User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/The Future of Gamepedia/@comment-45165680-20201104230646

Again, I'm seeing a ton of overreactions in the comments. Y'all scared of change. Sure, there are some interesting points (particularly the one about ad revenue, I hadn't considered that), but I've seen multiple comments directing insults towards the team. Yeah, the situation is bad. Yeah, this is feeling like the Firefox Daylight rollout- rushed and lacking in standard features. But I'm not gonna jump to insulting Fandom staff's intelligence. I AM, however, gonna note that Fandom is turning into a Frankenstein's monster- you've grafted social media, news, and pop culture onto a wiki farm, and Gamepedia's philosophy feels a little too irreconcilable to me with Fandom's philosophy to be attached as well, although that's just my opinion. This was a site to provide a space for people to all equally contribute to an encyclopedic database of information on any topic that a community gathered around. Gamepedia is similar, but again, in my opinion, it doesn't quite fit with that philosophy. The effort to increase visibility of the Gamepedia wikis feels a little bit- just a little bit!- like an effort to increase ad revenue. I'm no expert on SEO (whatever that is) or site visibility, but couldn't Gamepedia make an effort on their own to increase that? (please correct me if I'm wrong on this point, my other points don't depend on it) As for the social media, news, and everything else on top of the central wiki-farm philosophy- why? We didn't NEED the Discussions forum to be the default page you see when visiting ___.fandom.com. We needed the main page to be the default page. What even is the watchlist? It's pointless on certain wikis. TBH, the links to Muthead and Futhead at the bottom of the page are fine (networking with the rest of the FANDOM-owned domains make sense, I guess), but the squares at the bottom of the page seem to be entirely random links to articles on completely unrelated wikis. I'm on a Fantendo article, I've only ever contributed to Fantendo, I don't need 7 different links to the Muppet Wiki. And don't even get me started on the "news" articles- yeah sure, some people like reading these funny little posts under fandom.com/articles/___. Some people aren't a fan, and would rather that the wikifarm they're contributing to be that- a wikifarm. Sure, we could move to Miraheze or Shoutwiki or whatever, but FANDOM is the most known wikifarm, so it kinda has a monopoly. Migrating your wiki can take a very long time. Migrating all the users to a different wikifarm can be tough. CSS might not carry over (especially with how non-standard FANDOM is), JS might break, pages might look terrible, extensions will probably crap out, and overall, the effort to migrate doesn't feel worth it. That is the issue- FANDOM is creating new things that a lot of people actually don't want, but FANDOM'll do it anyway because the economy is no longer consumer-focused (don't quote me on that actually, I have no valid reasoning as to why FANDOM is doing all this aside from what is in the blog posts like this one). People want to leave, but it's too much effort to be worth it. FANDOM sees that the migration away from their platform is overall very low, and they think, "Huh. Virtually nobody hates what we've done enough to emigrate, so we can keep making changes!" And the cycle repeats.

Wait- what was my original point? Whatever, feel free to ignore this directionless comment from yet another mildly-pissed-off FANDOM user.