Jonathan Majors found guilty of assault, harassment

Sure, their opinion is perfectly valid, as are everyone's who criticize Marvel. I'm not saying it's not valid to dislike Marvel content. But expressing a "valid" opinion does not necessarily mean it adds anything of value to the discussion, or that the way the person expressed those opinions is acceptable.

Tildes is also more than just a "civilized" forum, where anything goes so long as you don't include personal attacks... it's a community of users which focuses on in-depth content. And does Eji1700's comment strike you as particularly in-depth or high-quality? Because IMO it's just a standard, low-effort comment, of the kind that took over Reddit and turned it into a low-quality hellscape... and so, as such, is Noise label worthy (which it has now been labeled as by more than just me, since it takes at least 2 people to label it that to trigger the effect).

p.s. I'm not asking people to never criticize Marvel, but it would be nice if people could put in a bit more effort into their critique, instead of just repeating other low-effort variations of "Marvel sucks". And it would also be nice if people who dislike Marvel content occasionally gave those of us who are actually fans some breathing room to discuss what we enjoy about the shows/movies, instead of flooding every topic with "Marvel sucks" type comments.

@cfabbro brings up a good point though: Even if the criticism is reasonable, it still results in a dog-pile effect that makes it unfun to talk about outside of a specific niche. Marvel/Star Wars suffers worse in part because it hit such a wide mainstream favor, now that it's falling out of mainstream favor, the dog-pile effect will be terrible until such time the mainstream no longer cares and only the fans are following and commenting.

I've definitely been guilty of "spoiling the fun" on Apple threads in the past...and now I really do try to refrain unless it's directly relevant to my interests anymore. It's a challenge to balance on a site like Tildes where there isn't really space to let all the competing viewpoints (that may or may not have good discussion for everyone pleased and displeased) without potentially causing that dog-pile effect for either group.

I don't think there is a good technical solution to this problem. But it's definitely a problem. Marvel nerds should be free to discuss these things, and more content is better than less content (within reason). But people with legit criticism of Marvel's stuff shouldn't be ousted either. Perhaps tagging something as a hype thread would allow for a level of filtering "only positive things, take critical discussion to a non-hype thread".

I believe it's a popularity thing. Titanic is a good example that comes to mind.

The pre-release line on Titanic was "disaster in the making." Hollywood was pretty much standing by with fully sharpened knives for the incoming fiasco of its release. It had gone so overbudget a second studio had to be brought in to add funding. The shoot schedule had gone completely out of control. What we now know to be some cast and crew difficulties on set had started to leak out.

Then the film released. And the groundswell of "it's great" began. Anyone who hasn't looked it up should; Titanic did something pretty rare in modern film history. It went up in ticket sales, rather than crashing by half or more. It was in the number one movie for fifteen weeks, and made more than ten million for sixteen. It made more in it's second week, and then again in it's third, than it did in its first. That kind of thing is unheard of for a wide release.

I mention all this to remind how popular Titanic was. Because it - was - everywhere. The song, the posters, the clips, the screenings. Newspaper cartoons were riffing on it. Talk shows brought it up constantly. Morning radio, afternoon radio, TV at all hours. Titanic was everywhere.

Which triggered a huge backlash. The only reason the backlash didn't take over was Titanic was that popular. That its supporters and adherents were so numerous and so into the film they did something moderately rare; they did manage to drown out (to some extent) the haters eager to pile on.

For years it was very edgelord fashionable to dump on Titanic. "The boat sank; get over it" was a common angle they took. They dumped on Leo (this was before anyone knew Leo, or how he'd become one of the biggest movie stars in the world). They dumped on Cameron. They dumped on the set, the production, its budget. They dumped on how it was a tragic romance. They shit on how it didn't know if it wanted to be a lovey dovey story or a thrilling disaster. They said anyone who liked it had the taste of a grade school girl (because a lot of women very much backed Titanic).

It was super popular to shit on Titanic for quite a while. It's only somewhat recently, in the last eight-ish years or so, most of that has faded and just the Titanic fans have been left standing. Because Titanic is still a great film, still beloved by its fans. The haters finally seem to have mostly moved on.

My point is popularity triggers the edgelords. People who want to be funny, who think it's cool to be counter. Whatever "it" is, they will instinctively look for an angle to dump shit on it. The bigger "it" is, the more popular "it" is, the more eager some are going to inevitably be to shit on it. There's this weird love of creating (and then embracing) a backlash against anything that gathers support.

You see it in entertainment all the time. But it turns up in business, politics, everywhere. Whatever "it" is, be it a person or a movement or a film, as it gathers support, that backlash is starting to build too. And when "it" has begun to enter the common lexicon, where you don't have to explain or define "it" when you bring it up in conversation, that's about when the backlash has begun to appear.

Basically, humans (or at least Americans for sure), can't fucking stand it when someone else is successful. That's their cue to sharpen the knives and start poking at it so some of the air comes out and "it" might deflate some.

First thing we'd need to do is establish what "popularity metrics" we'd use to assess their popularity, taking care to control for some variables. This seems challenging to apply evenly across various competitors. Examples: 1) box office ratings (some movies don't get the same release scope as others); 2) Nielsen ratings (not necessarily representative of the wider viewing audience); 3) social media mentions (which platform, what counts as positive commentary, eg emojis, likes, re-tweets, mentions, hashtags, etc); 4) platform viewership numbers (rarely reported to the public).

I'd suggest not all curves are going to be normally distributed, as you suggest. Many will have skewed tails, it seems unlikely for the popularity intensity to be symmetric about the mean (or, more precisely, the peak).