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EyIchFragDochNur ,

Could you give a summary? I stopped using youtube.

H1jAcK ,

Stop using Fandom

EyIchFragDochNur ,

Why?

H1jAcK , (edited )

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

snooggums ,
@snooggums@kbin.social avatar

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

Same issue with Fandom.

EyIchFragDochNur ,

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.

NightAuthor ,

Where’s that bot w the fedi links for videos?

Th3D3k0y ,

Be the change you want to see.

NightAuthor ,

You want me to be pipedbot ?

Th3D3k0y ,

Yes, integrate yourself with the digital world! Translate the videos for us!

simple OP ,

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.
EyIchFragDochNur ,

Thank you

GrammatonCleric ,
@GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world avatar

Fandom seems like my experience on Fextralife

buddhabound ,

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 OP ,

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.

captainphatty ,

The good thing is that they are going to stop abusers of the embed system like Fextralife, the new policy was announced at TwitchCon blog.twitch.tv/…/everything-we-announced-at-twitc…

pyrflie ,

You can block the element behind the player with the UBlock Origin element picker and it won’t comeback. I took the time to build this into my UBlock filters list since I regularly use their shitty WotR Wiki. I would kill for a good WotR Wiki.

Th3D3k0y ,

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.

108 ,
@108@kbin.social avatar

When the OG crew left, so did I.

Paradachshund ,

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 ,

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 ,

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.

ThrowawayPermanente ,

You’re the best, thanks

Zoidsberg ,
@Zoidsberg@lemmy.ca avatar

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

What can we do with this information, I wonder…

CoderKat ,

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.

theneverfox ,

Nice write-up, I appreciate it

NightAuthor ,
  • 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 ,

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 ,

How about an alternative Link to the same video? inv.vern.cc/watch?v=qcfuA_UAz3I

EyIchFragDochNur ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    wildginger ,

    What does this even mean

    Pringles ,

    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 ,

    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.

    Skasi ,

    Personally I use a browser extension called LibRedirect.

    WeLoveCastingSpellz ,

    summarize.tech

    g6d3np81 ,
    @g6d3np81@kbin.social avatar

    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 ,

    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.

    g6d3np81 ,
    @g6d3np81@kbin.social avatar

    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?

    Stovetop ,

    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”.

    M500 ,

    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 ,
    @snooggums@kbin.social avatar

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

    Caesium ,

    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

    M500 ,

    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.

    CascadianGiraffe ,

    Minecraft just moved to an official site recently

    Nelots ,

    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.

    at_an_angle ,

    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.

    Mkengine ,

    Why not use Breezewiki?

    10EXP , (edited )
    @10EXP@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Better yet: Try the Indie Wiki Buddy extension. It serves 2 purposes:

    1. It redirects you from fandom wikis to the new official wikis, to which the community has now moved from the fandom one. Also filters out fandom results from search engines only if an independent, more up-to-date alternative exists.
    2. If something is still hosted on fandom with no indie wiki, redirects it to a BreezeWiki instance.

    I use it in combination with wiki.gg redirect, which redirects to newer wikis which aren’t independent, but moved to wiki.gg from fandom.

    Update: IndieWikiBuddy can now redirect to Wiki.gg wikis too, no need for wiki.gg redirect.

    overkill0485 ,

    Whats the alternative?

    MargotRobbie ,
    @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

    Independent wikis for those media franchises that have them.

    Vipsu ,
    @Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    MargotRobbie ,
    @MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

    Or use a wiki host that’s not affiliated with Fandom.

    But they did buy out Gamepedia too…

    stebo02 ,
    @stebo02@sopuli.xyz avatar

    for Minecraft, minecraft.wiki

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

    1simpletailer , (edited )
    @1simpletailer@startrek.website avatar

    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.

    simple OP ,

    Aside from self-hosting your own wiki, wiki.gg seems to be the popular option. Terraria’s official wiki is now terraria.wiki.gg and it’s great.

    bingrazer ,

    I’ve also used miraheze (miraheze.org)

    SPOOPYGHOST ,

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

    ChaoticNeutralCzech ,

    Self-hosting using MediaWiki

    XbSuper ,

    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.

    Jhogenbaum ,

    Easy. Never heard of it. Done.

    Psychodelic ,

    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

    hal_5700X ,
    @hal_5700X@lemmy.world avatar

    Who knows of a good Final Fantasy wiki?

    Vipsu ,
    @Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

    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 ,

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

    Vipsu ,
    @Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

    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 ,

    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 ,
    @Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    wildginger ,

    And wiki.gg wouldnt host them?

    Vipsu ,
    @Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    wildginger ,

    … Didnt you just say you made those 2 examples? Or did I misread

    Vipsu ,
    @Vipsu@lemmy.world avatar

    Quoting what I said in earlier reply:

    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.

    I have not created any wikis myself I’ve just contributed to few that I’ve found which unfortunately have been hosted on fandom.

    wildginger ,

    Ah, I did misread.

    Pretty sure wiki.gg has a wiki port request, so the fandom versions can be moved

    mana ,

    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.

    Gaybees ,
    @Gaybees@artemis.camp avatar

    Yes!! Gotta love Kagi and the ability to tailor search results to be exactly what you want.

    janAkali ,

    I use Metager instead - it’s FOSS and also has an option to filter out choosen domains from the search results.

    Jarmer ,

    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

    YarHarSuperstar ,
    @YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world avatar

    What’s wrong with fextralife? I’m ootl

    mana ,

    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.

    val , (edited )

    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.

    YarHarSuperstar ,
    @YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world avatar

    Oh wow. Is it still worth using on games like elden ring where they have a good amount of info on every page?

    val ,

    Still haven’t gotten around to playing Elden Ring so I don’t know if there are better alternatives.

    Resol ,
    @Resol@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    xvlc ,

    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.

    Chetzemoka ,

    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.

    AceFuzzLord ,

    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.

    ElectricTrombone ,
    @ElectricTrombone@lemmy.world avatar

    Does serebii.net or bulbapedia only cover the original franchise games? Just curious. Haven’t played a Pokémon game in a long time.

    AceFuzzLord ,

    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.

    morgunkorn , (edited )
    @morgunkorn@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    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

    Dark_Arc ,
    @Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

    That’s really cool!

    victron ,
    @victron@programming.dev avatar

    Thanks for sharing, didn’t know that.

    terrehbyte ,

    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.

    dx1 ,

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

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