So... #MinecraftWiki is jumping off of #Fandom.

I wish them the best of luck. Fandom (formerly #Wikia) is an awful business that treats your small #Wiki as an #ad #spam farm with a lot of #SEO riding on it. This isn't even an #enshittification case; 13 years ago the western #Telefang community forked off Wikia and it took half a decade for us to consistently rank above their ancient copy of our wiki in search.

#WikiFur had left #Fandom, Inc (then called #Wikia , formerly #Wikicities) 15 years ago, following Transformers Wiki's exit.

Since then about 50 wiki communities have decided to part ways, a minuscule number compared to the total number of wikis hosted. http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forked_wikis

And the CC license allows Fandom to keep the original wiki open, ranking higher than the spinoff thanks to aggressive SEO.

They've acquired #Metacritic and #Gamespot too—no doubt they'll soon fall to #enshittification.

Attn: Soliciting feedback from people who dislike or avoid #FandomDotCom / #FandomWiki / #Wikia

Background:

* I currently work at Fandom
* I recently got into a conversation with someone at work who has more say than I do
* TL;DR he didn't believe me that there are a significant number of folks online who dislike/avoid anything dot fandom dot com
* He especially didn't believe that some even go so far as to consider it a pestilence
* I suspect this is due to survivorship bias in the company's community outreach
* In short, people who don't like Fandom are, pretty much by definition, not part of the community, and therefore the company doesn't hear much about their opinions

Here's the actual request:

I am inviting you to air your criticisms and/or grievances to me, so that I can consolidate and summarize the feedback.

If it's about the sheer quantity of ads, I don't think I can do anything except recommend Firefox + uBlock Origin, because the company is pretty dead set in paying the bills via ads rather than, say, donations/subscriptions/premium features. (I've had that conversation before. The first time was when I was being interviewed to work there. Trust me, they know and don't care. 😑)

However, I mentioned the "no linking to non-Fandom websites" thing as a grievance people had, and he genuinely did not know that anyone had a problem with that policy.

Don't get me wrong, if you have good things to say, that's fine too! But they probably know those already.

Also, the sad reality is that I have to translate from human to techie, so the more you can phrase your grievances in a way that will be understood by largely white-cis-allo-het Bay Area / Silicon Valley tech executive types who think the MCU is the greatest thing since sliced bread, the more likely it is that I'll be successful in translating that feedback to something they'll understand.

NB: links to your existing posts / writing on the topic is also welcome! You don't need to repeat yourself.

I keep reading "fandom" as "fandomme."

#wikia

Kotaku: Resident Evil 4 Remake Boss Can Be Killed With Eggs https://kotaku.com/resident-evil-4-remake-golden-egg-salazar-boss-fight-1850298142 #gaming #tech #kotaku #videogamesdevelopedinjapan #fictionalcharacters #horrorvideogames #residentevil4 #creativeworks #birdbreeding #ashleygraham #ramonsalazar #leonskennedy #windowsgames #leonkennedy #aviculture #videogames #parasite #salazar #wikia

IRC is so much more robust than it used to be.
Miraheze (good free wikia hosting site) and Opensim (secondlife server emulator) both have IRC and use this web app called "Libera Chat". It is suprisingly robust and clean. I havent made an account but I can still see both of the IRCs I connected to.

#IRC #Miraheze #Wiki #wikia #secondlife #opensim #serveremulation #serveremulator #liberachat

Kotaku: Layoffs Hit GameSpot, Giant Bomb Just Months After Fandom Buys Them https://kotaku.com/giant-bomb-gamespot-metacritic-fandom-layoffs-1850008228 #gaming #tech #kotaku #business2cfinance #perkinsmiller #jonwinkelried #jeffgerstmann #goldmansachs #worldwideweb #digitalmedia #redventures #tpgcapital #danryckert #giantbomb #microsoft #gamespot #websites #comcast #fandom #viacom #amazon #wikis #wikia #jess #ign

@noelle This is literally the worst possible thing that #wikia could have done with that site. Yes I know they're Fandom now, I don't care.

My first experience with Wikia was about a decade ago. I heard about #Telefang and the translation patch. I tried reverse-engineering the title screen, since it wasn't translated yet... only to realize that I had an old patch because everyone moved off Wikia a year ago

RacieB had tried to warn people, but Wikia actually de-op'd her and locked the main page