It feels good to have someone verbalize this.
I can't enjoy much social media anymore because there's an expectation that discussing anything opinionated requires a preface about what side you're on.
Making a politically neutral statement means you're with the enemy (where the enemy is on the side opposite whoever reads your neutral statement).
I'm not even referring to politics or discussion of world events: even more futurist/what-if thoughts about how society works/could work.
HN is the calmest place to have a discussion with someone, because no one's looking for clues about your personal beliefs and what side you're ostensibly warring for.
9 times out of 10, only the content of your comment seems to matter. As it should be.
just scroll to the bottom where everything is downvote-collapsed already, anything that isn't Silicon Valley political echo chamber isn't really discussed holistically and garners the same "you're the enemy" or "you're not in the middle if you don't already agree with me" response as other networks
need a patch for this
My thoughts are that Americans need a credible external threat for unity, and currently we don't have one. The Cold War thing jumped the shark decades ago and just doesn't have unifying consensus as being a problem for America, the religious extremist story has fallen apart with everyone knowing its all part of our cozy relationship with the House of Saud. So here we are
I have a few people in my feed who do this, from both sides. It almost feels like they've turned into nothing but meme/share-bots. It gets so annoying that I should probably block them already.
If you try to call out the content, you either get childishly shouted down because you're on "the other side", or called out as "the problem" because you don't agree with their group-think.