I think I get it.

I have noticed some commonalities across both liberal and conservative leaning forums. You can get dog piled for saying the wrong thing in polite words. Or using the wrong words. Or the wrong tone. Or sometimes failing to say something in a post. People react less to what you said, but what it sounds like you might be saying, treating it as though you had plainly said that thing.

It feels very "Tribalist". The way you speak about things is a shibboleth for the "team" you are on, regardless of what you write. And that is how the community reacts often, regardless of the content of your post.

I definitely think internet trolls bear some blame for it, because this is basically communities being on high alert for bad faith actors and becoming more insular as a result.

I mean, I took a look at the topic and I see a bunch of people kramering into it to complain about how shows like She-Ra are too gay and spreading homosexual propaganda or to complain that Netflix is too progressive or hates free speech. Ignore that Netflix stood behind Chappelle when people criticized him and his comedy specials. There were plenty of other posts that went deeper into how pricing issues and anti-consumer issues are more of a problem but when that's the solid halfish of the first page I see it doesn't spell a healthy topic.

I think sites like HN are increasingly prone to this sort of thing as the user base grows and the self-selection filter falters. That's why I distanced myself from posting on HN due to issues I felt were never going to be resolved. It's less tedious to just post somewhere smaller where it's easier to filter out bad faith people and/or maintain post quality.

Half the front page of comments is "I cancelled Netflix because they are shoving political propaganda down my throat" with vaguer and vaguer acquisitions when asked for specifics.

You'd think that, but it certainly turned into one.

I didn’t read the Netflix thread but here are a few topics tangentially related to Netflix which have the potential to spark interesting debates on HN:

* Netflix’s worker and labor policy: Being a FAANG it is inevitably interesting to tech workers how one of the big profile companies treads their workers. In a healthy class aware industry this should be a hot topic and indeed an issue in the culture war (as described by Marx himself a century and a half ago). Regardless, as a tech worker my self it is always interesting to see what other tech workers think about our current state of our working conditions.

* Netflix’s role in our entertainment: We are humans after all and like different things, we also like to talk about what we like and do not like. Netflix has been particularly brutal in cancelling loved media before the authors of said media had plans to write more (e.g. GLOW, Sense8, etc.) There are some media critics among us that surely has an interesting take on this, and other cultural critics which can go on about what this means in the broader context of our cultures.

* Netflix’s influence in the shift of how media is consumed: Being an early streaming platform it has inevitably had a huge influence in individualization and the platformization of media, for better or worse. Most HN users consume media and have felt this and have an opinion on this. There are a lot of amateur—and some professional—philosophers among us which like to share their take on the philosophy of consumerism. These takes can indeed be interesting.

It’s a voluntary community, with community standards. If you want a free-for-all, the internet is full of them.