There’s a variant of “cancel culture” that’s actually just trial by publicity and I think that’s objectively a bad thing.
But often, people in social media are just looking for attention by deliberately inciting outrage, posting their “hot takes” and making controversial statements—and then when other people with opposing views reply to disagree, the original posters start crying about “cancel culture” when, in fact, it’s just plain old disagreement in public discourse.
What needs to happen here is for people to take accountability in what they post in social media, and to take it as seriously as saying their opinions out loud in a physical, public space. If you’re deliberately inciting anger by saying something that puts a group of people at a disadvantage, don’t be surprised if someone from that group stands up to fight back. Your right to free speech does not mean protection from humiliation for the stupid things that you say in public.
It's probably better to just stop using social media. (And stop tolerating people that do.)
I doubt that even something as 'light' on that spectrum as Hacker News is worthwhile enough compared to the non-social-media alternatives. (As a reminder, you can have a tree-like discussion structure without an upvote system.)
Have an ironic upvote. HN's system of not explicitly showing post scores and using accumulated score to give access to downvote buttons etc is the least bad that I have encountered.