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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Oh god this is worrying. Fandom has already made Wikia an absolutely unusable, ad ridden nightmare, to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it.

I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot, GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.

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I feel like Fandom and Wikipedia provide a fantastic case study in the difference of outcome between non-profit, mission driven organizations and for-profit capital driven organizations.

They were both founded by Jimmy Wales. They both have the goal of organizing information using crowdsourcing. And look at the difference in outcome.

I had no idea Fandom/Wikicities/Wikia was also founded by Jimmy Wales. I agree, would be amazing to see a academic comparison between the two, one clearly had a bigger impact on humanity as a whole.

On that note, I wonder if Fandom contributes back any funds to the Wikimedia Foundation. If so, it might actually make sense to have two branches of the same software, if the commercial arm can fund the non-profit one.

> If so, it might actually make sense to have two branches of the same software, if the commercial arm can fund the non-profit one.

The inevitable problem with these schemes is that the MBAs at the commercial part will eventually try to "optimize" the funding channel towards the non-profit section.

GameFAQs has already been dying for the last 10-15 years. Its amazing how most of their user reviews are from 2000-2005 or so and how frequently they don't even have guides for games anymore. Their message boards went from being notoriously overmoderated with tons of silly rules like a ban on profanity to notoriously undermoderated with very few rules (but what few they have are still enforced bureaucratically) and lots of trolls.

CBS did not do a good job of running it especially after the site's founder left so its good that they're selling it. Its just probably not good that Fandom is buying it.

I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most of their userbase as well.

YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search.

Best result is a Steam forums link, second best is YouTube, third is Wikia and all that crap (why would you auto-play an unrelated video and make that take up a third of the screen in a sticky div if I scroll down?!?!). Fourth are seemingly machine-generated garbage results that don't contain anything useful but try to look like they do.

Gamefaqs would still be the best on desktop but it doesn't show up in searches so I kinda forgot they existed and also text FAQs suck to navigate on mobile, and 99% of the time if I'm looking up how to find the Yellow Key or whatever it's on my phone, because I'm either not at my computer, or am gaming on it. Some other comments here make it seem like they don't have content for a lot of modern games, anyway.

YouTube is great for those situations where a written explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.

Some of the content was beyond excellent, though. Like, a text file with a guide to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 with location co-ordinates to every single item and interactable object.

For real. The dedication and detail involved in some of those guides was just unreal.

I still re-read the Doom FAQ every decade or so. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text

I would have never soloed BG2 with a Sorcerer if not for a very detailed and funny guide on GameFAQs. I didn't quite believe it's possible, but decided to check it out. Oh boy, one-shotting (almost, ie. in a single turn) dragons and eventual Wish-spamming, that was really nice. Another guide allowed me to finish "Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader" with pure-mage, again, I wouldn't have believed it's possible but the author did all the math, compared almost all possible builds, and arrived at the most min-maxed one: fire-based mage. It was really nice to wade through hordes of enemies without caring about sneaking, aggroing just a few at once, and escaping all the time. However, one advice there was priceless, it said: "grab a book. No really, grab a book." I've read I think two before finishing the game. (If you're curious: the carnage cost mana, and the game was not designed for pure-anyone, so the supply of mana potions was insufficient (to say the least). Given that the build had like 5-6 times as much mana as normal character, the natural mana regen took like 40 minutes (IIRC) by the end of the game...)

With apologies to... I think it was Groucho Marx? Lionheart is a very educational game, I finished all of Moby Dick while playing it.

GameFAQs was necessary in a time of dial-up modems. The guides were just plain text documents that were tiny and downloaded quickly. The site design was basic and not overly flashy. The forums were a "go-to" spot for any game that got announced. I spent a lot of hours in my summers in the late 90s and even early 2000s writing FAQs for N64, Gamecube and Game Boy Advance games and patrolling the message boards.

In the mid 2000s, a lot of that traffic got diverted to IGN (who started siphoning off prominent FAQ writers to write guides for their own site) but also Digg and then Reddit. Having a game-specific forum on GameFAQs didn't matter as much when you could moderate your own subreddit community for it.

It started when you googled cheats for a game, this was one of the top results, and it spit things like these:

- In super Mario you can gather 100 coins for an extra life!

- There are no currently known cheats for Civilization VI. If you know one, tell us!

I loved GameFAQs and even wrote a couple guides for it back in the day. As limited as it was, I think the plaintext format had a lot going for it in terms of simplicity, searchability, and avoiding spoilers. The alternatives today seem to be either 100-page web guides laden with ads, YouTube videos with spoilers in the title, or incomplete wikis. GameFAQs did add the ability to make HTML guides with pictures (although as far as I know they're all multi-page), but by then it was too late.

> to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it.

Which is a good thing honestly. There's such a big difference in usability between the independent internet that exists out of genuine passion/interest and the internet that's run by advertising companies and people looking to make money off advertisements.

True. Wikia's existence meant things like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance and Square Enix Independent Wiki Alliance could put out some actually good wikis about the games they cover. Stuff like Mario Wiki, Bulbapedia, the Super Smash Bros Wiki, etc are significantly better than their Wikia/Fandom counterparts, and have proved you can defeat the service in the Google rankings by providing a better service.

Just hope your owners don't decide to cash out and sell the site to Wikia/Fandom later on, otherwise the whole branching stuff will have to be done all over again.

> Bulbapedia

Curse used to traffic the ads for this site, at least in 2016 when I worked for them. They may very well still be getting trafficked by Fandom who have since acquired Curse Media.

Today I am thankful for Kagi having a feature which allows me to remove or downgrade certain sites from search results. It has already saved me countless clicks to fandom and can be easily expanded to include other sites as the fandom cancer grows.

I believe the content on Fandom's wikis is all permissively licensed. I've often thought about making a read-only mirror of their wikis that just scrapes updates and serves the content without all the BS. Once it scales to the point where hosting is expensive, put up a donation jar. If it pays for itself, consider opening up editing and creating a fork with the end goal of killing Fandom's godawful wiki sites.

Fandom is just rebranded wikia, for what it's worth

Agreed, though somehow fextralife manages to be even worse

I casually end up on a fandom wiki every now and then. What's the main criticism?

1. Autoplay videos done by fandom editors who may not have read the source material or even their own wiki article inserted at the top of pages just so they have video to justify video ads

2. Large portions of the page dedicated to "engagement bait", e.g. related articles in a permanent sidebar (mixed with ads), piles of random forum discussions/elsewhere on fandom links at the end of the page.

3. Open a fandom page with your adblocker off. Video ads in the header, in a floating overlay, randomly mid article, etc.

4. On mobile I can't get images to display without disabling my ad blocker.

5. Despite nominally being Wikis the Fandom wikis have effectively zero Wiki-like intrapage or interpage navigation.

I remember the likes of Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha before they got Fandomed. They are sad ghosts of what used to be very good fan oriented Wikis. Fandom is a dumpster fire and I wish them nothing but ill fortune.

#5 is entirely dependent on the wiki itself, which is community-driven. Fandom only provides the infrastructure and platform, which support the feature.

But the platform affects the contributors.

The dark patterns must drive many people away completely. You have to fight them every step of the way if you use the site. Who wants to see their creative work featured on such a site for sore eyes?

If it paid some people might overcome all that but to do it for free?

This is a stretch at best.

I get it, Fandom sucks. The rest of the points are completely accurate. But the amount of interlinking isn't their fault.

I mean, if they push their GUI editor and their GUI editor makes it hard to interlink, arguably that does make them part of the problem.

I mean, it’s the same VisualEditor that’s used across MediaWiki sites, including as the default on Wikipedia.

How is it only a problem on Fandom?

I was surprised by this claim, as I didn't remember them being the same. And I checked, as a logged out user, on a wikia site and on wikipedia, and...

No, they're not the same by default.

Wikia/Fandom defaults to a WYSIWYG editor, linking is a 4-click process.

Wikipedia has a toolbar atop a wiki code view. It does offer the option of a WYSIWYG editor, but it is _not_ the default. Linking is [[some article title]].

I'm a logged out user on both sites, so it's not a preference I've set.

I said it’s the same VisualEditor. As in, it’s literally the same extension. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor I never claimed the defaults are the same. VisualEditor will likely become default on Wikipedia at some point in the future, as it’s an opt-in feature. And it can be turned off on Fandom, which I’m sure core contributors are likely to.

As a platform, Fandom provides the same visual editor that is provided by MediaWiki. That was the claim.

No, you claimed that the visual editor was the default on wikipedia.

> I mean, it’s the same VisualEditor that’s used across MediaWiki sites, including as the default on Wikipedia.

I mean, I guess you could claim technical correctness if Wikia was defaulting to a non-visual editor, but that's going on a wild tangent and the opposite of the real situation

I'm not sure how the opt-in visual editor on wikipedia being the same as the default editor on wikia would disprove the claim that the visual editor's more difficult linking would cause people using the default experience on wikia (wysiwg editor) to link less compared to those using the default experience on wikipedia (source editor) with it's less sidelined linking experience.

> 5. Despite nominally being Wikis the Fandom wikis have effectively zero Wiki-like intrapage or interpage navigation.

The site mechanically sucks, with all the ads, needless videos, comment sections, "related content", etc, but this one is up to the writers to do. It's not Fandom's fault if writers don't integrate wiki functionality more thoroughly.

I personally never even noticed Wookiepedia or Memory Alpha switching to Fandom. They seem about the same as they always have.

I should instead say "when Wikia switched to Fandom". Wikia used to be pretty standard MediaWiki instances. Then they moved the format to a more custom layout until they became the absolute trash Fandom layout of today.

When Wikia was more standard MediaWiki layout both sites were extremely usable. The Fandom trash styling makes both very difficult to navigate now. They're unusable without an ad blocker.

Really? Because I found the transition of Memory Alpha switching to Fandom extremely jarring. Maybe it will improve after WWIII and First Contact, when profit ceases to be a factor.

I truly can't remember even noticing a difference. I didn't even realize it had ever been hosted anywhere else until this thread.

On top of being generally worse in terms of content (if only for layout), they also SEO heavily and derank any better wikis. The only two fandoms (ha) that have had their independent wikis consistently rank higher I'm aware of are bulbapedia and fextralife.

Here's the justifications the Runescape wiki admins used for forking to a new site a few years ago, and things have only gotten worse since then:

https://runescape.wiki/w/Forum:Leaving_Wikia#Why%3F

Ads whose performance brings a dev box to its knees, ads that cause content to jump around as they load, ads that bloat your screen to the point where you have to scroll to see anything of use on the page you're on, and (this is a matter of taste), an atrocious layout.

Compare, a few pages on, say, http://poewiki.net (the community fork) with http://pathofexile.fandom.com

Compare the loading times. The jank. The layout, that optimizes providing you information, over serving you ads. The usability difference is night and day.

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