this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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[–] EyIchFragDochNur@feddit.de 88 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Could you give a summary? I stopped using youtube.

[–] simple@lemm.ee 184 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

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.

[–] GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fandom seems like my experience on Fextralife

[–] buddhabound@lemmy.world 43 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] simple@lemm.ee 16 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] Paradachshund@lemmy.today 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] T4UTV1S@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year 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.

[–] Skasi@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)
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[–] morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de 68 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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

[–] victron@programming.dev 15 points 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing, didn't know that.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 9 points 1 year ago

That's really cool!

[–] M500@lemmy.ml 67 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] snooggums@kbin.social 35 points 1 year ago

It is slower without the adblocker since it waits for the ads to load if they are not blocked.

[–] at_an_angle@lemmy.one 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Not watching a YT video.

Anyone got a synopsis?

[–] Azzu@lemm.ee 57 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] uis@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's called enshittification

[–] Azzu@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Thanks for the trendy buzzword :D

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[–] w3dd1e@lemm.ee 33 points 1 year 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.

[–] terrehbyte@ani.social 30 points 1 year 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.

[–] TheNanaimoBarScene@lemmy.ca 28 points 1 year 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/

[–] Smacks@lemmy.world 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] thorbot@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Okay, I will stop using the thing I have never used once in my life

[–] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You probably did use it if you're a nerd under its old name, Wikia, back before it got enshittified.

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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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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[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

decentralized open alternative (like lemmy) to take back control

which unfortunately still require capital to run

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[–] xvlc@feddit.de 19 points 1 year 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.

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 18 points 1 year 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.

[–] dx1@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

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

[–] mana@lemmynsfw.com 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.net 6 points 1 year 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

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[–] Vipsu@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The reason you often cannot find smaller wikis is because this site killed them off.

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[–] overkill0485@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)
[–] simple@lemm.ee 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Independent wikis for those media franchises that have them.

[–] Vipsu@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] g6d3np81@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.net 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.world 10 points 1 year 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".

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[–] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] nodimetotie@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[–] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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