[HN Gopher] "Attention assault" on Fandom
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"Attention assault" on Fandom
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 209 points
Date : 2024-06-17 21:08 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (j3s.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (j3s.sh)
| Sivart13 wrote:
| Moreso than just the visual assault from going to a Fandom page,
| these things have got to have an impact on global battery life.
|
| Having a couple Fandom pages open in tabs can drive my laptop fan
| crazy and turn my phone into a griddle.
| intelVISA wrote:
| > Having a couple Fandom pages open in tabs can drive my laptop
| fan crazy and turn my phone into a griddle.
|
| It's all the FanCoin it's mining in situ
| nine_k wrote:
| Going to commercial web sites without an ad blocker is a
| terrible experience. Avoid it if you can.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The problem is that Fandom ends up with better search engine rank
| than the replacement wiki that the actual community moved on to.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| What's the replacement wiki?
| itishappy wrote:
| What you move to when you quit Fandom. Super common for
| games.
|
| Examples:
|
| Fandom: https://noita.fandom.com/wiki/Noita_Wiki
|
| Official: https://noita.wiki.gg/wiki/Noita_Wiki
|
| Fandom: https://terraria.fandom.com/wiki/Terraria_Wiki
|
| Official: https://terraria.wiki.gg/wiki/Terraria
|
| Fandom: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki
|
| Official: https://minecraft.wiki/
|
| Two of the three Fandom wiki's above are still ranked higher
| than the official ones on Google.
| o11c wrote:
| https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page is ranked above the
| Fandom version these days.
| Falell wrote:
| There isn't one, there are hundreds. Given that you end up on
| a small fandom wiki, you have no idea where 'the better
| community' is. You go to your search engine of choice and
| start clicking random wikis hoping at least one other one has
| decent info (most are useless).
|
| As a concrete example, Path of Exile moved to
| https://www.poewiki.net/ (which is a single MediaWiki
| instance not associated with a larger network). The content
| is quite good but it took probably 18 months for it to start
| reliably appearing in google search results.
| freehorse wrote:
| In many cases, it is not a big deal to just open a few
| links and figure it out. Fandom's content is usually too
| crap and incomplete. I have been mostly avoiding fandom and
| fextralife because of content reasons, and I had no idea of
| all the drama around them.
| bisby wrote:
| https://libredirect.github.io/
|
| LibRedirect has an automatic Fandom redirect option, so if
| someone sends you a fandom link, or you otherwise click one
| without realizing it, you won't wind up on fandom. You still
| give the analytics that you clicked a fandom link to whoever
| served you the link though.
| themagicteeth wrote:
| Doesn't it just redirect to BreezeWiki? BreezeWiki is just a
| Fandom mirror as far as I am aware. So while you won't see
| Fandoms ads, the content is still on Fandom. Though, it is
| still better than the actual website by a lot... and the
| other redirects it offers are pretty great as well.
| https://breezewiki.com/
| chgs wrote:
| That's sounds brilliant.
|
| I typed "memory alpha" on the search page you linked to.
| Exception raised in Racket code at response generation
| time: json-pointer-value: contract violation
|
| Cest La vie. On desktop fandom is fine, ublock handles it.
| On an iPhone though forget it. It's the videos.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Yeah. LibRedirect is a nice generalist tool, but for wikis
| you are better off with Indie Wiki Buddy[1] which is a
| community led tool to point to the best avaialble wiki, or
| breeze if there isn't one. You def want this because some
| communities have made it a point to poison the fandom pages
| (see Terraria which is full of fake items and crafting
| recipes now).
|
| [1] https://getindie.wiki/
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It's better to use https://getindie.wiki/, which sends you to
| the specific replacement wikis rather than BreezeWiki (though
| it _does_ support BreezeWiki).
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I work for wiki.gg
|
| You can use one (or both) of these extensions to avoid Fandom:
|
| * https://getindie.wiki/, should redirect you to any not-fandom
| equivalent
|
| * https://support.wiki.gg/wiki/Wiki.gg_Redirect, is wiki.gg
| wikis only and will see updates for such wikis more frequently
| Ukv wrote:
| The (Old School) Runescape wiki mentioned in the article
| (https://runescape.wiki/ and https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/)
| is higher up than the Fandom one on all search engines I'm
| aware of. The Minecraft wiki (https://minecraft.wiki/) also
| generally beats out the Fandom one (on Bing, Yandex, ... - but
| critically not yet Google).
|
| Definitely takes a lot of effort, but can be done.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > but critically not yet Google).
|
| My takeaway from the recent Google search engine ranking
| documentation leak was that they very heavily uprank big
| brand names. A page on reddit with various short comments
| (many of them useful I'm sure) is going to always outrank a
| random individual's blog with a well-researched article about
| the same topic. Same for Quora, Facebook, and the other
| websites with big moderation teams and where we all know what
| to expect.
|
| There is something to be said for it as well: the quality of
| a reddit discussion or quora answers will probably be more
| consistent than if you serve up random other pages (those may
| be content farms, ad farms, unresearched opinions...). Other
| pages on the web may be better, or may be worse. I'm guessing
| that Google figures/found they look better if they don't
| serve up (m)any bad results but rather pretend that big
| brands are the internet now, sticking to an average
| (mediocre-ish) quality
|
| Perhaps that's why Google likes big brand Wikia better than
| this new domain
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| So?
| ziddoap wrote:
| So people looking for a wiki with a quick search end up
| clicking on the fandom link, being bombarded with ads as well
| as potentially outdated or incorrect information, instead of
| clicking on the wiki that doesn't have those issues. In turn,
| that gives fandom more ad views and potential clicks,
| perpetuating the problem.
| throwanem wrote:
| So search engines continue to serve the SEO-riddled landgrab
| garbage over the valuable resource, new visitors to the
| community continue to get served bad information and deterred
| from involving themselves further, the maintainers of the
| real wiki have to waste spare time figuring out how to deal
| with this nonsense over maintaining the resource, and Fandom
| continues to pollute the informational commons to its own
| gain and everyone else's detriment.
| labster wrote:
| Miraheze is the main replacement to Fandom -- it's an ad-free,
| community-owned, nonprofit supported entirely by donations,
| grants and volunteers. We've been operating free wikis on
| MediaWiki for about 9 years now, supported through different
| organizations, but right now we're the fastest and most stable
| we've ever been. Like all OSS efforts, we can always use more
| technical volunteers. I'm Chair and Acting President of the
| WikiTide Foundation, the parent of Miraheze, and I'd be happy to
| answer any questions about the service. Our users are generally
| more anti-Fandom than this article is, in my experience.
|
| For paid offerings, with a little more freedom than a wiki farm
| host can allow, WikiTeq, MyWikis, and WikiWorks are all good
| offerings in the MediaWiki space. I currently work for WikiTeq,
| but they're all pretty good, and the owners are on friendly terms
| with each other, with a lot of them coming in through the
| Wikimedia community or staff.
| solardev wrote:
| Can I ask what your stack is? I used to volunteer at another
| nonprofit wiki (not a host, just a single wiki). I had a lot of
| trouble trying to manage the MediaWiki LAMP stack, especially
| when you have to add things like Varnish with proper
| integration or Parsoid (I think back in the day it was a
| separate, standalone server that needed root). MediaWiki
| Updates weren't easy either. Is it still that difficult these
| days, or is there some readily-available containerized version
| now?
|
| Cloudways for a while had a managed MediaWiki VM offering, but
| they discontinued that I think. Are there standard best
| practices for hosting MediaWiki these days, or is that part of
| your secret sauce...?
| rahidz wrote:
| Anyone else find it a bit "conflict of interest"-y that Wikipedia
| often limits creation of niche articles because they have to be
| 'notable' enough, meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in
| running for-profit Fandom that _just so_ happens to solve that
| problem?
| YawningAngel wrote:
| I have had this exact thought and am deeply irritated by it
| pocketarc wrote:
| I don't even really understand why things have to be notable
| for Wikipedia. If people wanted to maintain all of the
| Runescape articles in Wikipedia (as mentioned by nouser76)...
| why not? Why not have Wikipedia literally be the central place
| for all information for all these different things?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-
| traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-
| confidence as either no one is monitoring for changes, or due
| to information wars between parties with conflicting
| interest.
|
| I've personally been approached to build tech to monitor and
| revert changes matching keywords using residential proxy
| systems as a service for low-stakes clients (and declined).
| lolinder wrote:
| > The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that
| low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-
| confidence
|
| Can you suggest some alternate approaches that you think
| would actually work? How would you approach removing the
| notability requirement without immediately opening the
| floodgates to hundreds of thousands of additional sketchy
| articles about niche topics that don't have enough interest
| to be vetted by more than one person per year?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I would argue that quite some "fandom" content gathers more
| views than many "notable" pages on Wikipedia.
|
| That said, I think there is a distinction between fact and
| made up.
| stevage wrote:
| There are many places on Wikipedia that explain exactly why.
|
| The short answer is, because it costs time and effort, and a
| little bit of money, to maintain all those articles, and they
| cause more problems than they are worth.
| i80and wrote:
| It's been frustrating watching articles for stuff I cared
| about in the 2000's get deleted because the mere passage or
| time has rendered the topics non-notable
| bpeebles wrote:
| It's not always clear but notability is not temporary[0]
| under English Wikipedia's guidelines. Standards of what
| makes something notable have shifted over the years and
| sometimes the different is hard to tease out.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notab
| ilit...
| Retr0id wrote:
| I see what you're saying, but in practice, not really?
|
| It would be weird for wikipedia to host, for example, every
| minecraft crafting recipe.
| binary132 wrote:
| why?
| ang_cire wrote:
| The same reason I would not fault a print encyclopedia
| publisher for not including video game strategy guides?
| mcny wrote:
| This is an ongoing debate between inclusionists and
| deletionists and it is far from settled even though the
| deletionists would have you believe the war is over.
|
| See also https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Limited page count?
| Retr0id wrote:
| I was going to say "it would be like documenting every
| chess opening move", but I looked it up and the article
| exists, so I guess I've just argued against myself:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| In disambiguation issues alone, it would be a nightmare
| if wikipedia hosted niche-topic content within the same
| namespacing as everything else. What would be good is not
| wikipedia being more lax, it's WMF providing the same
| service that Miraheze does; and here, I think, is where
| the conflict of interest really gets in the way
| nextaccountic wrote:
| This is a list of notable chess moves though, not an
| exhaustive list of all possible chess moves
| thih9 wrote:
| Why would that be weird? Personally I would find it
| convenient.
|
| There would be some issues, e.g. I wouldn't want to see
| Minecraft recipes when I'm searching for "obsidian". But
| these seem solvable; niche articles could be flagged and
| downranked, or they could live in a satellite wiki project,
| or something else.
|
| I remember seeing niche articles like this and enjoying it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's not really about what you would find convenient. It's
| about what Wikimedia wants to spend its limited resources
| on. It has decided it wants to spend its resources on
| something it believes to be a reasonable subset of general
| knowledge and information. Where to draw that line is
| highly subjective, but they have to try to find a good
| balance.
| stevage wrote:
| No, that's a real stretch. Jimmy Wales is barely involved in
| Wikipedia, and certainly has no say in editorial policy like
| that.
|
| The notability policy predates the creation of Wikicities
| significantly.
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| Where's the conflict of interest in having two different
| products for two different purposes?
| thih9 wrote:
| I am a user of both Wikipedia and Fandom, Vampire Survivors
| Wiki[1] in particular. I would very much prefer to read niche
| articles on Wikipedia.
|
| I can understand strict rules about reliable sources,
| independent point of view, or fighting SEO/spam. Still,
| satellite wikis could exist. Or Portals could serve as some
| workaround to the notability rule. Or something else.
|
| Wikipedia is by nerds and largely for nerds, I'm sure allowing
| nerdy topics there would help everyone in the long run.
|
| [1]: https://vampire-
| survivors.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_Survivors_...
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| It goes hand in hand with Wikipedia's stricter source
| requirements. You would need to source all the information from
| books and news articles (from a select choice of reliable sites
| decided by wikipedia editors). Essentially Wikipedia's
| definition of notable is 3 reliable sources writing about the
| topic. So it's really more about reliability (or, what
| Wikipedia admins consider reliable) than notability.
| Affric wrote:
| Not at all. Once you start permitting large amounts of fiction
| in Wikipedia then what's to stop any sort of fiction being
| included? Why not just have articles full of lies?
| Fundamentally fiction is lies. Just because a large group of
| people enjoy indulging the lies doesn't mean it should be
| included in an encyclopaedia. I say this as a lover of fiction
| and video games.
|
| Notability criterion is important.
| eurleif wrote:
| There's plenty of fiction on Wikipedia already; fictionality
| is orthogonal to notability; and it's possible to describe
| what occurs within a work of fiction without asserting that
| it occurs in the real world.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| No. Before the internet the encyclopedia didn't have over
| 10,000 articles about The Simpsons and it's reasonable that
| that would be outside the scope of Wikipedia as well. Just
| because someone profits from a situation doesn't make it
| improper.
| celemap wrote:
| You realise Wikipedia is not for Monster Hunter character
| builds right? A video game Wiki is different than Wikipedia.
| Nouser76 wrote:
| One of the best cases of leaving Fandom that I know of is the
| Runescape wiki mentioned in the article[0]. The community that
| ran the fandom wiki had buy-in from the creators of Runescape to
| assist with the transition, help with funding, and eventually
| direct integration into their games. In a game as information-
| dense as Runescape, that updates weekly, the wiki is basically a
| necessity for folks to play efficiently, or to find out how a new
| update actually works.
|
| Fandom isn't the only bad wiki site though. Fextralife had (has?
| I haven't kept up) an issue where they were embedding Twitch
| streams on each page load, which was boosting viewer counts for
| whatever streamer they decided to embed on every page.
|
| I'd love to see a world where more companies self-host the wiki
| for their game/TV show/etc, especially given the relatively low
| cost of deploying and hosting, but I also understand that most
| companies don't have the motivation to do that as it doesn't
| always directly impact their bottom line and it can take effort
| to moderate.
|
| [0]: https://runescape.wiki
| soared wrote:
| Would love to watch a documentary on the osrs wiki and
| especially the power transfer from fandom. Such a ridiculously
| incredible wiki. It makes me wish I never used it, as no other
| source of information (video game or not) is anywhere near as
| complete and knowledgeable. Anything you want to know about
| osrs, it's in the wiki.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| I don't play OSRS, but my partner does, and on more than one
| occasion they've shown me a page from the wiki and I've felt
| the exact emotion you're describing. Even a lot of enterprise
| software tools struggle to produce docs as good as the OSRS
| wiki's.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The Fextralife Twitch thing was so weird to see. Just some
| random stream with 14k viewers but the chat moved glacially.
| SSLy wrote:
| their last twitch stream was two years ago, the day before
| twitch stopped counting iframe embeds in the viewer stats
| Macha wrote:
| It also means the RS Wiki have full control over their fate, in
| comparison to e.g. what happened with the WoW wiki where it was
| WoWWiki at Fandom (then Wikia), they split to Wowpedia at
| Gamepedia which then got bought by Fandom and reeled them back
| in, and so they had to move out again, so now they're Warcraft
| Wiki. But they're at a new wiki host (wiki.gg) so who knows,
| maybe Fandom buys them too and they end up having to do a 4th
| fork.
| Nouser76 wrote:
| This may be tangential, but the interesting thing to me about
| the Warcraft Wiki is that it serves the lore and API
| information in great detail and is my go-to resource for
| those. But when it comes to precise data about the content
| (e.g. spell data and its coefficients), guides for current
| content, etc. Wowhead has much more relevant content in
| greater detail - which is a shame because to me the
| navigability and discoverability on Wowhead is nowhere near
| as good as MediaWiki.
|
| My dream is somebody takes the data from Wowhead and ports it
| into MediaWiki and the community rallies behind keeping that
| in date, but I know it's a bit of a pipe dream.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't have any issue with boosting their Twitch rating,
| actually it is a pretty funny trick, and who cares about Amazon
| anyway? Messing with their stats is a social good. But it is
| annoying how slow it makes their site.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| And the saddest part is, even if all notable games migrate away
| from Fandom within the next year or two, how enormous will the
| pile of money be that those VCs and private equity firm managed
| to accumulate by burning it all down?
|
| Investors don't give a shit about making sustainable products or
| really anything valuable to society, as long as they can fleece
| unwitting consumers for massive eyeball money for a short time.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I liked it a lot back when it was named wikia. It was really
| awesome for niche communities as well as for the most detailed
| info imaginable on any game I was playing at the time (a use case
| gamefaqs used to solve).
|
| I also really liked the name wikia, it was like a wiki for
| anything too detailed for wikipedia.
|
| But today, yeah...
|
| P.S. I never knew it was founded by the same founder as
| wikipedia!
| etrvic wrote:
| I had a similar experience this morning. I made the huge mistake
| of opening Famdom on my phone, and it took me a few minutes of
| blankly staring at the screen to realize this is actually a legit
| site. The amount of ads they managed to pack on a 4.7 inch screen
| was mesmerising.
|
| The problem is i got stuck at that game and searched for a quick
| solution. Then google straight up made me end up in that pile of
| ads. I hope people will start realizing what that website is and
| hopefully migrate their wikis to a better place, although it
| probably won't happen.
| dimmke wrote:
| I think it's funny that we're constantly reckoning with the
| issues that venture capital causes to various things in tech on a
| website that's funded and maintained by a venture capital fund.
|
| It can't be all bad, right? More and more, it seems like VC is
| the only way you can go in tech unless you have a really specific
| business model.
| sameoldtune wrote:
| It's funny you say that, considering VC funding tends to elicit
| a "very specific" kind of business model--a kind of "consumer
| goodwill pump-and-dump."
| Larrikin wrote:
| The only useful information in the article is
|
| >download Indie Wiki Buddy
|
| Seems like a nice plugin.
|
| There are dozens of tools to block ads on all platforms and
| nearly all of the internet is a cesspool of ads. I don't know how
| anyone can browse it without an ad blocker. Not really an
| interesting topic to spend most of the blog talking about.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I use ablocker but even with adblocker, Fandom's UI is so
| cluttered, that it is actually bloatware. It ranks high on Google
| and it is apparently one of the most visited websites in the
| world, undeservedly so.
| chungy wrote:
| Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki from
| Fandom servers. For several communities that decide to cut ties
| with Fandom, they effectively have to "fork" the wiki to a new
| domain and hosting provider, and all the while, search engines
| will almost always show the Fandom version first. I know it's
| happened with Doom, Simpsons, Futurama, Minecraft.
|
| It also draws would-be contributors to the Fandom site, make
| changes there, and since they are no longer supervised by the
| community 'elite', the quality of the Fandom version rapidly
| declines.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Will they allow the bulk overwriting of pages?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Sure, until someone (anyone, since it's a wiki) notices the
| vandalism and reverts it and reports your account to probably
| get banned
| b800h wrote:
| Yep, enormously frustrating. Search 'minecraft granite' and the
| top result is still Fandom.
|
| EDIT: Hell, even 'Minecraft Wiki' still goes there.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| > Fandom will also not allow wiki owners to remove the wiki
| from Fandom servers.
|
| The IP owners can request a takedown though & they'll usually
| comply, some game studios have done this
| stevage wrote:
| I think there's a big lesson about not investing your time and
| effort in anything controlled by venture capital.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Yay for the Minecraft wiki migration! I was so annoyed by having
| to use Wikia while creating a minecraft scavenger hunt for my
| partner when wanting to do things with redstone or light level
| spawnproofing.
|
| Opening the wiki now on the domain they host themselves, it is
| also very noticeably faster to click around. Sounds like a big
| win for the Minecraft community and kudos on doing such a large
| migration! Having tried to migrate Telegram groups to Signal,
| among a group of people studying IT security no less, it became
| very clear to me how hard it is to migrate communities
| philipov wrote:
| I found it easy to stop using Fandom, because their information
| sucks. It's always out of date, and grossly incomplete.
| eluded7 wrote:
| can't upvote this hard enough
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Whether I use it or not, it's the first 50 search results: until
| that changes, fandom is going to keep getting used. It's
| basically the w3schools for game info: a takeover by people who
| actually care and then uplifting it to something that's actually
| good (like what happened with w3schools) is a far better road to
| victory than getting people to stop using fandom - there are too
| many people, and too few search engines.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Is it fair to assume the guy who hates ads also doesn't want to
| pay for access?
|
| Because this road leads back to the AOL days of paid forum
| access.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > Because this road leads back to the AOL days of paid forum
| access.
|
| And such could be said that without an ad-block that this road
| leads to a gaping chasm full of forced malcontent and sponsored
| information.
| ziddoap wrote:
| It doesn't have to be a choice between numerous giant
| advertisements for non-gaming items or having a paywall, so I'm
| not sure why you are saying this as if those are the only two
| solutions.
| evmar wrote:
| Not that I'm a fan of ads, but I find it interesting that this
| post specifically complains that the ads aren't targeted enough
| ("my ad was for furniture - ah yes, just what i wanted" / "i do
| not have a dog" / "i don't need sunscreen") when I would expect
| the post's author also probably objects to being profiled by ad
| networks.
|
| It would be less curious if the post was saying around something
| like "I object to fandom monetizing at all", but also that also
| probably feels like a less sensible thing to say.
| Stagnant wrote:
| There was this site called LyricWiki[0] (lyrics.wikia.com) that
| was one of the larger wiki sites a few years back. Things went
| downhill quickly once wikia became fandom. Making new articles
| and editing was blocked in 2019 and the whole thing was wiped in
| 2020. It was the largest lyrics site for many smaller languages
| and as a result it seems lots of lyrics / information has been
| permanently lost. It also had artist pages which at times
| contained better information than the actual wikipedia page.
|
| I'd like to hear if by change someone had archived lyricwiki
| before its shutdown. I've looked in to it a couple of times but
| AFAIK the only pages that were preserved are the ones found in
| wayback machine. There is a dump of various wikia pages in
| archive.org but IIRC lyrics wikia is missing from that.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyricWiki
| doublerabbit wrote:
| And tvtropes is still holding strong, pretty much launched at the
| same time as.
|
| On interested, here's a 2005 - archived copy:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20051110015311/http://tvtropes.or...
| dabbz wrote:
| Had to go in and make sure fandom was blocked by my Kagi search
| filters. We're good now.
| languagehacker wrote:
| I worked there when it was Wikia. I'm disappointed that the APIs
| have been hobbled, that the name became something so honestly
| lame, and that you can't even view images with mobile ad blocking
| on. It really is about moats and enshittification, which is sad
| because the communities put a lot of hard work into their
| content.
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(page generated 2024-06-17 23:00 UTC)