The biggest insult is that Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia helped create fandom because he was fed up of people using Wikipedia to create detailed articles about fictional characters and video games. Wikipedia now has an artificially strict notability policy where things are falsely declared as not notable so they can be monetized on Fandom, all while Jimbo Wales has the gall to ask for money for his “non profit” Wikipedia while he makes the real money on Fandom.
If this is real I’ll be genuinely glad I haven’t donated to wikipedia yet.
I mean the conspiracy theory side of it is questionable but the basic facts are true:
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Wikipedia has a policy against non-notable things. They were always embarrassed by the fact that every detailed version of every Pokemon had its own page, whereas the pages for important historical events were stubs. The WP:Notability standard has been the bane of every garage band and open-source game and DVD extra that was booted off the site because trivia cannot meaningfully be checked, trivia that otherwise allows hoax articles to live on.
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Jimbo Wales decided to profit off of the desire to create fan-encyclopedias or even complete nonsense (like, for example, Penny Arcade’s Elemenstor Saga wiki, which details the history of a novel series and anime and cardgame that never existed) by creating Wikia, the for-profit Wikipedia that had no standards about what you could put on it besides legality. Just create your own Wikia and run it with an iron fist.
Now, the question is whether he did (1) in order to drive profitable users to (2). That’s where the conspiracy question lives. And I tend to assume good faith. People’s morals erode over time, not all at once. Since both (1) and (2) are totally legitimate, but profit motive encourages the millimetre-by-millimetre enshittification of Wikia into the horrible thing it is today.
It doesn’t seem so devious to me. He wanted Wikipedia to be considered a serious source of information which admittedly, detailed pages for video games, fictional characters and such would work against that goal. Being a non profit also works towards being taken seriously in the eyes of some.
So he created a secondary company to host that content and profit from it. Why not, I would argue. Don’t use the product If you don’t like it. I personally hate wikia. It’s slow and covered in ads. The question I ask is why is there no competition in the space? Jimbo’s not on the hook for that.
I’d be very curious to hear more details on this, do you happen to have a source handy, or any recommended reading?
In fairness, the money he gets from being a scumbag with fandom probably can’t be used to fund Wikipedia unless he wants to donate the money he’s making from his business to run his nonprofit. It’s not surprising he wouldn’t do that (even if thats the way the world ought to work) and I don’t presently have reason to believe he personally gets anything out of the donations that are given to keep Wikipedia running
Given the criticism of Fandom, why not use a Piped link instead of YT? It’s like criticizing YT on YT.
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.
We can’t just get out of capitalism, but you can work to improve your situation. If you have a yard, grow a garden.
Also, see if there’s a mutual aid group in your area, and if not consider talking with your neighbors about what you can do to help each other out. One person might be good with car Maintanance. Another might be a good gardener. Everyone can contribute something.
Gardening will not solve the climate crisis because it won’t offset the millions of tons of co2 being emitted.
It would help, sure, but we have to radically change production to stop it. Currently the rich own those, so the best we can do short of removing them is plead.
Also yes, you can’t just get rid of capitalism, history shows it takes years/decades of planning and organizing. Start as soon as possible because I don’t think we have all that much time.
no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
There was a time, long ago, where companies actually cared about their customers, and wanted to sell them good products while making a profit, and they strived for the win - win, and the “customer is always right” philosophy. They took their fair share, and they didn’t triy to squeeze every last dime out of their customers with crappy products.
Not that that they were saints by any stretch of the imagination (there were definitely bad players back then too) but there used to be a sense of ethics with Capitalism, in America at least, a sense of products being warrantied to work the way they should be and advertised as how they would actually work.
I have no effing idea how to get back to that state, as it seems like the “lunch for wimps” crowd are running the c-suites these days.
Regulation. Take the money out of governing, both national government and private directors. If someone makes decisions that affect many people, make that person accountable, either through a competitive market or a functioning justice system.
The problem is that the fantastically efficient tool that is capitalism will try to increase it reach as much as possible. Killing competition and undermining laws will always be the end goal, so long as they are in anyway allowed.
The reason companies used to care is because not caring drove customers to the competition. But then there was no competition, and the care evaporated. As long as they are allowed, they will take. Civility can only be guaranteed if profits are on the line.
No way of going back to that state unless we start from scratch, power is too consolidated as it is. And capitalism would soon evolve back to something like this eventually anyway.
We are on late stage capitalism now, as predicted by Marx.
e: also those better times werent that good either if you werent white/from somewhere rich, not long ago kids were working in coal mines.
decentralized open alternative (like lemmy) to take back control
which unfortunately still require capital to run
Or we could just… host our own wikis. There’s plenty of open source software for them. It’s not hard. Not everything needs to be federated.
Not watching a YT video.
Anyone got a synopsis?
You could always use Invidious or Piped (instance list here) to avoid using YT directly if you want. You won’t get any ads or anti-adblocker bullshit with Invidious, so I usually use that. I’m not sure about Piped, but it seems good too. Unless your point is to simply stop using YT for anything, in which case just ignore what I said.
EDIT: To the now 8 of you who downvoted me, just, why? No, seriously, why. If you downvote me, please at least tell me why you are instead of downvoting and leaving. It makes me anxious to think that I was a dick or spreading misinformation or just being rude and not even noticing it, and would much rather have someone say something to me so I can at least know what people don’t like. That’s not to say I would agree with it, I might not, but I’d rather know what the problem is so I can agree or disagree.
I think it’s the fact that not everything needs a 20 minute video. There’s a lot of topics that I’m interested in but skip because I don’t have 20, 30, 40, 60 minutes for it.
Fandom is for-profit and making their service ever more shitty in pursuit of that. Use https://getindie.wiki/
Or maybe check other comments in this thread
Could you give a summary? I stopped using youtube.
Did you stop using YouTube because of the intrusive ads and monetization?
Same issue with Fandom.
How about an alternative Link to the same video? https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=qcfuA_UAz3I
How do you find these? You search alternative video players or is there some site where you enter a youtube url and it gives you alternatives?
Personally I use a browser extension called LibRedirect.
It is called individious, there are many hosts you can choose from. In any instance, a youtube link you paste in the search bar gives you that video in individious. If a certain video is not working, you can use “Switch Individious Instance” to quickly jump to another.
The video pretty much describes why Fandom is so bad and why many games are moving their wikis to alternative services, and why you should stop using it in general. Some examples include:
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Ads everywhere, including autoplaying video ads that play another ad when they’re done. There are also ads sneakily inserted in the middle of articles that are related to the wiki, like a Gamespot review (Gamespot is owned by Fandom)
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A sidebar you can’t remove that promotes their content
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Fandom hijacked the community’s Mcdonald’s wiki to turn it into a giant advertisement
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Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages
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Fandom sometimes introduces things nobody wants, such as AI generated answers that are usually wrong, take up the top half of the page, and with no way for wiki admins to remove it. They removed it after a lot of backlash but still…
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When people fork their wikis to other sites, fandom refuses to let admins delete their old wikis. This makes new wikis difficult to start because Fandom usually ends up as the top result on search engines, even if they’re old abandoned wikis.
Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages
What can we do with this information, I wonder…
The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.
The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.
And then you learn about Fextra’s embedded twitch player that artificially inflates their twitch view count and pushes out smaller content creators who are actually trying to engage with a game’s audience.
Oh yeah… Gamespot, that place existed and it was terrible always. Then you look at the other things Gamespot own and realize they all got butchered in terms of reliability and impact.
Seems like on that last one someone could go through and change all the content in every page to a link to the new wiki. A PIA? Certainly, but at least it would get the ball rolling and use the built up SEO from fandom to help your new site get views.
Unfortunately they just use a bot to revert those. You’re not allowed to truly migrate off fandom, all you can do is fork your own data and try to out-SEO the fandom wiki, because as soon as you put it.on fandom, fandom owns it too.
Worst TL;DR:
Fandom is a wiki farm, meaning it hosts a bunch of wikis. Also they run on freely available software mediawiki.
Fandom has a couple main problems:
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Barriers to entry are super low, verification for users takes place 4 days post account creation, with no other steps needed by the user. Paired with the limited options that moderators have for editing access on wikis and you have a wiki that is much tougher to moderate.
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Ads. Fandom is for-profit. And that means super obtrusive ads that we’ve come to expect. But fandom also shoved ads in the middle of wiki pages, with admins having no control of where those should be placed. There’s also the matter of sketchy ads that are served to minors. Also, some of the ads are outdated but are for subsidiary companies of Fandom.
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The Grimace Incident. Basically Fandom took over and turned the McDonald’s and grimace wikis into huge advertisements, wiping out the hard work that the actual wiki maintainers did. They also put in a bunch of factually incorrect information, literally going against the whole purpose of a wiki and really worrying other wikis, because what’s stopping Fandom from getting paid again and repeating the event with their wikis?
I’m sure I glossed over a bunch of the details but that’s the best I can do from memory.
