Some Notes on Set Side B’s Linking Policy

Today it’s a big talky thinky post, that doesn’t have much to do, directly, with video games. Sorry for that, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and wanted to get off my chest. If you leave things like this spinning around your head for too long they begin to fester, and I’d also like to give my reasons for having grudges against the likes of Fandom (the wiki company, with a capital-F).

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Until recently I didn’t have a specific list of things I absolutely won’t give the privilege of a link from these halls. It was more an ad hoc judgement: “Oh, this thing is on Reddit. Do I really want to point people there?” It’s not that I have such a high opinion of ourselves, but that there are some internet entities that I don’t want to further in any way, whether it’s through added traffic or search engine rank. We may not have much influence on the web ourselves, but what we do have we should use wisely.

So now, in order to be consistent, I’ve started making a list, of places or things I don’t want to aid nor abet. Perhaps I won’t be able to avoid linking to them ever, depending on how available the content is from other sources, but we do try to veer away from these things. Maybe it’ll make you think about your own linking practices.

Remember, the thing that makes the internet great, always has and always will be, isn’t companies, it isn’t “AIs,” it’s the people on it, as commenters and linkers, as readers and as creators.

Generative AI

That leads us to probably the biggest of these things on the list: generative AI. I hate it.

I hate it, and I hate that so many people have uncritically adopted the moneyfolk’s naming it as if it were actual AI, the expert system type, decision-making neural networks and so forth. It has confused people on the difference between slop machines like ChatGPT and Claude, which work by constructing the semblance of actual work which may or may not be useful or even correct, and actual AI that does things like discovering new proteins. That kind of AI is doing real and important work; the text constructors that you ask to do homework for you, finish your presentation or write an app are not.

It’s true, a couple of years ago I made a couple of posts using “AI.” (Always use the scare quotes if it isn’t clear you’re talking about the bad kind!) One was a link to someone’s generated image of Kirby, which was funny for how uncanny it was; the other was a mocking sequence where I asked it as many ridiculous questions I could think of, including asking it repeatedly if Biden was a vampire. (The most interesting thing it said was the word moose repeated many times.) There may have been a third time way back then, for I kicked its tires as many others did in the early days of Teh Hype. I won’t be doing that ever again, even for the purpose of mocking it. It’d be better for all of us if it just died.

Twitter

Another thing, or rather place, that I won’t link to is Twitter, a.k.a. “X.”

What a stupid name. What a stupid thing. Its overlord, an incredibly insecure man whose loathsomeness is only exceeded by the one in the White House at this moment, has at least given us an acid test of human quality. Are you still on Twitter even now, in 2026? Is reaching whatever audience remains there worth legitimizing, enriching, this awful human being and everything he stands for? Why are you there? Are you waiting for some other shoe to drop? Haven’t enough fallen already? Your presence conspires to give all those other people who haven’t left yet their own reasons to remain. Stop doing that!

You might be concerned about abandoning others, an established following, friends, conversation partners. Some of those are at least slightly understandable. But come on, there’s no lack of other ways to communicate now! Here is a partial list: email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Signal, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Medium, Blogger, TikTok, Youtube, text messages, forums, IRC (it still exists), and others.

What is more though, I would say you need to think about what digital life means. Without exception, every long-lived, corporate-based popular internet service has betrayed its users in some fundamental way. Every single one! There are good companies out there, you may argue, and it may even be true, but it isn’t true of any big one, and the big ones are the ones everyone knows, and do the most damage, because chasing money and size to the exclusion of all else paints a certain route for your organization that naturally leads to enshittification.

So what other choices are there?

• The modestly-sized companies, who by definition are not trying to squeeze out every cent from users. They’re in a bit of a dilemma: people like them because they haven’t enshittified themselves yet, but the more popular they become the more tempting the drive to ruin their experience will be. Sooner or later they’ll fall: either they’ll just go out of business, the founders will betray their principles, they’ll get bought out or the people running it will just die.
• Free or community-run services. These are pretty good for the most part, but you may not be able to rely on them forever either. They have less incentive to ruin themselves for cash money dollars, but nothing says the good folk will stay in charge forever. Even decentralized services have their drawbacks. Mastodon servers tend to emerge, enlarge then pop like bubbles in a boiling pot. My personal Mastodon account has moved three times. On that note….
• Being a digital nomad. Never staying in one place for too long. Being ready to pull up stakes and transplant yourself to a new site at the first scent of shit. The plus: you can feel good about yourself, so long as you have the time and energy to do this. The minus: how will you ever build up a substantial audience if you keep having to move around so often.

It’s funny. None of those seem like perfect options! I don’t mean funny ha-ha; I mean it more like funny oh-no.

Fandom wikis

I’ve been making a list of alternatives to as many Fandom-based wikis as I can find, and I may share it with you some day.

Fandom got started as Wikicities (it’s old enough that, back then, having a Geocities-like name was considered an advantage), then it changed its name to Wikia, and now to Fandom. One of its founders was Jimmy Wales, yes, the guy on Wikipedia who’s always begging you to give them money.

You might not realize how far Fandom’s tentacles extend. They own Gamespot, GameFAQs, TV Guide, Metacritic, ComicVine and Fanatical!

The problems with Fandom are manyfold: they’re loaded with ads for one. For two their different wikis crosslink between themselves and give them all an artificially high Google rank, meaning one of their sites is much more likely to come up in search results than other people’s.

But probably their worst aspect is they suck much of the creative oxygen out of the web. Do you start your own website to tell the world what you know, or do you find one of their many tens of thousands* of innocent-looking Fandom sites, and contribute to that, thinking that you’re helping people out? But unlike Wikipedia, Fandom isn’t a non-profit, they’re owned by venture capital and are looking to put as many ads on your edits as they can. You’re giving of yourself, but they’re turning it into cash for their investors.

Back when they didn’t seem quite so rapacious they managed to shelter a couple of very high-profile sites under their umbrella, the Star Wars wiki Wookieepedia, and the Star Trek wiki Memory Alpha. Those two sites were probably the most prominent non-Pedia wikis on the internet, but now they’ve both been creatures of the Fandom empire for well over a decade. Imagine how much Google rank that gave them to spend.

* How many wiki sites does Fandom really have? Try this experiment. Take any even slightly famous entertainment media property you can think of, and search for it on Google. See if “fandom” is in the URL of one of the first page of results. I’d wager you’re very likely to find at least one, and that it’ll probably rank pretty highly. Fandom wikis seem to appear very readily, almost as if there’s an automatic process creating them.

A few other things that negatively affect my willingness to link to them

• As I mentioned above, Reddit is another place that I won’t link to, but I’ll save my diatribe against them for another time. Many of the Fandom arguments apply to them too.
• Paywalled pages are not completely off limits, but I don’t like sending visitors head-first into a paywall.
• Substack also has its problems, oh yes,but it isn’t a completely hard no yet, due to the sheer number of them. Of course, there’s lots of Fandom wikis too.

Notably, Youtube is not on this list. There’s just too much content that’s only on Youtube. I’d love to wean us off of it some day, however. Something to remember, in case the opportunity comes.