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

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

#151

Post by fknorangesite »

Nextgrid wrote: post #141
omeze wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im discussing in good faith here (and used to watch Giant Bomb religiously back in high school, and remember how the Gamespot \ Giant Bomb schism occurred). There are many creators who use NFTs perfectly well to raise money for their work (like the guy that creates the excellent Blender donut tutorials), and use simple fixed prices to monetize (not auctions, so speculation has nothing to do with it). Please dont be r…

What do NFTs bring to the table that can't be achieved by just taking payments in crypto?

What does taking payments in crypto bring to the table that can't be achieved by just taking payments in regular currency?

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

#152

Post by Nextgrid »

fknorangesite wrote: post #151
Nextgrid wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do NFTs bring to the table that can't be achieved by just taking payments in crypto?

What does taking payments in crypto bring to the table that can't be achieved by just taking payments in regular currency?

True but I wanted to preempt the point that NFTs are independent of payment platforms & their censorship. Which is true, but so is "boring" crypto without NFTs.

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

#153

Post by altruios »

snide wrote: 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:

Well, don't go with ads, go with crypto-miners running on the viewers hardware - accessed via the web. keep it slim (0.1% of the GPU or what ever)...

If we went with that - that could be a viable source of income for content creators that don't rely on the every growing ad industry.

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

#154

Post by vkou »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #15
CM30 wrote: 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?

Ads whose performance brings a dev box to its knees, ads that cause content to jump around as they load, ads that bloat your screen to the point where you have to scroll to see anything of use on the page you're on, and (this is a matter of taste), an atrocious layout.

Compare, a few pages on, say, http://poewiki.net (the community fork) with http://pathofexile.fandom.com

Compare the loading times. The jank. The layout, that optimizes providing you information, over serving you ads. The usability difference is night and day.

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

#155

Post by NoGravitas »

delecti wrote: post #32
giantrobot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 switchi…

Really? Because I found the transition of Memory Alpha switching to Fandom extremely jarring. Maybe it will improve after WWIII and First Contact, when profit ceases to be a factor.

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

#156

Post by antisthenes »

capableweb wrote: post #47
dbingham wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had no idea Fandom/Wikicities/Wikia was also founded by Jimmy Wales. I agree, would be amazing to see a academic comparison between the two, one clearly had a bigger impact on humanity as a whole. On that note, I wonder if Fandom contributes back any funds to the Wikimedia Foundation. If so, it might actually make sense to have two branches of the same software, if the commercial arm can fund the non-profit one.

> If so, it might actually make sense to have two branches of the same software, if the commercial arm can fund the non-profit one.

The inevitable problem with these schemes is that the MBAs at the commercial part will eventually try to "optimize" the funding channel towards the non-profit section.

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

#157

Post by bombcar »

eropple wrote: post #56
snide wrote: 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…

> With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. I just left a company that's doing its level best to make this more affordable and achievable for small organizations, and I wish them the absolute best, but this was true when GB was new and it's still true now. Video is just too many bits across too many gatekeepers (like any of the big clouds). It's not that there isn't transit capacity, it's that ever…

The other problem is that doing high quality video content is hard - you can do a one-man channel but it will NEVER be as "flashy" as channels that have dedicated editors, etc. And once you have a group, you have deadlines and income requirements you have to meet.

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

#158

Post by kroltan »

snet0 wrote: post #85
TylerE wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix has gone completely down the shitter in the last decade. Ruined the UI, got rid of all the good content and replaced it with C-tier series that get canceled before concluding anyway. Oh, and have basically doubled prices. I canceled a year ago and haven’t missed it in the slightest - and I had it back when it was still dvds by mail.

And it's still better than terrestrial TV.

True, but not watching either is also an option, and there are still other ways of kill time.

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

#159

Post by snide »

celdon25 wrote: post #142
snide wrote: 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…

So you were the one who made the shitty knockoff version of mp3.com --after-- the acquisition?

Hard to take credit for that as the "one", but I did work on the site as a community manager near its launch. The idea (which wasn't mine) was that in a world where digital downloads existed, there would be no one store that would have them all in one place. People were likely going to need to go to multiple places to get their music, and mp3.com would act as a registry for that content, pointing you in the right direction. If you didn't see what was coming it wasn't a terrible idea.

What we didn't know then in 2003-2004, was that Apple ended up eating the entire industry (at the time) and everyone just bought an iPod and called it a day. MP3.com rightly fell apart shortly after.

Weirdly enough, that assumed model and need now exists now that content has fractured again, this time with video. Which service is streaming that movie I want to watch? We're getting to the point where we need those registries as much as we need "caniuse" for browser comparability.

Should that directory concept have been attempted on a very important domain like mp3.com, itself having fallen apart earlier in the Internet bust? Probably not, but hindsight is easy looking back. Back then domains were more important.

Anyways, just answering to some trivia for you. I didn't have much to do with that site's origins.

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

#160

Post by bombcar »

giantrobot wrote: post #97
dimitar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what happened to the p2p craze? That seems like the solution to the hosting costs.

P2P video is extremely difficult to do well. Video is sensitive to transfer bitrate, data order, and timing. None of these are things P2P is really good at providing. While P2P can ask for data ordering the actual availability of that order is dependent on the participants in the swarm. Even then as a host you need to provide seeds for all your videos as a P2P swarm will only ever help with currently popular videos.…

If I recall correctly, the amount of streams you could support with a cheap VPS + Cloudflare + similar things is pretty impressive.

The reality is most people don't need to be able to handle millions of simultaneous views, and so a basic setup with "p2p on top" might work exceedingly well.

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