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 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.