Board Thread:New Features/@comment-134861-20190207143747/@comment-134861-20190207153146

I'm cool with ads, though. Ads are not the problem to me.
 * Short version: websites require money. Ads give money. Ads need clicks. Clickbait gives clicks. It may not be the the most popular, or even the most effective, strategy. But it's one they've tried.
 * Editing wikis is, and always has been, a volunteer job. You knew that when you signed up. You knew Wikicities/Wikia/Fandom/whatever was going to make money off it. But you only complain about the profit, and not the costs they make.

What's a problem to me is this content portraying itself as if its supported by the community of the wikis. It's one thing to have ad-supported content, it's another thing entirely to use my work without even notifying me, twist it into something that gives me a bad reputation, and then profit off of it.

The gripe about the "not seeing a paycheck" was mostly facetious -- if the articles and personality quizes and all sorts of stuff like that were actually supporting the costs of building the wiki, I'd be fine with them. But they're not ads, they're trying to turn Fandom into something it was never supposed to be.

Like, at what point does Fandom decide that the whole "user-generated content" thing is unprofitable and just ditch the wikis to become another geek news site, like comicbook.com? That's the direction it seems like we're going. That's what worries me -- not the need to make money, but choosing to make money through methods that actively and very infamously drive away the actual encyclopedia members. Tfwiki.net, which is actually endorsed by the creators of the series, used to be on wikia. Wikia lost that through their own actions.

It's one thing to say "we can't just do encyclopedia work all the time, we also have to make money to keep it running". It's another thing entirely to toss the encyclopedias in favor of the making money.

Did not know these (my skin settings omit the global banner), those actually make sense.
 * The Fandom name is, again, because of advertisers. Nobody outside wiki editors is all too familiar with the concept of wikis, no matter what wiki editors think. Advertisers just see "user-generated content" and they're weary of that (that's verrrrry scandal-prone in their eyes).
 * In case you're living under a rock and haven't clicked that annoying global banner: "serious wikis", those in the lifestyle vertical, will mostly be moved to Wikia.org rather than Fandom.org.