Today, Fandom officially withdrew behind the fig leaves.

In a recent Discord announcement, the platform announced they have "parted ways" with members of their Community Team and are transitioning to a centralized, anonymous "Fandom Staff" account for official communications.

Table of contents

1. Context
2. The Current Situation at HSW
3. My past role
4. License and Indemnity as modern Fig Leaves
5. FANDOM's unethical and immoral moves
6. FANDOM's ToU Indemnity and License
7. FANDOM's actions as example of the Current Zeitgeist
8. Conclusions

Context

As a former editor of the Hypixel SkyBlock Wiki (HSW), I have realized that this is marking a massive shift in FANDOM's community relations strategy and a dire step in the wrong direction ethically and philosophically which exemplifies what I term The Age of Indemnity and License (or poetically, the age of fig leaves) in the modern era.

For those who are new to this blog; I am Thundercraft5, a former wiki editor and Vanguard on FANDOM, and now programmer, writer, and aspiring farmer-in-training. I do not often talk about my background at Fandom as it has been over 4 years ago, but I feel compelled to do so today given the gravity of these announcements.

Despite not editing for over 4 years since I left in around May of 2022, I have still quietly maintained relations with the Staff Team of HSW and have watched the wiki evolve and grow in my absence, despite the numerous problems with modern video games (such as addiction) the community aspects of these games is fascinating and demonstrates the adaptability, creativity, and resilience of the human spirit.

The Current Situation at HSW

In the past several years since I have left, HSW has witnessed a slow, gradual "enshittification" of the global platform through continual introduction of ads, branding, and unwarranted features such as an AI "Quick Answers" feature which are often factually incorrect regarding nuanced game statistics which are lost in the process of AI summarization, as SkyBlock is a numbers-heavy game.

The Wiki has long contemplated moving and attempts were made, some of them failing in the past. Now, with wikis such as minecraft.wiki having successfully made their move off the platform to new hosts, it is looking increasingly feasible for HSW to move to a new host.

My past role

As mentioned, I am a former Bureaucrat, which is the highest-ranking staff role in the staff hierarchy. I made over 25,000 (4%) edits, which is as of this date, I am narrowly the #1 contributor, closely behind my good colleague MonkeysHK.

I joined in Dec 2019, working my way up the ladder vigorously until I was promoted to Bureaucrat around 7 months later. On July 16th, 2021 I joined Vanguard, which is an elite team of experienced technical volunteers charged with maintaining the platform's code integrity. With my credentials established on this matter, let us move to my history.

I worked on the Wiki's Lua scripting system (backend code) which provides performant technical infrastructure for the rest of the wiki, JavaScript Editing tools, and discord server bot. I also worked on the Fandom Developer's Wiki for a long time, where I authored a number of scripts for the general userbase.

While I eventually quit SkyBlock, I moved to a more managerial role within the wiki and continued to support lower-ranking staff culturally and morally until I left, leaving the wiki in capable hands I had trained.

License and Indemnity as modern Fig Leaves

In the Bible, there is the metaphor of the Fig Leaf, where after The Fall of Man Adam and Eve wove fig leaves to cover their sin. This metaphor means something which covers up some undesirable or unsound aspect of another thing, like a rug to sweep things under.

There are two terms I define for the purposes of this blog related to the metaphorical fig leaf: License and Indemnity. The first word you have likely heard, the second one you likely only heard in legal or insurance contexts, but the meaning of the word is quite deep.

According to wikitionary, indemnity means:

1. Security from damage, loss, or penalty.
2. (law) An obligation or duty upon an individual to incur the losses of another.
3. Repayment; compensation for loss or injury.

Senses #1 and #2 is the essence of the idea ethically and philosophically. Indemnity is a cognate term with condemn, damn, and damnation, so etymologically it literally means "not damned" or "removed from damnation".

It does not imply "redeemed" or "saved", it just means shielded from consequences. This has theological implications but they are irrelevant, the focus of the blog is ethics and philosophy.

License is defined as:

1. A legal document giving official permission to do something; a permit.
2. The legal terms under which a person is allowed to use a product, especially software.
3. Freedom to deviate deliberately from normally applicable rules or practices (especially in behaviour or speech).
4. Excessive freedom; lack of due restraint.

Senses #4 and #3 are the essence of what the idea of license is for the purposes of this blog. In classical philosophy, there is a distinction between Liberty—the freedom or ability to act within bounds of reason and purpose and License which is simply lack of constraint permitting any whim.

As both concepts relate to evasion of accountability and shielding oneself from consequence like the metaphor of the fig-leaf, they naturally come together in the legal-style doublet of "license and indemnity".

FANDOM's unethical and immoral moves

With those definitions out of the way, let us now fully point the finger at FANDOM, with the gravity this matter deserves.

FANDOM has made the historically significant decision to weave a corporate fig leaf by centralizing the identity of the announcer into an anonymous faceless "Official Account", which is likely (though we cannot prove) a deliberate move in their community relations playbook to obtain a freer hand to forcefully push whatever changes they would like, against the will of the community.

Further, they posted a second one which confirms the nature of the first announcement. The first announcement about the account centralization seems routine, mundane, even negligible. When read together with the following announcement, it suddenly becomes clear:

From what I can find, they have terminated several high-ranking Community Managers who were the liaison and more importantly the human face between the experienced editors like myself and FANDOM's inner staff team. Now, deliberately or not, they have removed the only link for big wikis like HSW.

Such a move is a purely egoistical act with the effect of saving the company's face in their termination instead of showing face. In Levinas' ethics, the face (the presence or identity) of The Other (the opposite of Self) is the starting point of all ethics, when we encounter someone injured on the street there is a primal, silent cry—"Do not hurt or neglect me.". In Martin Buber's ethics, the I-Thou is the foundational ethical relationship of all humans.

When we see someone in suffering, need, or who demands justice and accountability from us, do we put on a mask to hide our faces, or do we show up and step out into the light!?. That is what FANDOM has done in their Anonymity! Consider, dear readers, what this means. If you have a complaint about the platform, or if FANDOM pushes a change which is detrimental to the community, all you can do is point at the mask and shout but the mask is lifeless, silent, generic.

But the mask has no ears; it is a plasticized barrier designed to let your grievances slide off into a digital abyss.

When it does speak, you do not know whose voice it is. That is the insidious design, that is the evil of the indemnity which removes the "damnation" (liability) the community naturally asserts when it has been wronged.

In Kafka's novels, the monstrosity of the Kafkaesque aesthetic was not just the absurdity of the giant, sprawling bureaucratic system but the facelessness of it, most of all. There was no other human face, an I-Thou for which to connect, someone you could plea to and hope for reprieve under, the system is merely an I-It, a faceless, inhuman "thing".

FANDOM in their announcements, therefore has willfully chosen to save face over showing face! They have enacted the cardinal sin of personalist ethics. Showing face requires vulnerability, accountability, and the courage to be liable for one's actions. These managers have no such courage to do so, as they have so clearly demonstrated!

Finally, I touch on what is known as The Banality of Evil, a concept from political theorist Hannah Arendt which asserts that ordinary people commit evil acts not out of malice, but by thoughtlessly following orders and conforming to the norms of a corrupt system. The current cultural climate and system is such a corrupt system in my view in the political world.

While the difference in scale and depravity is large, the core idea that evil such as this happens through countless thoughtless, bureaucratic acts applies quite well here.

The Managers of FANDOM, probably do not believe themselves to be evil, they are likely just following internal Standard Operating Procedure or the corporate and marketing "playbook of community relations".

This is the architecture of Max Weber’s Iron Cage. The platform has prioritized rational calculation and efficiency over the human spirit. The 'Standard Operating Procedure' is the lock on the door.

Inside this cage, there is no room for the 'face' of the Other, only the metrics of the System. The indemnity and license I mentioned earlier are merely the grease that keeps the gears of this cage turning smoothly, crushing the souls of both the community and lower-level FANDOM staff between them.

But as we shall see, actions such as this are not merely isolated incidents, it is a systemic pattern in the modern era

FANDOM's ToU Indemnity and License

The Indemnity clause here, specifically the phrase "arising out of your use or misuse of the Services", is a calculated legal attempt in contract law to attempt to get the user to implicitly give consent to any kind of harm arising out of use of the wiki.

In light of the previous criticisms of the term indemnity, when read together with the announcements portrays an internal corporate culture of irresponsibility protected by legally enforceable license and indemnity, the literal fig leaf in the crown of the king.

The legal triplet of "indemnify", "defend", and "hold harmless" is construed as broadly as possible for maximum indemnity and license.

Suppose you suffer from epilepsy and suffer a seziure some flashy ad, that would be your problem. Suppose you got addicted due to FANDOM's questions an answers feature or the addictive and attention-grabbing nature of the platform. By this contract, that's on your end.

The law, which is supposed to be the shield for the weak and vulnerable is now the fig leaf of the giant faceless corporation, behind which they commit these unethical, unsound actions!

The contrast is stark: Fandom’s terms are a cage of indemnity; Weird Gloop’s are a covenant of conduct. In a stunning departure from the industry’s 'enshittified' norms, Weird Gloop’s Terms of Use (as of January 2025) lack any clause requiring the user to indemnify or bankroll the company's legal defense.

FANDOM's actions as example of the Current Zeitgeist

We can see this pattern more broadly in our current cultural environment, in platforms such as Facebook and Google systematically adding AI and ad features which are implicitly but very strongly intended to extract surplus value from the user rather than creating value for the user.

In 2023, Reddit shut down its free API tier which the important volunteer moderators relied upon for custom tools to moderate the numerous subreddits and hundreds of thousands of posts which would have been impossible to do manually with Reddit's inadequate native moderation tools.

Reddit, instead of honoring the Moderator and Subreddit's protests simply crushed them by force and indemnified themselves from the consequences. They were simply "too big to fail", or rather, too entrenched to need user consent.

An almost identical clause is also found in Reddit's User Agreement, the similarity is striking and eerie, like Kafka's The Castle which reveals it is standard corporate practice:

Such legal ToUs and User Agreements are like the Ring of Gyges from Plato's Republic, where a man discovered a magic ring that rendered him invisible, allowing him to commit any injustice: theft, seduction, murder—without fear of consequence. The Ring of Gyges makes enshittification possible, without the invisibility of faceless accounts and indemnified systems, value extraction would face direct accountability.

Fandom’s "Official Account" is that ring. It provides the invisibility required to dismantle a community's labor while remaining shielded from the moral weight of the act. Such is the nature of Enshittification in our era: the systematic removal of the human face until only the machine of extraction remains.

FANDOM might counterargue that their changes are for "transparency", "efficiency", and "privacy" reasons. Privacy is only morally justified when exposure leads to actual unjustified harm, utilizing privacy as a shield is exactly what I call indemnity.

True "Transparency" in the actual sense of the word would not involve obscuring the identity of the communicator behind a faceless corporate account, what FANDOM did was a contradiction in terms. Efficiency is meaningless if there is no effectiveness, and certainly on our end FANDOM staff will be less effective.

Such corporate buzz words are all deceptive doublespeak, words which are hollowed out of meaning until they are contradictions in terms. They have taken the Liberty of the community's trust and converted it into a license for whatever fits their corporate agenda.

Conclusions

It is a sad thing, to see the platform I have worked hard in the past as a Vanguard member, Dev Wiki Editor, and indirectly as a Bureaucrat to commit such insidiously unethical acts using the language and pretense of empathy. Whether they intend evil or harm or not, the effect on us is the same, our community is alienated. Let this be a warning, to any corporation which seeks to put on the Ring of Gyges, the Fig leaf, and the Faceless Mask of Indemnity.

The mask saves your face FANDOM, but you have lost your soul in Adeia (license, indemnity, impunity, amnesty).

I look to the regenerative farm I apply to in the future, where the land and animals have a real face, where people still have a face to show, not save.