hey that's a surprisingly good summation of why i'm a hermit. very good post.
i would however note that in part
is a discussion-al question. "we don't want to talk about it, it's not interesting" or perhaps "everyone else is talking about it, we're bored"
in a very tenuous part i would say it's the reason /vr/ was also one of the better boards on 4chan, because it takes you back to the pre-internet age culture and people just want to discuss static old media rather than deal with the ever-changing present. (i say tenuous because the individuals posting are still the same, and undoubtedly it will come to pass that discussion will spiral into present-day arguments, or more historical political arguments with present day relevance.)
It's worth noting that on the other side of SJWs you basically have and have had the tabloid press for a long time. The Daily Mail is basically just right-wing "SJWism" (in terms of structure, not surface content) for 40 something women. perhaps most notable is also the flexibility of language to mislead. one person on twitter dislikes a politician's speech? headline: OUTRAGE at politician's speech.
i'm increasingly re-convinced that "human nature" far from being an argument for a market economy is the strongest argument against it: by exploiting "human nature" you can get people trapped in skinner boxes. only through abstract planning against that nature (essentially, creating new structures to steer people in the ways we "know are good" rather than the ways we instinctively want) can you actually build a "good society", and for structural reasons this shouldn't lead to significantly lower net happiness.
(i partially base this on, say, an idea about stimulation - if you grow up with the modern internet for example, you might expect constant stimulation, but were the central planners to take it away then the next generation would grow up with a lower baseline - say TV, or even books - and because the baseline is lower, the lower gross stimulation isn't a problem, people are just as "stimulated" in meaningful terms, but have more time to think, etc.)
i think it's also notable that internet communities seem to inherently breed shitposting almost as a pavlovian response. (i mean, i do it, i know i do it, i still do it. i don't particularly enjoy it although sometimes at high velocities it can be fun, trying to think of an inane reply in a microsecond and then post it before the crazy-train has gone further off the rails.) i mean, there are all sorts of reasons "at a distance" it has appeal - disavowed action, the ability to say everything you don't mean, or simply to pattern-match - but structurally it seems encouraged that "everyone" does it.
i think a problem with fandoms is also that we've hit a sort of critical mass, which i will lazily tie into my autistic obsession with full employment.
up until quite recently there was a good possibility that you could contribute something to the understanding of a fandom - i.e. in a game, you might notice a secret that nobody else did, or you might notice a more mundane piece of lore and be the person to post this. it was easily possible for everyone to have a "job" and contribute actual knowledge/content to the fandom. as the supply of fans increased much faster than the supply of content, we now have a situation where that isn't the case. within a day, all secrets in a game will be known, before release the entire plot will have been figured out on reddit, etc. so there's no "role" for individuals there anymore. this is particularly bad for older, dead series, where the "previous generation" discovered everything and now all the new generation can do is compete over their own knowledge of the "facts" rather than set out to discover those facts themselves. in fandom terms, they are unemployed and watching jeremy kyle.
