Especially after 2020.

78 points

It’s actively trying to smother other wikis

It’s full of ads and trackers

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78 points

Standard enshittification: They’ve been pushing features nobody wants and making user unfriendly decisions. I’m sure other people will provide specific examples, but that’s pretty much it.

Another thing is that, due to their market position, they won’t let people use alternatives. If there’s a big enough fandom wiki, google pushes it to the top above any independent fan supported wiki.

https://getindie.wiki/ Is an extension that redirects fandom wikis to other wikis.

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34 points

They also make it unreasonably difficult to move a wiki to another platform, even if the wiki’s owners and the community want it.

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24 points
*

Not even unreasonable. Straight up hostage. I’d you post a wiki to their site thry effectively own it, and if you try to close it they will simply steal control of it and refuse to delete it under any circumstances to continue serving ad revenue. Which is what happened to fucking Mojang with the Minecraft wiki.

LPT use the Indiebuddy wiki to purge all Fandom links out of your browser and replace them with the correct indie wiki.

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1 point
*

So what you are saying is that you should make a script that slowly changes random articles on a wiki on fandom, so that over time the information will be gone and any backups fandom may have taken are outdated or bad as well.

EDIT: this reminds me of a virus I heard about, it would infect your excel files, and slowly introduce rounding errors in them.

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42 points

In a word: enshittification

A single corporate entity wanting to gatekeep our collective knowledge of the things we love is intrinsically a bad thing. It was easy to ignore back when its functionality was basic and the ads minimal. These days the website is bloated with third party cookies and scripts, and it is one of the worst offenders outside Big Tech / FAANG when it comes to implementing surveilance capitalism.

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41 points

Use it on mobile without an adblocker

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24 points

Thanks, I need to see an oncologist now.

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The only controversy I know of is that those wikis are just straight up garbage. Shitty layout, no navigational controls for basic pages, the information is consistently wrong (like even more so than typical for something with user contributed alterations because at least other sites moderate), etc.

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4 points

It’s a shame, back when they were wikia and just hosted mediawikis with light ads, it was actually a really nice service.

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