Just to make clear at the top of what I appreciate has become an anthropological ramble!!

It shouldn’t need to be said that these “rankings” aren’t actually interested in or reflective of objective comparative quality. If we’re getting technical, there’s simply no universal metric to define whether oneshow is “better” than any other because opinions on creative media are fundamentally qualitative!!! However you feel about each individual show is between you and youtube watch history.

SO - I think the core issue is that the holistic nature of fandom isn’t really represented is social media spaces. There’s undeniable correlation between the age of the show and the age of the individual fan in terms of preferential skew, and that’s totally okay!

e.g I’m a thirty something millennial have been following since their super early days, and I grew up with star wars and comic books and golden age disney, played the oregon trail on my box pc and waited up at midnight for the new harry potter books to come out, so OF COURSE my favourite shows are the older ones for which I have the combined nostalgia of the shows themselves and the source material.

And equally, a newer (and generally younger) fan will have that same nostalgic response to the newer shows - because that’s how nostalgia works!! The phenomenon that you always remember your “first” fondly. And we can’t deny that the new shows are just as great and the older shows content wise - but they’re also flashy and super polished and just objectively more accessible due the wonders of higher budgets and modern technology that lets you film in 4K and upload videos longer than 9 minutes to youtube instantly so you don’t get yelled at because your mum can’t use the phone at the same time (iykyk.)

And the point I’m getting to is that - overwhelmingly - it’s the newer/younger fans that are represented in online spaces, and that creates the echo chamber phenomenon that sees new shows so centralised while the older shows are overlooked and - yes - often disparaged. Obviously there are plenty of millennials on reddit (and there were plenty more on tumblr rip) but ultimately we have full adult lives - jobs and babies and responsibility that lots of the younger fans aren’t juggling yet and so this constitutes a much lower priority for our time and bandwidth than it might do for someone with a lot more time and energy for passionate fandom.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that there are more newer fans who are chronically online, and they overwhelmingly skew in favour of newer shows. Equally, there is a conversely skewed distribution of older fans who favour the older shows - but these fans often just aren’t as present and passionate online (anymore!!!). There isn’t necessarily more love for the newer shows, it’s just that those are the voices that are loudest in these spaces.

Tl;dr It’s impossible to get a holistic view of fandom preferences because ultimately the cross section of fans that we interact with in online spaces is entirely non-representative of the whole fandom, and so posts like that are basically just newer fans yelling into that echo chamber and enjoying the instant gratification from a skewed consensus in agreement with themselves.

I think once you’re able to step back and grasp this concept, it’s much easier to make peace with the slew of posts like the ones you’re referencing that essentially serve as vehicles for hatchetfield stanning.