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.