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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember when "Fandom" was called Wikia? It really started going down the gutter when it started TikTokifying itself by trying to act as an entertainment hub. It was supposed to be a neutral resource for people to build community-driven knowledge bases but it turned into some real gamified garbage. I've never really been comfortable with the concept of addressing a "fandom" as one whole anyway, even in general, so the new act is just complete crap to me.

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I remember backlash against the name change. It seemed like they were trying to usurp the whole concept of a fandom, a sort of evil SEO to trick people into visiting the site.

I still call it Wikia on reflex.

Same. I also call Facebook and Google by their true names, even though they tried to get out of their reputation by naming new parent companies.

Oh, and Twitter, even though its new reputation is more deserved than before it got acquired.

Fandom probably hosts more copyrighted images and media than the Internet Archive does.

Entertainment studios can often turn a blind eye to use of their properties when it's by fans, for fans, and promotes those franchises. They are not sending C&D to people making avatars, or cosplaying, or memeing their screengrabs into notoriety.

It is weird to think that the WMF and Wikia/Fandom had a common founder and origin.

I remember when it was called Wikicities.

It was still crap back when it was Wikia. The website itself wasn't so bad yet, but the actual content of most Wikia wikis was very poor quality (often wrong, outdated, and/or poorly sourced; lack of maintenance and amateurish writing/presentation). I quickly learned to not click on Wikia search results whenever I could help it, whereas an independent wiki was a sign that the community cared enough to run their own servers.

The only Wikia sites that had anything worthwhile were the ones that started as independent communities and got bought out, like Memory Alpha or the Minecraft wiki.

I have nostalgia for real, community-driven crap. I have absolutely no nostalgia for this top-down systematic destruction of value.

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