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.
Could you give a summary? I stopped using youtube.
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.
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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.
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:
edit: typo, added example
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.
I’ve found the best way to browse Fandom(if necessary) is to use a VPN set to Nordic countries. Ads are very generic and in a language I can’t read. So they are very easy to spot.
Why not use Breezewiki?
Better yet: Try the Indie Wiki Buddy extension. It serves 2 purposes:
- It redirects you from fandom wikis to the new official wikis, to which the community has now moved from the fandom one. Also filters out fandom results from search engines only if an independent, more up-to-date alternative exists.
- If something is still hosted on fandom with no indie wiki, redirects it to a BreezeWiki instance.
I use it in combination with wiki.gg redirect, which redirects to newer wikis which aren’t independent, but moved to wiki.gg from fandom.Update: IndieWikiBuddy can now redirect to Wiki.gg wikis too, no need for wiki.gg redirect.
