Fandom

[tarantino]

I don't think it was mentioned at the time, but " Fandom acquired a host of brands — Comic Vine, Cord Cutters News, GameFAQs, GameSpot, Giant Bomb, Metacritic and TV Guide — from Red Ventures in October. Sources told TechCrunch at that time that the size of the deal was around $55 million."

Today it was announced that "Fandom has made an unspecified number of layoffs at GameSpot, Giant Bomb, Metacritic and TV Guide — four months after buying the entertainment and gaming sites for about $50 million — and also has let go other Fandom employees."

I think Jimmy is still co-chairman there. I wonder how much of the company he owns now?

[Hemiauchenia]

I've read several threads on Reddit where people discuss Fandom. (e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments ... nt_gaming/ ) Their perception of them is overwhelmingly negative, with the chief complaint being that Fandom completely bloats the pages with ads, to the signficiant detriment of user experience.

[No Ledge]

Fandom only owns the digital TV Guide. The print TV Guide (magazine) (T-H-L) apparently still with a circulation over 1 million, is an independent company which was spun off in 2008.

[Emptyeye]

I had wondered if Jimbo was still making bank off of Fandom. I can't really find anything one way or the other on that.

I will note he doesn't seem to be listed among the leaders on Fandom's website.

[Hemiauchenia]

Apparently Fandom wikis are now altering articles at the request of advertisers. CzechOut, a member of Fandom's community team https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Commu ... tral:Staff who also used to edit Wikipedia as CzechOut (T-C-L), recently rewrote and locked the McDonald's Wiki article about Grimace, stating that this was at the behest of McDonald's as part of a promotional campaign. https://mcdonalds.fandom.com/wiki/Grima ... on=history .

The entire main page of the Wiki has also been transformed into an advertisement by CzechOut https://mcdonalds.fandom.com/wiki/McDonald%27s_Wiki

According to CzechOut's edit summary, they attempted to communicate with the admin of the wiki but got no response https://mcdonalds.fandom.com/wiki/McDon ... on=history

The guy who wrote the article seems pretty unhappy about it:

I really thought my opinion of Fandom couldn't get any lower, but this imo shows complete disrespect to Fandom's volunteers.

EDIT: This has also been covered by Kotaku https://kotaku.com/mcdonalds-grimace-wi ... 1850552640 and Insider https://www.insider.com/grimace-superfa ... -ad-2023-6

[tarantino]

Minecraft's Wiki Site Has Gotten So "Degraded" Its Editors Are Voting To Leave En Masse

It's nine to one in favor of forking.

Fandom has an interesting business strategy of buying shit and then just making them worse.

I can't use Fandom sites. Nothing worse for my adhd than trying to read something only to have it vanish, then move around as I try to read, then get compressed because a flashing dancing thing is desperately trying to get me to consider.mortgages and rat poison.

[Zoloft]

Minecraft's Wiki Site Has Gotten So "Degraded" Its Editors Are Voting To Leave En Masse

It's nine to one in favor of forking.

Fandom has an interesting business strategy of buying shit and then just making them worse.

I can't use Fandom sites. Nothing worse for my adhd than trying to read something only to have it vanish, then move around as I try to read, then get compressed because a flashing dancing thing is desperately trying to get me to consider.mortgages and rat poison.

Everything is Better with Ad Blockers™

[Beeblebrox]

I guess I hadn't looked at any of that in a while... it's a fucking nightmare, that guys description of flashing and moving text is exactly what I just experienced.

[Konveyor Belt]

I recently found out that the Minecraft wiki had moved to Fandom just last week when I got back into the game and needed to look up some block IDs. It had once been on Gamepedia, a competing wiki service owned by Curse which also included the largest Minecraft forum of the time and Curseforge, the largest Minecraft mod repository. The wiki back then I remember as being very clean looking and eminently usable, and it was nice to have all these services under one roof.

Curse was broken up at some point, with Gamepedia being sold to Fandom and Curseforge sold to Overwolf, a company which makes in-game overlay software. Curseforge seems to more or less be the same as it was before, just with different UI, while the Minecraft Wiki is noticeably much worse, and the forums were shuttered altogether. Just another example of how the user experience on the internet is crumbling before our eyes.

[Hemiauchenia]

Fandom is a textbook example of enshittification in action. For all the bad things that one could say about the WMF (there are quite a few), at least they aren't run by a money grubbing private equity firm.

[Konveyor Belt]

After much discussion, the Minecraft wiki has decided to move from Fandom to their own self-hosted site. The announcement on the new site can be seen here.

[kepchup]

I hope UESPWiki never gets bought out. It might have ads but they're not obscuring-all-but-two-lines-of-text bad.

The parchmenty background color and old mediawiki look is so charming.

[Beeblebrox]

I hope UESPWiki never gets bought out. It might have ads but they're not obscuring-all-but-two-lines-of-text bad.

The parchmenty background color and old mediawiki look is so charming.

I do sometimes try to look up things on fandom when I'm watching a movie or whatever, but it is so obnoxious with the level of ads as to be practically unreadable. And a lot of it is clearly unmaintained.

[Snooper]

I actually attempted to use gamefaqs earlier this year for my retro gaming handheld. The FAQ's used to be plain text files that I could easily rip programmatically for all my roms on the device. Have the text file right there to read if I got stuck offline.

Found all the nice clean text files are now embedded into HTML and not directly linked. Upped the effort level beyond what I wanted to invest.

I have no doubt this predated their acquisition by fandom but it reminded me I wanted to complain about this.

[Anroth]

I have no doubt this predated their acquisition by fandom but it reminded me I wanted to complain about this.

By quite a few years. They started the process at least a decade ago (possibly more) when they did a big site revamp.

If you want text versions, still easy enough to get, at the bottom of any opened text based guide (a lot of the newer ones are not txt at all, being written after the upgrade), there should be an option to 'View in text mode'. Click that, then save the page as a txt file.