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@sesivany you are totally wrong for saying that

The sad thing is that the most correct answer usually is "it's complicated" which people hate to hear.

"My favorite politician/party is against X, therefore X must be a Bad thing" is much easier

@vinzv saldy on social media they quickly dominate the discussion and when others see that, they adapt to it thinking it's the only way to be heard.

@hypolite I have no data, just a feeling that we're more polarized and tend to go to extreme reactions more than before.

@sesivany I wasn't expecting any data, I was just curious whether you knew the source and/or context of your feeling. What is backed by data is that extremes are more likely to be covered by media outlets because over the past 10-20 years, the whole news media industry has shifted from a stable subscriber model to a risky attention-based model. Sensational stories and extreme opinion columns rake in more engagement -- positive and negative -- and as such are prioritized by newsroom everywhere, when the concentration of outlets in a decreasing amount of rich hands didn't turn them into mere propaganda mouthpieces.

Specifically in the US, the first-past-the-post election system has made only two political parties relevant at the national and state level, so the political polarization dates way back. Famous historical examples include the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, McCarthyism and most recently the War on Terror and the coups in South America countries.

@hypolite what triggered the rant is the case of Red Hat not providing source code the way we did in the past. We still provide the source code, we still contribute thousands of developers into open source software. It's OK to be upset about the change, but many people immediately jump into the "Red Hat is evil!" extreme like there was no scale. It's just that I see this more and more often on various topics.

@sesivany From the little that I've seen about this decision, the published motivations for it are contradicting themselves which isn't a good catalyst for nuanced discussions.

Beyond that, there are historical precedents for businesses to shut the door gradually to openness until there's nothing left, so there is a legitimate slippery slope concern from the first decision to shut something down, no matter how small you believe it is.

There is also a common concept of "the change too far". People who didn't object to previous changes or even defended them before may suddenly turn against an organization because of an otherwise minor new change. It was just their breaking point and they're now lost forever to your cause which does trigger strong reactions.