It's actively trying to smother other wikis
It's full of ads and trackers
Standard enshittification: They've been pushing features nobody wants and making user unfriendly decisions. I'm sure other people will provide specific examples, but that's pretty much it.
Another thing is that, due to their market position, they won't let people use alternatives. If there's a big enough fandom wiki, google pushes it to the top above any independent fan supported wiki.
https://getindie.wiki/ Is an extension that redirects fandom wikis to other wikis.
They also make it unreasonably difficult to move a wiki to another platform, even if the wiki's owners and the community want it.
Not even unreasonable. Straight up hostage. I'd you post a wiki to their site thry effectively own it, and if you try to close it they will simply steal control of it and refuse to delete it under any circumstances to continue serving ad revenue. Which is what happened to fucking Mojang with the Minecraft wiki.
LPT use the Indiebuddy wiki to purge all Fandom links out of your browser and replace them with the correct indie wiki.
In a word: enshittification
A single corporate entity wanting to gatekeep our collective knowledge of the things we love is intrinsically a bad thing. It was easy to ignore back when its functionality was basic and the ads minimal. These days the website is bloated with third party cookies and scripts, and it is one of the worst offenders outside Big Tech / FAANG when it comes to implementing surveilance capitalism.
Use it on mobile without an adblocker
Thanks, I need to see an oncologist now.
The only controversy I know of is that those wikis are just straight up garbage. Shitty layout, no navigational controls for basic pages, the information is consistently wrong (like even more so than typical for something with user contributed alterations because at least other sites moderate), etc.
It's a shame, back when they were wikia and just hosted mediawikis with light ads, it was actually a really nice service.
I'm going to second this, the linked video explains a lot of the controversy really well.
This video is a pretty good next video. I consider one incomplete without the other.
Could it be because fandom is made up of fans, the most argumentative people to exist?
Edit: after reading some of the other comments, that may not be it.
