Helping wikis move away from Fandom

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Fandom’s Problems and Enshittification

  • Many commenters describe Fandom as borderline unusable: heavy ads, autoplay video, tracking, slow performance, large modals and cookie walls, and broken mobile UX.
  • Users report seeing more ads than on piracy or porn sites; some joke that the “fan” in Fandom refers to PC fans spinning up.
  • Without adblockers or tools like “Cleaner Fandom”/BreezeWiki, people feel the site looks malware‑like.
  • Quality problems: outdated or wrong content after communities move away, AI‑generated FAQ clutter, vandalism, and deliberate “poisoning” of Fandom copies to encourage migration.
  • Some note Fandom used to be decent as Wikia, then steadily deteriorated, seen as a classic “enshittification” story.

Weird Gloop and Independent Wikis

  • Weird Gloop is praised for fast, clean, MediaWiki‑based wikis (notably RuneScape, Minecraft, League of Legends).
  • Key design: each wiki has its own domain, with contractual guarantees that communities can leave, take the domain, and get database/image dumps. No “zombie” mirror left behind.
  • Funding is mixed: limited, non‑intrusive banner ads; contracts with game studios; donations. They claim to be profitable without third‑party investors.
  • Commenters highlight their strong community relationship: consulting users before adding ads, quick response to bad ads, and focus on editor experience and performance.

Infrastructure, Cost, and Cloudflare

  • Several participants discuss how hard it is to run large MediaWiki instances: job queues, caching, Redis/Memcached, Varnish/CDN, DB contention.
  • Cloudflare (and similar CDNs) is seen as a major reason high‑traffic wikis are now affordable; some argue you can serve huge volumes even on free tiers.
  • Others stress that even “350k requests/day” can overwhelm a poorly tuned server, so managed hosting or a farm like Weird Gloop remains attractive.

Search, SEO, and Discovery

  • Fandom pages often outrank newer, better wikis (Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Path of Exile, etc.), frustrating users.
  • Tools like Indie Wiki Buddy and custom search downranking are recommended to bypass Fandom in search results.
  • Some speculate Google’s incentives (ads, big brands, leaked ranking factors) help keep Fandom high; opinions differ on whether this is deliberate favoritism or side‑effect.

Alternatives and Models

  • Other wiki hosts mentioned: Miraheze, wiki.gg, ShoutWiki, Fextralife, Liquipedia; mixed views on their ad practices and long‑term risks.
  • Some want more dev‑hosted official wikis; others emphasize decentralized, community‑controlled hosting with easy forking and regular public dumps as the most resilient model.
  • Skeptics warn any for‑profit host can eventually follow Fandom’s path unless structures and incentives are carefully designed.