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Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

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31–40 of 219 posts

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#31

Fandom has absolutely ruined all the GameSpot and GameFAQ wikis and resources I use while gaming. Their left-side nav with flyouts that don't disappear is so goddamned annoying . Fortunately, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Pi-hole kill all the ads.

Given that you're commenting on a press release announcing Fandom buying these properties, I think you're misattributing the blame here.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#32
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Autoplay videos done by fandom editors who may not have read the source material or even their own wiki article inserted at the top of pages just so they have video to justify video ads 2. Large portions of the page dedicated to "engagement bait", e.g. related articles in a permanent sidebar (mixed with ads), piles of random forum discussions/elsewhere on fandom links at the end of the page. 3. Open a fandom page…

4. On mobile I can't get images to display without disabling my ad blocker. 5. Despite nominally being Wikis the Fandom wikis have effectively zero Wiki-like intrapage or interpage navigation. I remember the likes of Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha before they got Fandomed. They are sad ghosts of what used to be very good fan oriented Wikis. Fandom is a dumpster fire and I wish them nothing but ill fortune.

> 5. Despite nominally being Wikis the Fandom wikis have effectively zero Wiki-like intrapage or interpage navigation.

The site mechanically sucks, with all the ads, needless videos, comment sections, "related content", etc, but this one is up to the writers to do. It's not Fandom's fault if writers don't integrate wiki functionality more thoroughly.

I personally never even noticed Wookiepedia or Memory Alpha switching to Fandom. They seem about the same as they always have.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#33
post #2

Oh god this is worrying. Fandom has already made Wikia an absolutely unusable, ad ridden nightmare, to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it. I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot, GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.

I feel like Fandom and Wikipedia provide a fantastic case study in the difference of outcome between non-profit, mission driven organizations and for-profit capital driven organizations.

They were both founded by Jimmy Wales. They both have the goal of organizing information using crowdsourcing. And look at the difference in outcome.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#34
post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

NFTs are the way forward, whatever you think of them…

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#35
post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

Thank you for your insight, Mr. Snider. I really enjoyed your work on-camera at Giant Bomb even before I knew how much you did behind the scenes. I miss your plane-flying video work with other staff.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#36
post #2

Oh god this is worrying. Fandom has already made Wikia an absolutely unusable, ad ridden nightmare, to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it. I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot, GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.

I casually end up on a fandom wiki every now and then. What's the main criticism?

On top of being generally worse in terms of content (if only for layout), they also SEO heavily and derank any better wikis. The only two fandoms (ha) that have had their independent wikis consistently rank higher I'm aware of are bulbapedia and fextralife.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#37
post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

The biggest problem is this all-consuming search for a bigger profit. It's absolutely possible to make a decent living off of content-creation, and YT or Twitch could be profitable businesses by just supporting that. However, they have probably reached their maximum audience, and so their profit would stop increasing if they just did that, and no growth, even for a profitable business, means desperate investors in th…

I don't know how reasonable it is to make a decent living off of YT/Twitch without an added patreon or some other revenue stream. Creators I'm a fan of constantly complain about being demonetized and unlisted, and needing to wrangle the algorithm.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#38
Seeing this just a couple days after the latest ZA/UM (creators of the game Disco Elysium) news feels weird. The DE situation was already ironic since that game mocked capitalism and now the people who helped fund the studio have wrecked everything to the point even the creative group that was technically separate dissolved. Now we see three very significant sites in the video game space continue to get handed around like a joint on a cold night.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#39
post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

You're asking tech bros who get paid $250K/year running those very scams you've just outlined.

Re: Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

#40
post #21

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have variou…

> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? The problem I see is that there's just too much supply compared to demand, thus the price of content is literally zero. Even the monetization models that are (still) available are on borrowed time. Ultimately there's no easy way to profit off something that is already ple…

> there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there

This is the concept that is most frequently left out of otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand.

Although I would not label the motivation as purely altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for doing so, are going to be doing it no matter the profit potential. Personally, I am a music composer [0] and I must make music. I am so unconcerned by profit that I have given all of my work away for free for more than a decade. I do all of my album releases on a podcast feed so that people never have to pay money, accept the terms of service of Spotify, or be raped by ad tech just to hear my work.

To me, payment is the fact that people heard my work. On that metric alone, SoundCloud has given me a lot more "payment" than any other online service out there, since it was so apparent when people did engage with my work, and those engagements were very meaningful to me on the whole.

[0]: https://multipli.city

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