Years ago I followed EVE Online politics and drama, and I remember a blog post talking about why some in-game alliances succeeded and some collapsed the moment somebody so much as poked them. The blog post was written by a goon.
He brought up various points mostly related to the fact that EVE Online was, at the end of the day, a goddamn video game (well, spreadsheet simulator pretending to be a video game, but I digress) and players needed to have fun or else they would never log on. He had choice words for alliances that routinely pinged every member with orders like "If you don't set your alarm clock for 2:55 AM on a Tuesday so you can be ready for our mandatory shoot-at-the-stationary-object operation then you might as well pack your shit up right now because you're not welcome here anymore."
One point I found very interesting, though, was that alliances that were run by councils, committees, boards of directors and other such autism had far worse effectiveness and longevity than alliances run by a single all-powerful dictator. Leadership-by-consensus models were extremely common in EVE for reasons I won't get into, and they universally sucked because every single person involved was, at the end of the day, a pissant playing pretend and wanted everything to be done my way or else. The result was that no decisions were ever made, and when they did get made, they were compromises that absolutely nobody was happy about. It also meant that these alliances suffered from rampant intel leaks, infighting, and drama; at one point the most powerful alliance in the game vanished overnight because one of the leaders sabotaged the others so spectacularly that an official comic book was published about the incident. The comic book sucked; don't bother looking for it.
Basically, organizations in EVE that were run by committees would be trapped in their own skin, hemming and hawing and jerking each other off for weeks, while an alliance dictator could (and would) literally just post "I'm declaring war on our neighbors because they're faggots and if you like them, you're a faggot too" and within minutes the killsquads would be forming. There were weaknesses in the leadership model, but it was effective in EVE because in the end, every EVE player was an anonymous jerk who wanted to have fun online.
Something Awful used to be a bunch of anonymous assholes run by a dictator, but SA has a tradition of fuckups so big as to defy the laws of reality, and accordingly, SA somehow managed to fucking decapitate itself like that one suicidal dude who rigged a chainsaw to a bunch of pulleys in his garage. Now, SA's leadership is by committee, and it can never be anything but by committee, because there need to be female voices and trans voices and black voices and pedophile voices and who the fuck knows what else. The result is that SA's leadership is a Rat King held together by each other's feces, endlessly writhing and squealing and snapping at anyone who points and laughs at their wretchedness. Meanwhile, every goon who was on the forums to have some fun online has jumped ship, and all that's left is a shrinking population of "digital natives" whose favorite pastime is eating each other alive.
