Could you give a summary? I stopped using youtube.

I loath this site. It’s rarely loads well and the images never load for me. And it’s always so slow. It’s probably because I have an adblocker.

My easy solution, whenever I land on a fandom page, is to add "anti" in front of the domain name, "antifandom" will filter out the crep out of the original page and present a clean version of the wiki. This is powered by BreezeWiki

Example:

• before: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Infect
• after: https://mtg.antifandom.com/wiki/Infect

edit: typo, added example

Not watching a YT video.

Anyone got a synopsis?

I agree with the premise; fandom sucks. But does it really require a 20 minute exposé though?

I've seen a few links to the Indie Wiki Buddy extension page. I'm not too interested in installing a browser extension to find new wikis, but I bookmarked their listing page: https://getindie.wiki/listings/

TLDR; Fandom has a lot of QAnon articles written to make the scams seem legitimate to less computer savvy people.

My mom has fallen in a Qanon conspiracy world. The people from that world write Fandom articles about themselves to make it seem legitimate. I found them when I started investigating these people trying to convince her to steer clear.

I don’t trust a single thing on Fandom anymore.

An extension called Indie Wiki Buddy can also help with this by helping direct you to known alternatives to fandom for specific franchises or falling back to Breezewiki-based instances that rehost Fandom content without all of the Fandom bloat. It also provides this filtering and hinting to search results too, so you don't have to change your workflow too much to use it.

I've always advocated against using Fandom. Not much customization and so many ads it makes the platform downright unusable.

A much better alternative is Wiki.gg, created by some of the original founders of Fandom.

You might have heard of alternative frontends to services such as YouTube (Piped, Invidious), X/Twitter (Nitter), etc.

Something similar exists for Fandom: Breezewiki. This instance seems to occasionally result in errors, other instances seem to work more reliable.

Mfw you want to check some quick Minecraft details and you get a pop up then half your screen covered with one video. Thank heavens that they created minecraft.wiki as a wiki is basically essential for playing that game.

Okay, I will stop using the thing I have never used once in my life

This is one of the main reasons I use Kagi. I have sites like fandom and fextralife blocked in my search results.

One of the things I miss about early internet years was all the independent fan sites and forums people had. Now, so much is just posted to these garbage platforms that control everything.

Fandom hosts a lot of wikis for long forgotten nich'e games and with these games there usually isn't enough interest to move to another wiki. When it comes to these wikis theres rarely if ever a team behind updating the wiki and more often than not the content is just being updated and maintained by random invidividuals who just happen to be engaging with the content at given time. The very low barrier of entry makes this possible as you don't really need to join a team to edit pages or even coordinate with other people.

When playing one of these games I like to record and share some my observations and findings about games mechanics etc but more often than not the only wiki I can find is fandom wiki that is either incomplete and possibly even abandoned. I cant be bothered to create my own Wiki for these games so I'll just start editing that one instead because it's easy, the foundation is usually already there and I don't need to bother taking any sort of responsibility/mantle of maintainer or admin.

While Fandom may not be the most optimal choice and there may be better ways to host wiki out there its still better than some obnoxious google document or poorly formatted steam guide that no one else can edit.

no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.

we have to use a decentralized open alternative (like lemmy) to take back control, switching to a proprietary solution by yet another company will only delay the problem further.

I got special Stylish CSS blocking half the shit on Fandom. IDK about any politics about them but the site is borderline unusable.

Whats the alternative?

Regarding SEO, What's stopping maintainers from vandalizing their own fandom page?

It would not be difficult to make a bot to update fandom page with a convincing but slightly wrong info, after a few hundred iterations, it's all useless. Go look at what google recommend and do complete opposite. I'm convinced this will bomb ranking and put whatever wiki they migrated to at the top.

For just about every single pokemon fan game I play, the fandom wiki pages have pretty much been utter garbage. Either they're out of date, contain almost no useful info, or have a slew of other problems making it as painful as falling in a bunch of cacti. Same for most other ones I used to visit.

Will admit, Pokemon Empire having their own site for their fan game is still infinitely better than the fandom pages for it.

Honestly, fuck Fandom. Do we have a Fediverse alternative?