain a few Dokuwiki-based ones, it's my preferred engine for simple wiki stuff, but Mediawiki (the same one that powers Wikipedia) is not bad either and not really too difficult, just a bit more demanding storage-wise. Heck, you can currently fire-and-forget DW-based wikis on SDF's "one payment" access tier, even! Probably on Neocities too, haven't checked.

The biggest insult is that Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia helped create fandom because he was fed up of people using Wikipedia to create detailed articles about fictional characters and video games. Wikipedia now has an artificially strict notability policy where things are falsely declared as not notable so they can be monetized on Fandom, all while Jimbo Wales has the gall to ask for money for his "non profit" Wikipedia while he makes the real money on Fandom.
- I'd be very curious to hear more details on this, do you happen to have a source handy, or any recommended reading?
  In fairness, the money he gets from being a scumbag with fandom probably can't be used to fund Wikipedia unless he wants to donate the money he's making from his business to run his nonprofit. It's not surprising he wouldn't do that (even if thats the way the world ought to work) and I don't presently have reason to believe he personally gets anything out of the donations that are given to keep Wikipedia running
- I love hearsay and dramatic "quotations".
- If this is real I'll be genuinely glad I haven't donated to wikipedia yet.
  
  I mean the conspiracy theory side of it is questionable but the basic facts are true:
  Wikipedia has a policy against non-notable things. They were always embarrassed by the fact that every detailed version of every Pokemon had its own page, whereas the pages for important historical events were stubs. The WP:Notability standard has been the bane of every garage band and open-source game and DVD extra that was booted off the site because trivia cannot meaningfully be checked, trivia that otherwise allows hoax articles to live on.
  Jimbo Wales decided to profit off of the desire to create fan-encyclopedias or even complete nonsense (like, for example, Penny Arcade's Elemenstor Saga wiki, which details the history of a novel series and anime and cardgame that never existed) by creating Wikia, the for-profit Wikipedia that had no standards about what you could put on it besides legality. Just create your own Wikia and run it with an iron fist.
  Now, the question is whether he did (1) in order to drive profitable users to (2). That's where the conspiracy question lives. And I tend to assume good faith. People's morals erode over time, not all at once. Since both (1) and (2) are totally legitimate, but profit motive encourages the millimetre-by-millimetre enshittification of Wikia into the horrible thing it is today.

Easy. Never heard of it. Done.
- Lemmy has more niche users (read: geeks/nerds) on one site than I've ever experienced.
  It's awesome, but man, I feel so out of my element. I thought I was a nerd on reddit but on lemmy I have like no idea what half of the users are talking about or consider normal. It's legit fascinating, tbh. I really wish it was possible to see the demographics of users here

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