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I wish them well, they have a hard road ahead of them. Breaking free from the walled gardens comes at a high cost to user retention. After all, those dark patte
by phendrenad2 4y ago
I wish them well, they have a hard road ahead of them. Breaking free from the walled gardens comes at a high cost to user retention. After all, those dark patterns that companies use to capture eyeballs actually do work. I have no doubt that Fandom will scrap together their own Zelda Wiki to compete with the newly-independent site.
Then again, this is part of the eternal dance between walled gardens and the distributed internet. We went from self-hosted platforms like wikis and forums, to centralized hosts like Facebook Groups and Fandom. Centralization is appealing at first, because all of that Venture Capital money leads to slick modern UIs, tons of traffic, and ad revenue. But eventually the platform starts to become greedy, wasteful, and starts putting dark patterns ahead of the user's interest. Then it's time to leave.
- edflsafoiewq 4y agoDo they need "user retention"?
- duskwuff 4y agoThe primary purpose of most gaming wikis is to serve as a useful resource to players of the game they're about. Having web traffic is a side effect, not a goal. Users return to the site because they find it useful, not because the web site is "sticky".
- hombre_fatal 4y agoNobody wants to work on something that nobody uses.
- CM30 4y agoI'm optimistic about them competing, since the other wikis they're affiliated with (the NIWA ones) are some of the biggest gaming wikis on the internet, and have thoroughly trounced their Wikia counterparts in terms of SEO and marketing. Very few people use the Mario, Pokemon and Smash Bros wikis on Fandom compared to the independent ones (Mario Wiki, Bulbapedia and Smash Wiki), and their interwiki links have already been updated to reflect the new domain. Assuming the fans keep linking to the new one, the Fandom one should get buried as a result.