User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Fandom and Curse Media are joining forces/@comment-5645428-20181221200243

Are you ready for some curious observations and opinions?

It will be months if not years before major frontend changes are conducted in relation to this acquisition on the Gamepedia end. People here speculating what might happen when neither Wikia nor Curse have a clear approach forward, other than knowing they’ve got a lot of work cut out for themselves…

I’ll admit, it’s mildly amusing that escapee communities from Fandom are being sucked back in. Although it will be a good while before they’ll be feeling the Fandom Funk I reckon.

I predict more major overhauls, such as to Wikia’s software. This acquisition should trigger forward-thinking surrounding wikis now, away from Fandom branding and associated media entertainment elements. Possibly, even a breakaway from MediaWiki as part of future-oriented modernisation? Who can say, but the combined company will have even greater resources now.

If Discussions has received as much backlash as it has, man, there are going to be some hectic days ahead. The truth, the cold hard truth that is either unknown to the inexperienced or else ignored on the most part by others, is that despite Discussions lacking features and stylish aesthetic, its architecture is far superior to that of forum. The forum is an unwieldy hackjob built through the iterations of article comments, then blog posts, and then message walls following into a feature that MediaWiki software was not even remotely designed for. The Wikia of today very well recognise that they made a mistake creating the forum as they did all those years ago, but it can certainly be argued that its social benefits to wiki communities outweighed the functional negatives that are bewildering on the backend to those who are aware of them.

Anyway, while more and more people grow frustrated over Wikia’s corporate decisions in branding direction and rage over the technicalities of feature implementation/removal while claiming that their voices aren’t being heard, it might dawn on some that their voices never were particularly relevant to begin with, only that their expectations were being met where there were occasions where Wikia could carry out some initiative to improve their user experience and it was both feasible and logical to do so in a more grander scheme of things.

Editors aren’t investing shareholders, they’re unpaid volunteers by the number of thousands serving an even greater number of paying customers (ad-exposed viewers)! It’s any business’s dream, really. If for just a moment you thought that Wikia has a primary interest to serve your own interests as an editor, you may have overestimated how logical you might consider yourself as a person. No, your interests are a far lower priority, although Wikia obviously cannot admit this unless giddy enough to contradict basic PR, and indeed, it’s always about the bottom line, now more than ever with so many modern revenue-generating solutions.

The idea of ‘wikis’ is old-school and it’s hard to see it manifesting out of nothing today than compared to the days before there was even such thing as YouTube. Second largest for-profit wiki host Gamepedia has gone down, beaten and eaten by Fandom despite so many being repulsed by its rebranding. A harsh reality that this is indeed what wikis of the future look like, meanwhile they will continue to evolve farther from their roots, and possibly the core software which they were first born from as well.

All this sound pessimistic? I’m really quite the optimist, but even more so the realist. Being honest and coming to terms with it all is the best way to be minimise disappointment and just get on with feeling good.