I don't go to talk about my favorite games anymore because it's all circle jerking and 'My favorite' topics over and over again no theories or anything that requires thinking that you can't just post a WIKIA link too or otherwise they think your trolling.
I got banned because I incited deeper thought conversation which is supposedly a crime now that can't be covered by a wiki article or something. 😢 Nobody gives a shit now beyond 'I broooooooke my Swiiiiiiiiitch' or 'Grandma got a free Swiiiiiiiiiiiiitch!' which gets 500 or more votes. And most posts are just memes of people doing shitty things in their game offering no conversation pattern beyond hive mind responses.
My eyes are really bothering me so I cannot explain better. 😢
I've been lurking for ages and finally, there's something I have personal experience with. Time for a wall of text.
During my mid-to-late teens, I was actually deeply involved in Zelda fansites, and it's only been recently that the social circles that came out of that era have begun to dissolve. Most of this probably isn't new, and I don't have any big inside scoops from the time, but I can at least say I was there.
First, you need to understand that half the "staff" we had were actual children and teenagers. No joke, one of the writers for Nintendo Castle was 11. These days, I don't really buy the "useful idiot" explanation, as prog circles are encroaching on RTLM territory, but it definitely applied to them. Their Facebook feeds, at the time full of prog propaganda, might as well have been scripture. Absolutely no critical thinking, and a desperate need to be a part of something. In other words, socially weak and easily manipulated.
One time, for like a month, socialization and work both came to a screeching halt because one of the new guys was incredibly annoying, but nobody could dredge up the will to boot him because they were afraid they'd be seen as a bad person.
The real problem people were the webmasters and their clique. Now, at least at the time, these people weren't pedos (these days they probably would be), but you can only imagine the sort of trainwreck of an adult actually wants to run a site when the main job is trying to wrangle children into doing their completely-optional homework. For some, such as the original webmaster of the site I was primarily involved in, it was just that he was a manchild. He may have been in college, but he really did have more in common with us high school Freshmen than his peers. He was genuine in his love for the games, but the site itself was just a crutch until he emotionally caught up with where he was in life. These are the weak guys who get latched onto by parasitical progs and used to push their own politics in their tiny internet fiefdom.
For the rest, they were broken narcissists who wanted to be internet famous. These are the guys who would take over sites when the previous webmasters would inevitably step down, only to combine the sites later on (Zelda Dungeon and Zelda Universe were infamous for this sort of thing). They have a more symbiotic relationship with the true believer progs, since they're resistant and (sometimes) competent enough to guide their sites in a generally useful direction, rather than just being sucked dry.
In both cases, the cliques were made up of one or two of the weak men or narcissists, and the true believer fanatics.
(I mentioned Nintendo Castle earlier. That's one unusual example that doesn't fit the usual two categories. The webmaster of that site was also an actual child, maybe 12-13. During its heyday, I don't think a single person working there was older than 14.)
As far as what they did for work, it wasn't much. Most of it was probably spent writing and rewriting staff pages, usually for their own benefit. Rather than try to organize the staff, they'd just write them off and get new ones - there were always more kids who thought writing for a website would be cool. They'd make alterations to articles, without consulting the original writer, usually for SEO, sometimes fucking up the articles themselves. Basically, fansites were the Screenrant prototype, but even more exploitative.
But what they really did is try to become a brand, and some of them are still doing it to this day. I know one guy in particular who is still, over a decade later, constantly trying to catch the attention of minor internet celebrities and organizations in hopes that they'll give him his breakthrough moment. He dropped the fansites he spent ages managing, not because he was tired of the job, but because fansites were dying and they no longer served his purpose. Now he hashtags and @'s on Twitter all day, every day. And it's all fake. I'm not sure he even has a soul anymore.
These days though, fansites are basically dead. So, while none of this is new, you're talking about the bottom of the barrel. You're not just getting the same old narcissist wrangling sociopaths for his own benefit, you're getting the lowest quality versions of these people. Progs and opportunists are usually pretty clever - it's why propaganda and manipulation is so sophisticated now - but these people are dumb as fuck. They can't hack it as /r/games mods, or even as /r/zelda mods. They have to boot stomp because they haven't curated a community that will attack you on site, because they don't know how to manipulate their forums and subreddits to change the perceived majority opinion and can't word the rules in such a way to serve themselves while hiding behind (im)plausible deniability.
I don't know how to end this essay. I would post Neco-Arc with a 200 lbs ass but it'd break rule 5.
I never did the fansite thing, mostly because I'm in my mid-thirties, so by the time I found them I was probably 20, and they always seemed to be stupid rumors from people who knew no more than me, and I wasn't that fanatical about anything I liked that I needed to constantly read about it.
Still, I'm reminded of a kid I knew at university -- he was 14 and a junior in college -- who loved Pokemon so much. He would go to anime club and just watch pokemon on his laptop, rather than whatever they were showing. Turns out another person who went to the club -- a normal-aged freshman -- ran some big Pokemon fan site the kid loved.
Such a memorable moment seeing a prepubescent kid super excited, saying "you're [username redacted]!?!", with the grumpy zero social skills freshman completely blowing off the kid. Maybe he just didn't know how to react, but what it looked like was that this young fansite admin was just a jerk; I doubt he got much better with age. I kept up with the kid until I got rid of social media, he's a transgender antifa influencer or something now, so perhaps the moral of the story is don't look up to site admins or reddit mods?
Edit: heh, I still know the guy's username, which found me the site. Turns out he isn't an admin (at least not anymore, maybe never was), but is still very active on the site posting articles. It's been over a decade, he probably is 30 now; maybe he is a true believer, or maybe he is one of the vampires.
I remember the rumor mill phenomenon. The webmasters usually knew they were bullshit, since they almost inevitably spawned on somebody else's forum, but their opinion was "lol who cares" because you had to pad the feed between releases somehow. I guess it wasn't a big deal though. Nobody was going to Link's Hideaway
to actually get Zelda newsat all, so it's not like it hurt anyone. It was mostly just socially-awkward kids entertaining themselves while retarded young adults try to get something out of it. Still, it's a look into how more "professional" sites operate.I do know a few people who are still doing it these days, in their late 20s and early 30s. Most of them quit a long time ago, and only returned because it was something they remembered being proud of. A few defunct sites were totally remade in the last couple years as some of the old guard rolled back in, just trying to grasp something of value. I've seen a lot of old acquaintances try, and fail, to get their old circles back. They're exactly the same, but half of their old friends are now lunatics, and the only sane people don't want anything to do with it anymore.
Thanks! You talked a lot about social media but I'm more into the niche forums that started to grow like Zelda Universe and Dungeon do you think those sites got taken over by the Progs and opportunists? I see the comments there seemed very controlled like a Borg hivemind.
Well most of the internet has been. I think it's basically the same dynamic, though it ended up there in a different way.
I left a bit out in that useful idiots sometimes become true believers (more or less*), which is something you see more often with old-style forums. That's at least something I've seen on Doom forums. That said, it's been ages since I've been a regular at ZD and ZU, and while they've definitely become prog hazard zones, I have no idea if it was the result of new blood coming in, or old blood being radicalized. My suspicion is that ZU is run by true believers, and ZD by wannabe-celebrities, but that's just from a glance and decade-old impressions. Whatever the case, none of those sites had any immunity to progification. The conditions for it were always there, whether it be weak-willed leaders or narcissists looking to wield the prog beast as a weapon.
I've gotten banned on ZD and nearly banned on ZU and one person Baton Rouge told me it's an SJW wet dream which is why none of my game topics got much noticed. My topics are more interested in exploring gameplay concepts and What If's,etc that require actual thought.
They just want the same old stupid shit posts.
There's a lot of hidden 'No No' words you don't know what they are that aren't actually part of what you'd think WOULD be no no words.