Not to date myself here but I think it's a function of a new generation of people averse to criticism, confrontation or social interaction they don't want to have. Like I've heard stories in the past month where a manager went to talk to their employee about something relating to work, and the employee felt attacked. Another one where during an interview, a non-standard question was posed (think along the lines of 'tell me something about you or an experience you've had that made you who you are today, that's unrelated to the position) and the person bust into tears and ran out.
But thinking about, for example, the nba thread, it's also a way of exclusion. You can talk about someone and unless they're willing to just stay in the thread for pages and pages and read through every single post, you can talk **** about them and not have to ever confront them and it becomes an in-joke. So it forces you to 'buy in' and creates little exclusionary sections within threads.
So like to call out my own behavior here, in some of these threads you have that situation where repeat pics get posted. Today I put a
'like' on somebody who literally just put an eyeroll or a facepalm in a thread. If you're not in the threads enough, you have no idea what that's about. They never quoted that user. I didn't quote that user.
To my credit, I've called them out before, directly, quoted their post and told them exactly how I feel, how they can slightly alter their behavior and turn all their negatives to positives, etc, and they never replied to me. But today I took part in not quoting the person, and just decided to be on the 'in group'.
I mean in one sense it cuts down on drama, cause you know dudes can get all internet tough guy and make a mountain out of a molehill. But on the other hand the vast majority of the time even if there's a little confrontation at first when quoting somebody, it can wind up being just fine. Like me and you went back and forth over "sock day"
a year or two ago and ultimately I think we came out of it being kind of friends, or at least I crack up laughing at most of your posts and gifs and respect you cause you actually ball like I do.