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Here's a good summary of controversy surrounding Fandom and why fandoms tend to leave: https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-wikis.html ht

Here's a good summary of controversy surrounding Fandom and why fandoms tend to leave: https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-wikis.html https://www.koopatv.org/2022/10/why-people-dont-like-fandom-... And it doesn't even really touch on how Fandom, sometimes, refuses to delete the old wiki for traffic purposes, and leaves it up as a "zombie" wiki that smothers the new wiki due to SEO, or the more serious conflicts between some admins and contributors in some other specific fandoms.

mcmoor 3y ago
Anyone who tries to worship Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia should know that if he really have his way, he'd turn it into this horrible mess of Fandom, which he also founded. Luckily the volunteers rightfully take Wikipedia from him. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork
- ravetcofx 3y ago
  Surprise surprise the rich aren't our friends
- rendall 3y ago
  There have been shenanigans where articles describing fictional lore have been taken down or merged with other articles due to being against Wikipedia policy ("Wikipedia is not a game manual"). e.g. see endless discussion on the Dungeons and Dragons Plane article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Drago... For instance, under that policy, this article was taken down https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&oldid=1086521358 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&o... and "merged" (with loss of information) to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#Plane_of_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#P... I saw a comment accusing Wales of enforcing this policy in order to direct traffic to Fandom. I thought when I read it that the accusation was uncalled for, but given Fandom's intransigence about taking old wikis down and the money-grubbing quality of its UX, I have wondered. Whatever the merits of this policy, it is applied inconsistently or not at all to topics not likely to be in Fandom.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
The part of that summary I like the most is the screenshot of the Zelda fandom wiki, which shows that it can fit 23 words (of the actual content) on screen at once.
nnadams 3y ago
The side-by-side view in that article is the key user experience reason to leave. The Fandom wiki sites tend to be slow and covered in ads. I avoid them if possible. I'm glad to see more and more groups take their wikis back. The Runescape wikis left Fandom a few years ago. The improvement to quality and features has been massive. I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets, but the Runescape wikis got over a billion page views in 2021 [1]. These are not insignificant losses for Fandom. [1] https://weirdgloop.org/2021-year-in-review/ https://weirdgloop.org/2021-year-in-review/
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets A lot. Its the 800lb gorilla of gaming, and it requires a lot of reference to play. I used to joke that 1/4 of Youtube is Minecraft videos, and I'm not even sure thats a hyperbole.
  - majewsky 3y ago
    It is probably not true today, but it may well have been true in 2010 or so, when Youtube started prioritizing watch time over raw views for the very first time. Back then, let's-plays were the cheapest content to produce in large volume, so the algorithm pushed it hard. And it just so happened that Minecraft released around that time. It's quite possible that Minecraft would not have become the phenomenon that it has become without this lucky coincidence.
deaddodo 3y ago
I don't even care about any of that. I care that literally everytime I click a fandom link, I immediately regret it; with my browser coming to a crawl and being forcefed a dozen ads. And even if you tried to ignore them, any interaction immediately triggers some sort of lazy-loaded/interactive ad to take over. It's one of the worse possible website experiences there is, that isn't actively clickbait or a scam and it's annoying as hell that actual good content continues to flock to that trash platform.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > I don't even care about any of that. You care about the quality of the wiki's content though. These kinds of business decisions detract from that.
- ghotli 3y ago
  Wow I've looked up stuff on the vampire survivors wiki on fandom a lot in the last year and this comment surprised me. Going to that website in regular ol' chrome without an adblocker was an experience indeed. I had no idea. You might find joy just putting a little bit of time into your browser setup. I was blissfully unaware of how bad that user experience was. Hope this helps!
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I had one of these moments where I was like "Why does anyone use apps like tic tok/instagram/whatever and not just surf the web? Then I browsed on the web without on a computer without an adblocker after years of having it on my phone and computer. My thought was then reversed, "Why isn't the web dead, why do people that don't know how to adblock subject themselves to this crap".
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      You can ask an important related question: Why are there people that don't know how to adblock? Usually information this important will spread to the people that need it. That hasn't happened here. What's blocking it?
ElCapitanMarkla 3y ago
I find this site so bloody confusing. I was on here recently while looking up something I was stuck with on Zelda, what a shambles. I got pissed off and left before I found what I was looking for, it just seems like such an incoherent mess

mcmoor 3y ago

Anyone who tries to worship Jimmy Wales for Wikipedia should know that if he really have his way, he'd turn it into this horrible mess of Fandom, which he also founded. Luckily the volunteers rightfully take Wikipedia from him. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork

ravetcofx 3y ago
Surprise surprise the rich aren't our friends
rendall 3y ago
There have been shenanigans where articles describing fictional lore have been taken down or merged with other articles due to being against Wikipedia policy ("Wikipedia is not a game manual"). e.g. see endless discussion on the Dungeons and Dragons Plane article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Drago... For instance, under that policy, this article was taken down https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&oldid=1086521358 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plane_of_Shadow&o... and "merged" (with loss of information) to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#Plane_of_Shadow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)#P... I saw a comment accusing Wales of enforcing this policy in order to direct traffic to Fandom. I thought when I read it that the accusation was uncalled for, but given Fandom's intransigence about taking old wikis down and the money-grubbing quality of its UX, I have wondered. Whatever the merits of this policy, it is applied inconsistently or not at all to topics not likely to be in Fandom.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

The part of that summary I like the most is the screenshot of the Zelda fandom wiki, which shows that it can fit 23 words (of the actual content) on screen at once.

nnadams 3y ago

The side-by-side view in that article is the key user experience reason to leave. The Fandom wiki sites tend to be slow and covered in ads. I avoid them if possible. I'm glad to see more and more groups take their wikis back. The Runescape wikis left Fandom a few years ago. The improvement to quality and features has been massive. I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets, but the Runescape wikis got over a billion page views in 2021 [1]. These are not insignificant losses for Fandom. [1] https://weirdgloop.org/2021-year-in-review/ https://weirdgloop.org/2021-year-in-review/

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> I'm not sure how much traffic the Minecraft wiki gets A lot. Its the 800lb gorilla of gaming, and it requires a lot of reference to play. I used to joke that 1/4 of Youtube is Minecraft videos, and I'm not even sure thats a hyperbole.
- majewsky 3y ago
  It is probably not true today, but it may well have been true in 2010 or so, when Youtube started prioritizing watch time over raw views for the very first time. Back then, let's-plays were the cheapest content to produce in large volume, so the algorithm pushed it hard. And it just so happened that Minecraft released around that time. It's quite possible that Minecraft would not have become the phenomenon that it has become without this lucky coincidence.

deaddodo 3y ago

I don't even care about any of that. I care that literally everytime I click a fandom link, I immediately regret it; with my browser coming to a crawl and being forcefed a dozen ads. And even if you tried to ignore them, any interaction immediately triggers some sort of lazy-loaded/interactive ad to take over. It's one of the worse possible website experiences there is, that isn't actively clickbait or a scam and it's annoying as hell that actual good content continues to flock to that trash platform.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> I don't even care about any of that. You care about the quality of the wiki's content though. These kinds of business decisions detract from that.
ghotli 3y ago
Wow I've looked up stuff on the vampire survivors wiki on fandom a lot in the last year and this comment surprised me. Going to that website in regular ol' chrome without an adblocker was an experience indeed. I had no idea. You might find joy just putting a little bit of time into your browser setup. I was blissfully unaware of how bad that user experience was. Hope this helps!
- pixl97 3y ago
  I had one of these moments where I was like "Why does anyone use apps like tic tok/instagram/whatever and not just surf the web? Then I browsed on the web without on a computer without an adblocker after years of having it on my phone and computer. My thought was then reversed, "Why isn't the web dead, why do people that don't know how to adblock subject themselves to this crap".
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    You can ask an important related question: Why are there people that don't know how to adblock? Usually information this important will spread to the people that need it. That hasn't happened here. What's blocking it?

ElCapitanMarkla 3y ago

I find this site so bloody confusing. I was on here recently while looking up something I was stuck with on Zelda, what a shambles. I got pissed off and left before I found what I was looking for, it just seems like such an incoherent mess