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 Either they’re out of date, contain almost no useful info, or have a slew of other problems making it as painful as falling in a bunch of cacti.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.
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.
Another comment without watching so I might be repeating something in the video, but did they mention how poor bloated the site is? I was trying to use the Forgotten Realms wiki and after a few tabs it would grind my browser to a halt. For something that really just needs to be serving text and a few images it’s wild how badly the site performs.
My easy solution is whenever I land on a fandom page to add “anti” in front of the domaine name, “antifandom” will filter out the crep out of the original page and present a clean version of the wiki.
Thanks for sharing, didn’t know that.
That’s really cool!
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.
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
I use Metager instead - it’s FOSS and also has an option to filter out choosen domains from the search results.
Yes!! Gotta love Kagi and the ability to tailor search results to be exactly what you want.
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/
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Saw this yesterday. Great video that informed me on something I was completely oblivious to. Fuck fandom
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.
Could you give a summary? I stopped using youtube.
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:
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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)
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A sidebar you can’t remove that promotes their content
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Fandom hijacked the community’s Mcdonald’s wiki to turn it into a giant advertisement
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Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages
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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…
Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages
What can we do with this information, I wonder…
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.
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.
Thank you
You’re the best, thanks
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summarize.tech
Stop using Fandom
Why?
Sorry, that’s the best summary I could come up with
Did you stop using YouTube because of the intrusive ads and monetization?
Same issue with Fandom.
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.
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.
I used to have the app, but that was ad galore. Now when I browse it, usually for some book series, with firefox and some ad blockers, it’s perfectly fine to read and browse. So I don’t really get the hate, but that might be because I don’t usually browse it for new content, but as a reference for finished series, like the wheel of time.
Easy. Never heard of it. Done.
