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How is fandom shitty now? I'm asking from a newer user perspective. What did standalone wikis do better? My initial guess is ads, but is there more to it?

naravara 2y ago
The pages are basically unreadable on mobile.
krige 2y ago
Ads, awful layout on desktop, beyond awful on mobile, slow server responses. On the flipside more wikis are actually moving OFF Fandom lately, for instance to wiki.gg
blharr 2y ago
Adding autoplay videos that are tangentially related to the wiki page. Said videos take about 10 seconds to show up and will cause the screen to scroll to a different point from where you are currently reading Their privacy policy is exhaustive, and you opt in by default to sharing your data with Google and 7 other analytics providers UI noise like "share to Instagram/YouTube/LinkedIn" that probably 0.1% of people even consider using When you're on a specific game wiki, you care only about that wiki content, but fandom places a Fandom navigation bar and side menu Their default email strategy sent almost daily updates for random posts on (unrelated) FANDOM community when I made a couple comments on a specific wiki a decade ago.
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  Also, on mobile the video ads plus Fandom navigation bar now take up a sticky combined 50% or more of the viewport until you find the close button. Also, Fandom got its start by taking advantage of the easy, permissive nature of CC licenses of major early wikis, including much of Fandom started as chunks of even Wikipedia itself that got excised for "relevance" or other "non-encylopedia" factors. Even in some of the cases where communities have decided to leave Fandom, Fandom believes it remains their right to scrape the community's new site and not need to include links back to the "real" home, so Fandom itself becomes an SEO disaster for the community. Even communities that had hoped to protect themselves from such situations by choosing a more restrictive CC license with the NC (Non Commercial) clause have been struggling with revoking Fandom's access to their content against Fandom's legal team saying that Fandom's commercial waver to the content was both retroactive and in perpetuity, and those wikis would have known that at the time.
hogdanish 2y ago
The last time I visited a Fandom wiki on mobile, it autoplayed two videos simultaneously at full volume and required me to scroll through 75% of the page to get to the actual article, which itself was also full of ads. It was so bad that it motivated me to setup my own DNS server with ad blocklists
xeonmc 2y ago
FANDOM Please help us personalize your experience! [I’m an adult] [I’m a kid]
giantrobot 2y ago
Besides ads and points sibling posts made: Fandom does a terrible job making a wiki an actual wiki. Their infoboxes are garbage, there's awful category navigation, and just general "wikiness" is entirely removed or hidden. Fandom presents wikis like they're SEO spam sites rather than actual references. Check out Wookiepedia or Memory Alpha on the Wayback machine sometime and compare them to current Fandom wikis. Even the thinly styled MediaWiki was vastly more navigable than the shit that is Fandom. The footers Fandom adds with advertisements of unrelated other wikis is also ridiculous. Fandom is SEO spam infested with intrusive and obnoxious ads and is terrible at being an actual wiki. It fails at everything but co-opting community generated content to make money.

naravara 2y ago

The pages are basically unreadable on mobile.

krige 2y ago

Ads, awful layout on desktop, beyond awful on mobile, slow server responses. On the flipside more wikis are actually moving OFF Fandom lately, for instance to wiki.gg

blharr 2y ago

Adding autoplay videos that are tangentially related to the wiki page. Said videos take about 10 seconds to show up and will cause the screen to scroll to a different point from where you are currently reading Their privacy policy is exhaustive, and you opt in by default to sharing your data with Google and 7 other analytics providers UI noise like "share to Instagram/YouTube/LinkedIn" that probably 0.1% of people even consider using When you're on a specific game wiki, you care only about that wiki content, but fandom places a Fandom navigation bar and side menu Their default email strategy sent almost daily updates for random posts on (unrelated) FANDOM community when I made a couple comments on a specific wiki a decade ago.

WorldMaker 2y ago
Also, on mobile the video ads plus Fandom navigation bar now take up a sticky combined 50% or more of the viewport until you find the close button. Also, Fandom got its start by taking advantage of the easy, permissive nature of CC licenses of major early wikis, including much of Fandom started as chunks of even Wikipedia itself that got excised for "relevance" or other "non-encylopedia" factors. Even in some of the cases where communities have decided to leave Fandom, Fandom believes it remains their right to scrape the community's new site and not need to include links back to the "real" home, so Fandom itself becomes an SEO disaster for the community. Even communities that had hoped to protect themselves from such situations by choosing a more restrictive CC license with the NC (Non Commercial) clause have been struggling with revoking Fandom's access to their content against Fandom's legal team saying that Fandom's commercial waver to the content was both retroactive and in perpetuity, and those wikis would have known that at the time.

hogdanish 2y ago

The last time I visited a Fandom wiki on mobile, it autoplayed two videos simultaneously at full volume and required me to scroll through 75% of the page to get to the actual article, which itself was also full of ads. It was so bad that it motivated me to setup my own DNS server with ad blocklists

xeonmc 2y ago

FANDOM Please help us personalize your experience! [I’m an adult] [I’m a kid]

giantrobot 2y ago

Besides ads and points sibling posts made: Fandom does a terrible job making a wiki an actual wiki. Their infoboxes are garbage, there's awful category navigation, and just general "wikiness" is entirely removed or hidden. Fandom presents wikis like they're SEO spam sites rather than actual references. Check out Wookiepedia or Memory Alpha on the Wayback machine sometime and compare them to current Fandom wikis. Even the thinly styled MediaWiki was vastly more navigable than the shit that is Fandom. The footers Fandom adds with advertisements of unrelated other wikis is also ridiculous. Fandom is SEO spam infested with intrusive and obnoxious ads and is terrible at being an actual wiki. It fails at everything but co-opting community generated content to make money.