alt Hacker NewsEveryone complains about Fandom, but it's the only reason 99% of the communities on its site have a wiki.
Take a random game like https://endlesslegend.fandom.com/wiki/Endless_Legend_Wiki
That game is 10 years old and its wiki was built in the height of its popularity when it had people to build it. The developer moved on, the community moved on. If its wiki weren't on Fandom, then its wiki would depend on some random person paying the bill for eternity for a game they themself moved on from long ago.
Yeah, it has ads, but someone has to pay the bill. I'll take the ad-ridden wiki that exists over the idealized one that went offline seven years ago when the interest died out.
This becomes a metaphor for the internet in general.
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If there actuallt exists a community, they can scare up somebody to host some infrastructure the community depends on. Otherwise the community is dead, and it’s archive.org you should be thanking.
I think with Fandom similar with Reddit, or Twitch, most people focus on the interface experience as sole advantage of the platform, and miss how they provide an accessible space to incubate new communities. You get low barrier to entry hosting, operation tools, and network exposure.
WeirdGloop is supposedly profitable despite having only a single, non-intrusive banner ad. It's perfectly possible to run forums/wikis/etc. on even just the free tier of Cloudflare/Oracle OCI.
The issue is that Wikia/Fandom, Reddit, etc. subsumed most other alternatives by offering what was for a long time a legitimately convenient and decent-quality service, but now that communities are too locked in to move (due to intentional measures like changing forking policy, and the community having to fight against network effect/SEO) they enshittify to squeeze out profit. Result is a worse site than if Fandom/etc. had never existed.
Relatively optimistic about movement towards structures that resist this kind of exploitation.
The system is way simpler.
— Something becomes popular.
— A $POPULAR_THING Wiki is swiftly created, some freelancers are hired to create article stubs. Links to it spread through other popular wikis.
— People trying to learn something about that topic get a lot of search results directing them to that new wiki. They assume that it's some kind of “community”, try to participate, and never realize that they're making love to an inflatable doll. Real activity, links and clicks now force the pages to stay on top, and attract even more naive visitors.
Of course, it's not specific to that site. “Social” sites often make people believe that they “interact” with thousands or millions of others, when in fact they shout into an empty box, and watch the movements of a primitive mechanism.