tl;dr - I don't think it's "butthurt" so much as people making it up as they go along.
There is sometimes a cultural or sub-cultural imperative to have and express an opinion on something even when there isn't enough information to go on.
I'm not sure how much of that is being American and how much of that is being on the Internet[0], but essentially it's not enough to just read the news anymore. If you don't have an opinion or belief (preferably a strong one) many people will regard you as ignorant, even if you're working from the same set of facts as they are.
When there's not enough information, it seems that people look first to familiar memes or established narratives. When it comes to US-Iranian relations, it's usually either the idea of American military supremacy (so it must have been an accident or Iranian bluffing) or the idea that the US intends to go to invade Iran any day now (so it's somehow an American ploy to start a war). There is a grain of truth in each which surely plays into the whole truth, but there are far too many unknowns for anybody commenting on the Internet to say with the kind of confident certainty that we so often do.
A site like Reddit (or HN, or anything with a comment box) amplifies this, because people like posting comments, and how can you comment on a story if you haven't decided what your opinion is about it? So people skim the article or just read the headline[1], draw conclusions which may be highly speculative, and then post whatever they think based on at most a few minutes of thought. And they might do this a dozen times a day, for years. So it becomes really natural for people to dash off whatever the easiest thing they can think to say is given the context, even as the context changes and the story evolves. On a popular story you might get dozens or hundreds of people saying the same handful of things.
[0] Or how much of it is what some call "Male Answer Syndome".
[1] Check out the length of headlines on /r/politics/.
There is sometimes a cultural or sub-cultural imperative to have and express an opinion on something even when there isn't enough information to go on.
I'm not sure how much of that is being American and how much of that is being on the Internet[0], but essentially it's not enough to just read the news anymore. If you don't have an opinion or belief (preferably a strong one) many people will regard you as ignorant, even if you're working from the same set of facts as they are.
When there's not enough information, it seems that people look first to familiar memes or established narratives. When it comes to US-Iranian relations, it's usually either the idea of American military supremacy (so it must have been an accident or Iranian bluffing) or the idea that the US intends to go to invade Iran any day now (so it's somehow an American ploy to start a war). There is a grain of truth in each which surely plays into the whole truth, but there are far too many unknowns for anybody commenting on the Internet to say with the kind of confident certainty that we so often do.
A site like Reddit (or HN, or anything with a comment box) amplifies this, because people like posting comments, and how can you comment on a story if you haven't decided what your opinion is about it? So people skim the article or just read the headline[1], draw conclusions which may be highly speculative, and then post whatever they think based on at most a few minutes of thought. And they might do this a dozen times a day, for years. So it becomes really natural for people to dash off whatever the easiest thing they can think to say is given the context, even as the context changes and the story evolves. On a popular story you might get dozens or hundreds of people saying the same handful of things.
[0] Or how much of it is what some call "Male Answer Syndome". [1] Check out the length of headlines on /r/politics/.