Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

r/HobbyDrama is a subreddit intended to document fandom drama. Posts there are written in high quality regardless of the content, divided into sections detailing different aspects of controversies in fanbases everywhere.
I do not like this subreddit for its heavy political bias. A good example of this would be their views regarding JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. They make her out to be an irredeemable, transphobic, antisemitic idiot, bringing up her good qualities but choosing to focus on the negative ones, and the post's OP says that "TERFs are in the comments!" TERF just feels like a buzzword at this point.
In addition, they downplay the hate she's received by noting that her being harassed is okay because "trans people go through worse," a rhetoric used by HL boycotters. A rhetoric that creates actual transphobia.
The comments sections for the posts are even worse, and feel like they were regurgitated from r/gamingcirclejerk, with people occasionally insulting opposing viewpoints or downvoting them into oblivion. If I wanted to read documentations of drama, I would just stay on this site. Its articles are unbiased and truthful, and the community is mainly civil and reasonable.
And yet, despite the qualities I mentioned, the subreddit manages to have 1.4M members and gains praise from outside sources, according to the Fanlore Wiki, with no one having visibly questioned this beforehand. Why is this?

>bringing up her good qualities but choosing to focus on the negative ones

Its a drama subreddit, drama groups are inherently about negative stuff

And to resume why people use it and like it, most drama isnt political, like I checked the most upvoted posts this month and they were

-Kendrick and Drake (like 12 times)

- Toys

-Godzilla

-Gatcha games

The post you mention about Rowling seems to be an anomaly, its the third most popular post in the subreddit history, but it has more comments than the first and second one combined (well before it got locked up and cleaned up) and it has several time for comments than the average post there, so it apparently was quite the battlefield.

So when something political happens, the average user just agrees/its ok with/ignores it and just moves on with their life, you mention comments being terrible but they seem pretty average (for reddit standards), maybe the political ones bring out the worst of some people.

I guess you're right. Most of the posts there seem fairly innocuous now that I look at it, and the political things seem to be an issue with Reddit overall.

In all honesty, I've spent time reading through some of their top posts and they're actually interesting, and cover a very large range of hobbies. In a way, they do documentation of obscure events in hobbies better, so I think it's a bit more to my speed.

I didn't really read all the comments in-depth, but I found the general tone to be less pessimistic and angry (although I'm biased).

I think it's a question of broader scope to explain the difference in popularity.