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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

When I still payed Dota, there was a wiki hosted on fandom.

The experience was terrible. It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch, and on mobile there were so many ads rendering the whole thing unreadable.

The catch is that there was a better wiki, called Liquipedia. But Google never showed it first and I kept getting tricked to click that shitty fandom site.

(It was years ago. But I just tested it a bit and for most Dota-related keywords, fandom is still ranked higher than liquipedia. I don't know if the quality of fandom site has improved though.)

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Yeah fandom has done this to several games. its taken a huge effort on the part of the Satisfactory community to make sure people know the official wiki is https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/ and not the garbage on fandom.

Using an extension to block fandom.com results is helpful because for other games I'm not really thinking about it when searching for something and find myself on that tumor of a website.

Shoutout to Kagi search for having a deny list feature. It’s really nice for this sort of thing.

Google used to have a deny/block list. But such lists are obviously very advertising unfriendly, since the companies paying for placement and running the most ads are most likely to be blocked.

They have one, it's just centralised and blocks the good sites.

I honestly love Kagi, it's like every single "it would be nice if Google gave me feature X instead of being greedy" in one place

Exactly. And SmallWeb is awesome too

I'm really enjoying a plugin (Indie Wiki Buddy) for replacing fandom links in search results with those of the corresponding independent wikis, and if you don't have an alternative, it converts any other fandom links to BreezeWiki which is like a 'reader view' of Fandom.

In theory I can imagine somebody feeling bad for 'poor fandom' getting scraped (and I do feel bad for some websites that have parties like Google take their content and regurgitate it without sending traffic) but nope, F*k Fandom because they cynically exploit the open CC licenses that this content was created with to guarantee themselves the right to compete with the original creators forever even when the creators want to leave.

Back when I played WoW, at some point the people running the fandom wiki "forked" it to move to different hosting, and I think even now years later the fandom one (which stopped receiving updates when the fork happened) is still ranked higher in Google searches

WoW is now on wiki number three after the company hosting the second one was also bought by fandom. The original rotting corpse is now over a decade out of date and still often ranks highest.

Fandom also refused to give back the wowwiki.com domain. A mistake to ever let them manage it.

Chrome/Firefox extension that redirects or alerts you when you open a Fandom or Fextralife wiki that has an independent alternative (many of which are migrations off those platforms): https://getindie.wiki/

Fandom is an abomination and filled with irrelevant or very basic content for most games. It wouldn’t exist if not for its phenomenal ranking on game-related searches…

Sometimes a fandom site I come across is legitimate and has tons of great information, and other times they completely make up fake games or features and just act like it was always real.

I think their trick was to buy something that was legitimately highly rated, then enshittify it.

I think the fandom wiki for Dota is effectively dead, with everything being migrated to Liquipedia. Doesn't stop the fandom one from ranking highly though.

For what it's worth Liquipedia is sort of aimed at different people than the fandom wiki. Liquipedia has a very e-sports bend to its content so it may be that the ranks are skewed because the fandom wiki has more general purpose info about the game, lore, etc while Liquipedia has info about teams, matches, events, etc.

When Jimmy Wales launched Fandom, then called Wikia, a shit-ton of (actually encyclopaedic) content about fictional stuff was deleted from Wikipedia to be moved to Fandom, with the excuse that it was a "sister project", that it was the right place for things to be moved, etc.

Fandom was pure corruption even before the tenth round of enshittification.

Are you trying to say Jimmy Wales is corrupt because he didn't let you have a separate page for every Lord of the Rings character?

Self-dealing is a bad look no matter how you try to spin it. Being fussy about what is and isn't "encyclopedic" (arguably a self-defining idea anyway though) is fine, until it benefits you to rule a certain way, then people are going to speculate.

Also, nobody knows how much money Jimmy Wales took home from selling Fandom to TPG/IMC.

So when Stack Overflow operates Stack Overflow, for programming questions, and Super User, for usage questions, and directs a computer usage question to Super User, that's corruption?

It'd be suspect, if SO was a nonprofit, and SU was a budding commercial enterprise owned in part by Mr. Overflow personally, and Mr. Overflow had used his influence over SO rules to farm content for SU so that he could sell SU to PE and get rich.

The problem was in the early days when people were still mocking the idea of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, journalists would snark about how (for example) the article on Captain Kirk was longer than some historical figure. So you can see how fictional content was seen as "embarrassing"

No, that isn't it

It really was. Outside the nerdosphere, articles about fictional people or places in TV, movies or games were widely mocked and seen as "unprofessional" -- people were saying if Wikipedia needed to be more like Britannica if it was going to be taken seriously.

I believe they are just saying that fandom.com sucked and made the internet worse even from the start, not necessarily that Jimmy Wales is corrupt.

Wikipedia actually does appear to have separate pages for every Lord of the Rings character. Frankly I think it makes sense for this series, since there's a truly unusual and effortful amount of worldbuilding behind its scenes, and since it has been so influential to fiction (even regardless of medium).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings

Anyway, Jimmy Wales doesn't unilaterally make article inclusion/exclusion decisions; there's a whole debate and voting process that Wikipedians use to make decisions like that. So if anyone were to be called corrupt for making ill-fated decisions to delete articles, it would be a bunch of pseudonymous Wikipedia users. And I think they likely acted in good faith, trying to improve the encyclopedia, even though it didn't work out well and wasn't what I would have done.

>It wasn't always update-to-date with the latest patch

In case you didn't know Fandom is not the one who is writing the wiki. The pages are community contributed. If it's out of date it means no one has contributed information about newer patches.

This doesn't actually matter, the user experience is just as bad. If you want visitors then you have to find a way to fix it.

Fair, but that's not their business model. They don't create any content. Their model is to trick naive (but obsessive) people into filling their wikis with information, then when they realize how enshittified the site is, using their SEO advantage to crush any later attempts by those same people to build a real community wiki.

> If you want visitors then you have to...

They'd say "Or, we can just have really good SEO and get those visitors without earning them!"

This is why people recommend Kagi.

But it's paid. Some people use brave because it's free and not google. More than duckduckgo

Free isn’t free, you get what you pay for and you’ll pay one way or another

> you get what you pay for

I generally agree with your sentiment against trusting free services/things.

I agree with paying for Kagi.

But I can see why people try to be frugal with their money and use free services.

The problem is handing over money guarantees nothing.

Money provides the opportunity for the other party to do the right thing by you. But they may take your money and do the shitty thing anyway. Particularly when you have no real way to tell - like most people using the internet.

I also broadly agree with you're sentiment

But re: kagi specifically, for me personally, the delta is obvious and isn't trust based.

When I use Kagi I have a curated search experience that has a relatively high information density - driven in large part by the alignment of incentives and the ability for me to tune my results.

There is a noticeable difference for me when I switch to 'free' alternatives where the content thrown in front of me is mining for attention and CPM - because the cost of 'free' is covered by the value of my attention. The cost of kagi is less than the value of my attention.

Brave is a series scam company.

It's still terrible. Also, congrats on escaping the cancer.

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