Is fandom.com actually getting worse?
I have been a frequent visitor of the various websites that are now under the Fandom.com umbrella, going back to when it was called Wikia. And if there's one thing that's been a consistent irritation with the platform, it's just how intrusive and annoying the advertising is. (For a sense of how long this has been a problem, see here.)
But worse than the intrusiveness of the sites' ads, their biggest problem is their performance. They can bring Firefox to a crawl.
For a while, it seemed like Fandom had been making some improvements. I could visit, say, Memory Alpha without the CPU on my computer spiking like crazy. But I just tried to look something up on the Forgotten Realms Wiki and, good god, it was terrible.
(And before anyone says anything, no, I have no intention of using an ad blocker to deal with it.)
Am I imagining it or is the platform actually getting worse again?
May I ask why not? That seems like a pretty essential part of browsing the web these days. That said, yeah, Fandom is somehow getting worse. I've noticed similar issues even with an adblocker in Chrome. Wookieepedia is similarly impossible to read.
Yeah, to me this post reads like "Anyone feel like everything is betting blurrier? (no I'm not going to wear glasses)". Yes, you're right, fandom.com and everywhere else is getting worse, that's why you need an ad blocker.
I'm hesitant to even say anything, because I really don't want to fight with anyone about this (which is also why I didn't elaborate on that statement in my original post), but I really don't appreciate the insinuation you and u/SpruceWillis are making that the only people who wouldn't use an ad blocker are idiots.
I don't think you're an idiot, I just think that you correctly predicted what most people's response would be, and if you don't want to talk about that (which is fine), there isn't much else to discuss. Looking through the top-level comments here, nearly every single one is recommending some way of finding the content you want without financially supporting fandom.com.
Thinking about it a little more, I realize I am just not very good at talking about a problem without trying to come up with solutions, which a lot of people find annoying. So I'm sorry for taking that out on you, I should be better at just empathizing.
Read the OP's post as "I want a new phone that wouldn't freeze up on me and will work reliably. I don't want iPhone".
It's OP's choice not to use adblocker and it was mentioned so everyone wanting to advise that can just pass along. Yet it failed even though it was specifically mentioned...
I'm not sure that's the best comparison here, I have an android phone and it's never frozen up on me and has always been reliable.
This is not the point of my comment. The point is that OP is looking for something and is NOT looking for something other. And people keep advising OP that something other.
Not everybody believes piracy is a morally acceptable answer.
I don't agree that adblocking is piracy but this reminds me of another well trotted out argument.
Pirating books is bad because it doesn't give revenue to the author. But buying secondhand books is fine, even though it also doesn't give revenue.
Using a site but not clicking any ads is fine (does the site get revenue?), but blocking those ads from appearing is bad because it doesn't give revenue to the site.
Maybe there's something I'm misunderstanding from your point of view.
The idea there being brand recognition I guess? You still see the ads if you don't click them. You might buy the next book new from the author?
I don't know, the twists to get from "you didn't display the blob of data like they asked you to" to being piracy is just disingenuous.
Seeing the ads is often what pays the money. Many ads are not revshare or click/action based, they are impression based. No impression = no money. A good clue to the validity of an action is to consider what would happen if everyone took it. In this case, if everyone chose to be a freerider then the site would have to shut down.
This is definitely a good way to start looking at whether or not something is moral, but it doesn't allow for a lot of nuance.
Counterpoint: People are more than willing to pay for things and/or deal with ads when they are getting a great service with a reasonable sacrifice. Netflix is a good example of this. There was a time when Netflix was an affordable place to watch almost any show or movie. When that changed, piracy went up. When that changed more, piracy went up more. Perhaps piracy is a good metric for whether or not people think you're providing a fair ask for your service.
Similarly, perhaps use of adblockers is a good metric to measure whether the internet as a whole has too many ads that are too intrusive. Perhaps they demonstrate that more work needs to be done in making ads safe, secure, less obnoxious.
Personally, I don't pirate unless a movie is a) unavailable on streaming and b) costs more than $5 or $10 to rent on YouTube.
When those two criteria are met, fuck em. They weren't getting a dime from me anyway. Only exception is new movies and theater tickets which understandably cost more.
You'll notice that my first choice is always to pay for the thing or deal with the ads. I subscribe to probably half the streaming services at a time and switch as needed.
Streaming could have killed piracy. Advertisers could have killed adblockers. They just had to be better.
Okay I see your point in how they get impression money rather than just clicks.
But I don't agree with using the "If everyone did it..." justification because if everyone just used the library or bought secondhand then authors would also still suffer but I doubt most people would consider using the library or buying secondhand as morally wrong/"invalid".
We are witnessing the consequences of everyone taking a different action. Right now, just about every website is choosing to actively violate your right to privacy by helping these ad networks collect your personal data to build advertising profiles. Because every one of them is doing this and we have no legitimate recourse, ad blockers are gaining popularity as the only viable option.
Honestly, I think that's why we can't leave this up to the free market. If the general consensus is that trackers are an invasion of privacy, then they shouldn't be legal.
Not necessarily. It's not like ads are the only revenue model out there. You can always ask for direct payments or subscriptions. That's what many news sites have shifted to.
But to be frank on the "validity": at this point in the web, ads have been abused and sacrificed all the aspects of browsing that shouldn't be sacrificed. performance, security, privacy good UX practices, lightweight, stability, etc. I've had weird full screen ads crash my entire browsing session. sites have trackers tracing my history and creating shadow profiles for places I never visited or have explicitly deleted my account for. And I don't think I need to elaborate on the outright malware links if you gotta search outside the plutocracy of the 20 biggest websites.
At this point adblocking is more for protection than to obtain free content. if I need to wear a helmet so I don't get slapped in the head everytime I enter a restaurant, it's going to fall on deaf ears if you say that helmets are ruining the business. Make sure I won't get slapped and we can start compromising on the helmet. Be it the company or the government, someone has to reel in these ad practices.
I've heard this before and it always baffles me. I can think of dozens of valid life choices that would cause issues if everyone did them. I'm never having kids, if everyone stopped having kids right this second we would run into some issues pretty quickly. I have three cats that I've also gotten sterilized, there aren't enough cats for everyone in the world to do that. Taking the bus in my little town would be much less pleasant if everyone was always trying to use it to go to the same places I was.
There's plenty of good things to do that would be good if everyone did them, certainly, but it doesn't seem like a very helpful rule of thumb.
In intro econ classes they explicitly teach you about how some behaviors can benefit you as an individual but would be bad if everyone did them. Most famously, saving money is catastrophic for the economy if everyone does it -- this is known as the Paradox of Thrift.
Even under an amoral analysis of its practicality I think this is a bad way of determining whether you should or shouldn't do something, and it's almost laughably orthogonal to any reasonable basis for assessing an action's ethics or morality.
It's really more of an ethics guide than a logistics thought experiment.
Kant can be tough to get through, but the Wikipedia article on the Categorical Imperative might be interesting reading.
The secondhand market theoretically increases the value and therefore possible asking price for new books. Even if not by much it's still a different scenario.
As someone who sails the high seas, I find it hypocritical to claim adblocking isn't piracy due to some technicalities. Getting access to a paid service without "paying" is piracy.
The only excusable reason imo is the risk of malware, but I seriously doubt this is the main/only reason for most people using them. Especially because the risk of getting infected is very low with modern browsers.
Like I still use adblockers because a lot of sites are quite intrusive with them, and the alternative subscription services are not only too tedious to subscribe to for every random site but most often way too expensive. But I'm not kidding myself that instead of not using a site I'm deciding to instead be a freeloader, which in some ways is even worse as a completely passive user since I'm not only not generating income but also causing higher expenses.
It's not just a technicality to note the difference between a service or product one cannot access legally except through a fee/membership and one that can be accessed by anyone at any time and they also get paid for your computer to load external resources. It's technical in nature, but it's a crucial technicality. Otherwise, loading a website would imply consenting to anything their server wanted to do, up to and including installing malware on your system. It isn't piracy to listen to a concert outside of the arena, it isn't piracy to turn off your television precisely when the commercial break starts and set a timer for three minutes, and it isn't theft when you find an abandoned book on a bus stop bench and take it home.
If publications want to "protect themselves" from freeloaders, they should stop enabling them by offering unauthorized access and taking advantage of a system they don't embrace, the Web as a place of freely accessible and indexed archives. If they want to close that "technicality", they can take actual sponsorships and serve the ads themselves, at least then they have to stand by what they shove in front of people's eyes.
Some trackers are honestly worse malware than any actual virus these days. And unlike ads, you can't really escape them by "going to a different website". And it only gets worse if you are indeed someone like me trying to go out of their way to discover other webpages outside of the mainstream.
I'd feel more bad if I had any choice for most websites. In this case, it's not like Fandom has a subscription option to remove the ads I'm already blocking. If they aren't up for offering options as they buy up every single space of old school guides that isn't doing such intrusive ads, I don't know what to say. I didn't ask them to buy GameFaqs and it's only a matter of time before the same fate befells it.
I'm not sure how I see ad blocking as piracy, for a few reasons.
The fact that advertising on these sites has gotten so bad that ad blockers feel like a necessity is their problem, not mine. In a similar vein, I don't think you would describe someone in 2003 skipping ads with their TiVo as a pirate.
The term piracy refers to an actual crime being committed. That is distributing copyrighted material to which you do not own the rights to do so. There is no law that says you have to look at ads before you are allowed to look at a fandom wiki.
"Piracy" strikes me as the wrong word, but I think I understand the sentiment.
A decade ago, I didn't really use ad blockers: ads felt less obnoxious back then, but a large part of my reasoning was because I wanted to support websites I liked, and many of those websites got paid per ad impression. I remember trying out an ad blocker at one point, so I was definitely aware of them. I just didn't use them.
Fast forward ten years, and ad blockers are on all of my devices. But I empathize with your views because I used to hold similar ones. I would like to caution you that your words sound slightly self-righteous on the web — but to the extent that your beliefs are genuinely held, I respect that, and I hope others respect that as well.
I guess… thanks for the warning?
I got the sense of an implied judgement (which might not have been your intention!), and I wanted to let you know in case others did as well — as it would distract from some very valid points you're raising. It's a very Kantian perspective, that if everyone used ad blockers the system would break down, so something is inconsistent somewhere. Even if we reach different conclusions about what the fix is, it's still a very worthwhile discussion.
Ad blockers are highly recommended, even by the FBI. At minimum for security purposes, it's worthwhile. uBlock Origin is easy to install and makes your experience on the internet much better.
Dril's candle tweet remains as relevant as ever.
you know the tweet is old when it's talking about $800 rent. And 2013 isn't that far away to begin with.
I'm going to take a different approach from others here and argue for two things that legitimatize adblockers besides just preventing viruses.
Right to privacy: without using adblockers and other antisnooping measures like VPNs, non-chromium browsers like Firefox, and other measures, 3rd parties like ad services are capable, willing, and proven to violate my right to privacy by building ad profiles, collecting personal data and the like. I wouldn't want cameras in grocery stores tracking my identity as I shop and ad services knowing who I am, my browsing habits, and my identity as a whole all without my informed consent is a violation of my rights. If using an adblocker protects my rights to privacy even a little bit, it's justified.
Ownership of my own device: If I buy a newspaper with advertisement inserts, I have every right to remove them and throw them away without looking at them. Likewise, I have the right to control what is downloaded onto my storage media, whether that be hard drive or ram. If I don't give consent to have some website serve me content of any kind against my will, why should that be forced upon me?
Because it feels like free riding and I don't feel comfortable with that.
Fandom.com is not free to host. If everyone blocks the ads, who pays for the website?
Everyone does not block the ads or they would just not put them there.
If the ads are detrimental enough to the site that people are first recommending to disable them over everything, then the site probably deserves to lose revenue over an intrusively idiotic decision.
I understand and respect your view point, even if I'm personally okay with using adblockers in practice. I also recognize your desire to avoid going over the ethical arguments yet again as a distraction from the original topic. Any arguments about whether it's "piracy" or not are orthogonal to the actual question you asked.
I would like to say though that I've very little problem adblocking Fandom sites in particular, as I consider them to be a negative for the web. They do provide value, but that value was created by users. The actual hosting costs for text content are surprisingly small. The vast majority of the page weight comes from ads, tracking, and other forms of promotion. An entire GameFAQs game guide will often be smaller than a single Fandom page.
Fandom built their content through acquisitions and then heavily monetized it. They swallowed up Wikia and Gamepedia so there are few independant wikis left. Some wikis have the resources to fork and start over on SEO and community building, but most do not.
If Fandom were to go under, it would be catastrophic in one sense, yet a great relief in another. Another, more sane wiki provider would be able to step up and fill that role, and things might start getting better again. And - if I'm not mistaken - the actual contents on the wikis are licensed as share-alike, so they may be able to be ported directly to other alternatives with only minimal interruption.
Just some food for thought.
I appreciate the thoughtful and polite reply. And I get where you're coming from. I, too, wish Fandom was going under and would be replaced.
I'm reluctant to dive much deeper into the moral question, but I do think there's one relevant point to make on the matter.
My problem with this is that it commits the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy. In my opinion, the only moral approach to take with sites that have excessively intrusive ads is to just not patronize the site. I have a mental blacklist of sites I refuse to visit because of how bad their ads are. Fandom just doesn't have a ton of viable alternatives so I feel trapped.
Anyway, all that is contingent on if one thinks there's any moral problem with the use of AdBlockers at all. If it's not a moral issue for a person, then there's no problem with using one anywhere.
You can use uBlacklist for an actual blacklist (on search engines) instead of a mental one.
Are you currently using Indie Wiki Buddy to redirect/alert you to independently hosted alternatives where applicable?
That's fair. Thanks for explaining your rationale further.
I know some users will operate adblocks on a whitelist basis. Certain websites or content creators - such as on YouTube - they'll allow ads for, while blocking all others as a default. I'm curious why there's not the inverse of this: allow ads by default, but blacklist specific websites that are overly aggressive about it. That seems like a potentially useful feature for an extension to offer. Regardless, I think we've fully explored that side discussion.
To answer your original question more directly - yes, I do think Fandom has gotten worse! I've written a few userstyles (separate from adblocking) just to reign in the site a little more, such as hiding that obnoxious yellow bar, and disabling the age gate popup. I can only imagine what manner of tracking they would unload if I actually clicked "Yes, I am an adult" on that thing.
Honestly, hopefully no one. That site is atrocious and the day that it disappears will be a good day for the world. I honestly don't understand what leads anyone to want to host information with it. At least as long as it has been called Fandom, it has been one of the least user-friendly sites on the Internet.
Other people mentioned it already, but for the most part people didn't want to use Fandom, they acquired a bunch of wikis a while back and the time-cost to migrate to a better platform is too high for most existing communities.
Not to mention Fandom has a history of not allowing communities that move to delete their Fandom wikis or even add a notice saying they've moved. They've banned long-standing admins for "vandalizing" pages.
Not so much a history as a present, tbh.
They're not keeping the lights on with that ad revenue. True its not ideal for every website to be expected to pay for its own hosting when providing a useful service but i think its important to note that in terms of driving money to a site, ads are not exactly user friendly.
They are a predatory, intrusive way of adding supplementary revenue to an existing business model. In terms of user experience, they not only perceptibly ruin a website's layout (usability) and ambience but these platforms actively track you behind the scenes. Information about you that you likely would not want out there. Using an ad blocker in this day and age is the only way you should be surfing the web, for your own safety.
If you find value in a service and want to support it: buy merch, donate, contribute. Any one of those things greatly increases revenue over ad views (because youre not clicking them, they make the website almost nothing). So youre not really supporting them this way and are actively being taken advantage of.
Sorry, what is the existing business model that fandom.com has that ads supplement? As far as I can see, ads are the only source of revenue.
They sell user data. It's pretty detailed in their privacy policy, and you can see exactly what services they use to do so with... an Adblocker. They also do site sponsorships (See their sponsorship with McDonalds which, despite techinically being an ad, was NOT blockable as it replaced the content on the page), and own the game retailer Fanatical along with Metacritic, GameFAQs and Gamespot, which all add to the pool of data they sell. Up until early 2022 they also owned D&D Beyond, which allowed for users to purchase digital copies of books for the TTRPG Dungeons & Dragons.
Its got a number of subsidiaries that it likyrly pushes traffic to that make money for one.
For another, i was making a general push for ad blockers in general
Edit: yep, i go to the site and am immediately hit by screen junkies and giant bomb content up front. Make no mistake, the wikia format has been completely co-opted to serve the purposes of fandom's parent company
It's pretty damn cheap to host, though.
In an ideal world: the users who want to and can afford to pay pay for the website, through something like Patreon. YouTubers and bloggers have been switching to this model, and Twitch streamers were already on it. Substack (though you shouldn't use Substack) was also built around this. Most Mastodon instances are funded via donations. Wikipedia is funded by donations. Several independent wikis are also funded by donations.
Fandom has no desire to explore such revenue streams, though, because ads make more money. (In my view) they're an extremely predatory corporation that leeches off of the work of wiki authors, with nothing but profit as their concern. I wouldn't put it past them to re-license user contributions as under their copyright in the future.
May I ask why?
They've become a bit of a Nazi bar.
compromise: download a tracker blocker like Ghostery instead (adblockers also block trackers but you don't seem to desire an adblocker). You can argue ads are necessary, trackers can be much more dangerous, insidious, and are a very easy road to malware.
fact is, most people don't even know about adblockers, or half the audience browse on mobile where Safari and Chrome rule (and do not allow extensions at all). So the ones blocking ads are still a minority. That's why tech hasnt gotten even more aggressive than they already are about adblock.
As to why (I'm not OP) - For example I get paid by ads. I absolutely understand that people behind various sites (mostly news) need to eat and pay their bills (me included). Based on this I don't use adblocker of any kind. I have the theory that if the site uses ads in controlled and okay-ish way, I don't have problem with that and I visit it and let the ads show up. On the other hand - if sites is more ads than content and/or the ads are obtrusive or aggresive (ie. self-play video with sound), I will not come back there.
This is the reason I don't like using fandom.com. I also remember when it was Wikia and it was much better before fandom.com swallowed it.
I don't have a lot to contribute to this discussion in terms of what using Fandom is like - but if you don't already have it, I'd highly recommend the extension Indie Wiki Buddy. It has options to either provide a banner at the top of or to automatically redirect fandom wikis to either an alternative off-fandom wiki if it exists, or to proxy it through a breezewiki instance which strips all of the cruft out. Since you have no intention of using an adblocker you'd probably mainly be interested in the feature which redirects to an alternative wiki if one exists.
I'd known about the Indie Wiki Buddy for a while, but this comment somehow was the trigger I needed to install it.
It's such a better experience, thank you.
Yes, things have been getting steadily worse. Not just for the end user experience, but also for admins, editors, and content submitters. Recently the Minecraft community started migrating off Fandom to a new host https://minecraft.wiki/.
ref https://www.pcgamer.com/official-minecraft-wiki-editors-so-furious-at-fandoms-degraded-functionality-and-popups-theyre-overwhelmingly-voting-to-leave-the-site/
Minor trivia: The provider they moved onto, Weird Gloop, themselves formed out of the RuneScape Wikis leaving Wikia.
Wikia/Fandom's history is one of ever increasing and ceaseless enshittification, so no, it's not just your imagination. If you're dead-set on not using an ad blocker (which I can't in good conscience condone, but I'll not press on), you could instead view Fandom wikis through BreezeWiki or find independently run alternatives, which the already-mentioned Indie Wiki Buddy streamlines.
Yeah, it definitely does feel like a textbook example of enshittification. They make it so easy to spin up a wiki for basically anything that no one bothers setting one up anywhere else.
Though I will say that I have been pleased to find that the Baldur's Gate 3 community has created a wiki that is both excellent and not posted on fandom.com. If more of that kept happening, maybe the owners of fandom would wake up to the problem they've caused.
Stop using Fandom (22:17)
Off-topic: I see someone beat me to posting a link to that video :P out of curiosity did you stumble across that video or do you watch much of Mossbag’s content?
For anyone unfamiliar, Mossbag is a creator that was/is incredibly active in the Hollow Knight lore community. If you’re a fan of the game’s lore, strongly recommend watching his videos. They’re clearly a labor of love from someone who really cares about the game.
The video showed up in my YouTube recs - I haven't watched any of his other videos, and I am not a Hollow Knight enjoyer.
Cool cool. It's a great video and IMO an important topic so I am happy to hear it made it to other parts of the internet than the ones I am on.
And I am a massive Hollow Knight enjoyer, so I am always looking for people who also like the lore. But I understand it isn't everyone's cup of tea :) cheers!
I've been using the Indie Wiki Buddy extension for a while and can't imagine browsing without it. It'll redirect to less ad-heavy/more-readable mirrors, but more importantly it'll redirect to offical and community run wikis when they exist. I've found those tend to have far more reliable and useful information than fandom.com wikis, tend to be a lot nicer to read as they often seem to have better handling of structured information and nicer styling, and most importantly, often have a much closer connection to the game's developers and communities.
I think your perception that fandom.com is getting worse is certainly a common opinion. I think wiki.gg has been part of a pushback against fandom.com wikis from game developers and their communities — Terraria's announcement about moving their wiki to wiki.gg and how fandom.com insisted on keeping the old unoffical one up is a good example.
And I'm perfectly happy with the idea of using an ad-blocker on fandom.com even though I avoid it — they bear a lot of responsibility for the current dire state of games wikis and have been a bad actor in the space for a long time. The "Controversies" section on their wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)#Controversies) has a good overview, though personally I mostly remember how often they'd start competing wikis or not let existing ones move away, relying on SEO to drive people towards their wiki even when the quality was far lower.
On a more abstract level, I'd go as far as to blame them for some of the worse wiki writing habits that have become very common now, such as creating one-line stub pages for every single item in a game (because it has better SEO → drives more traffic → more ads), even though that's almost always a terrible way to present information that would be better displayed as a list or table.
Your specific complaint about article stubs is one of my pet peeves as well. What really gets me is that these utterly useless pages, devoid of any content whatsoever, somehow still rank well in search.
I've been playing Monster Hunter: Rise lately, and recently looked up what the "melding pudding" is for. Here's what Fextralife says:
Boy, doesn't that just say a whole lot. The rest of the page is no better. It's just large blocks that list either N/A or "Tips go here". Most articles look this way.
Here's the real answer: melding pudding is a resource for melding talismans. That's it. It could be trivially explained in one or two sentences. I'd even be happy to contribute it to the wiki, if it weren't such a bastardized SEO content farm.
Anyway that's my rant. There are a handful of quality, well-written and curated wikis out there. Stardew Valley, Runescape, and Melvor Idle are great. Minecraft and Terraria are good if you use the forked versions. Unfortunately between Fandom and Fextralife, most wiki pages are low-quality and filled with vague descriptions that may or may not even apply to the item you're researching.
For almost anything I play for more than a few days and that has a decent wiki out there, I end up adding a search keyword for that wiki so I can skip google entirely (e.g. typing
melvor dragon clawwill go straight to Melvor's wiki, and for a clear enough result Mediawiki instances will go straight to the right page instead of a search results page). It's astounding how badly search engines rank this kind of content and pages with no useful information at all will top the results because the name is in the title.I try and contribute small amounts to wikis where I can, though I gave up on Fandom long ago. I don't know if it's still true, but at the time a lot of the content was templated even for blocks like the one you quoted, so it wasn't very practical to improve individual pages. (In fairness to fandom.com, this could well have been a specific wiki, it's long enough ago that I don't remember accurately.)
Dude, Fandom isn't made to be a repository of knowledge for your favorite works of fiction. It's using your favorite works of fiction to sell ad space.
It's ok for you to use an ad blocker in this case. Fandom 100% deserves it.
Absolutely. I remember the days when we had gamepedia UI before they got bought out by Fandom. No ugly yellow sidebar, no random unrelated wikis showing up as suggested pages, the search box being just a simple box instead of a pop up screen. I wish more people would migrate to alternatives like Miraheze for future gaming wikis, but there's the issue of SEO fuckery that makes them hard to take off versus the two big F* wiki platforms.
Fandom recently bought Fanatical and the site has gotten worse as a result. Now, even with an adblocker, I get pop-ups after a purchase about all of the “offers” and “deals” I’m eligible for on other sites while it also pushes things like the CapitalOne Shopping extension on me.
It’s a shame because I really like Fanatical and have used them for years, but avarice is on full display now that Fandom owns them.
I, too, have often wondered that. If my hardware has such an issue with it, exactly whose does not?
I have to assume that the bulk of all web traffic for almost any site is driven by normal, non-tech savvy users. How many ad impressions do they can get from those "normal users" if those people can't even navigate the site? I can't imagine very many of them are going to be persistent enough to make the site owners' design decisions rational.
But on the other hand, perhaps that's how this happened in the first place. It became a feedback loop of crap. The site doesn't work well, which drives users away, which drives down ad revenue, which prompts the owners to want to increase ad revenue on the remaining users, which drives more users away… Repeat ad infinitum.
They don't care if people navigate the site. They want Google to index their site well enough that searching "{game} {subject}" leads them to the page that has their content and all of the ads. The user can search the next subject as easily as they can navigate the site.
But if the users can navigate the site, they will visit more pages, and therefore generate more ad impressions. That's the part I don't get.
I can't really believe they would be introducing so many inter-wiki links/menus if they weren't trying to get users to browse around the pages more after landing there from Google.
Remember that humans aren't the only things browsing the web. All of those inter-links also matter to Google and other web-crawlers; they increase the discoverability and connectivity of other pages for the purposes of search rankings.
One significant part of SEO is reputation laundering. If a lot of users search for "redstone," visit the first link returned (Google gives me the fandom Minecraft 'redstone dust' page as the top result), and are evidently happy with the result (not returning to the search page to look at other results), then search engines can infer that the linked-to page is good and thus its outgoing links should carry some weight.
They might care about the item that interacts with the item they looked up, sure, and that is easily clickable within the text content.
They just don't have a model that cares about a deep dive into the game mechanics through site navigation. I guess that they have decided a few loaded page views is better than lots of page views with few ads.
Even without ads in the best case scenario, I only ever check maybe two or three pages when I visit a wiki (though I do not use Fandom at all, I just skip their wikis entirely).
Yep. IMO it's been steadily going downhill for years, ever since TPG Capital acquired it. But that's why I use BreezeWiki to view Fandom entries now instead of going directly to the site... and @Bauke's URL redirecting browser extension, Re-Nav, to do it automatically for me.
p.s. For anyone else using Re-Nav that wants the Fandom->BreezeWiki redirect, here's the share code for it. Or you can manually enter it using:
regex:
https?://(?<wiki>.+)\.fandom\.com/wiki/(?<page>.+)->
regex:
https://breezewiki.com/$<wiki>/wiki/$<page>There's an alternate solution here if you're just reading and not editing- there's a mirror of Fandom called "BreezeWiki." You just replace
fandomwithbreezewikiin the URL and it shows you a very light read-only version without ads or trackers.Fandom community content is under CC-BY-SA, so this mirroring is legal.
Interesting point.
I just tried to take it for a spin and the two sites don't have complete parity, which is to be expected if it is a fork and not just a mirror. For example (warning, there are Baldur's Gate 3 spoilers ahead) compare this to this.
I believe
antifandom.comis a mirror.Tangentially to this discussion, here are my adblock rules for fandom:
It removes all the useless crap like the left navigation bar and the bottom "fan feed" that's filled with unrelated pages.
Fandom will consistently go down hill until it runs itself into the ground. I have seen few sites as poorly managed as Fandom. It misses the mark on so many things and is completely unusable. The only reason the site is still relevant is because of SEO and unfortunately there really isn't a good way around that. I highly recommend the Indie Wiki extension as mentioned above.
Also get an ad blocker please I beg of you.
I don't suppose anyone here has any experience with recent versions of MediaWiki? I'm just wondering why more big communities don't just self-host - has it become particularly bloated and made it more expensive to run? I seem to remember that it was relatively lightweight 15 years ago.
The core MediaWiki software hasn't changed in a dramatic way. There have been many updates, improvements, and extensions, but MediaWiki in 2023 is pretty similar to MediaWiki in 2008. It's certainly much more complex than some other content management systems out there, but it was always that way.
Self-hosting is relatively difficult for the general population and most fan contributors to wikis don't have technical experience. The way the MediaWiki front-end is designed involves few of the skills necessary to operate a website on the back-end. It's essentially just HTML with custom markdown and optional CSS, plus knowing some weird hacks and conventions around the GUI. Generally, the most technical work that wiki administrators do in wiki code itself is writing parser functions (like switch statements) to do useful template calls. Some wikis may have advanced extensions like Semantic MediaWiki and DynamicPageLists; may write custom JavaScript and Lua files; and may integrate with the API to operate bot accounts. However, even for a fairly technically minded team, self-hosting adds additional layers to their routines. To a set of software engineers, self-hosting on MediaWiki is not uniquely challenging. But wiki admins are personally moderating their site, manually reviewing edits and maintaining a style guide, which is tedious and time-consuming. They are also volunteers and most lack project management experience.
I would argue that the prevalence of WYSIWYG editors in MediaWiki installations (especially Fandom) has attracted a more non-technical editor base over the years. If you edited Wikipedia in 2001, you were a nerd—because everyone on the internet in 2001 was a nerd. Today, the demographics of Wikipedia and Fandom are less programming-centric. When I worked for Fandom, I spent a lot of time helping community leaders with technical tasks. Some of them did not read or write code, including HTML, and struggled with basic computer science concepts. Many of them were also fairly young (in high school) and were not put-together enough to run a business, even a non-profit one. In many communities, the administrative turnover rate is high.
Having been built specifically for Wikipedia, MediaWiki is fairly hard to monetize, which is why Fandom and other for-profit wiki hosts tend to build on their own software on top. It isn't social in the way casual internet users understand and wiki engagement is nothing like that of Reddit. Many foundational concepts, like user and article talk pages, are unintuitive to people familiar with SMS-style text messaging and article comment secetions. Fandom was running on a MediaWiki fork for many years before recently clearing up their tech debt and separating their custom-built software from the MediaWiki foundation. Even today, their implementation is complex and their business needs are not similar to Wikipedia's.
Today, the biggest barrier for a wiki community interested in forking from Fandom is that the company's SEO is unbeatable. Even if the entire community were to move to a new platform, Fandom would retain a copy of the existing wiki. Their copy might slowly degrade over time, but not to a point that casual readers would stop using it. Given a choice between two wikis on the same topic, the majority of web traffic cannot consistently 1) realize that there are multiple wikis, and also 2) identify that one has significantly worse content than the other. Powerusers notice, but they aren't representative of the overall market.
Highly recommend the wiki.gg redirect extension for Chrome or Firefox.
Bro, everything on the internet is getting worse.