It's common of Internet discourse to reduce an extremely wide range of experiences down to either the one you personally had or a stereotype. Suburbs are kind of like that. You can see it in the existing responses, with some people saying they experienced tremendous community in a suburb but not in a city and some saying the opposite.

The truth is there is no archetype of an "American suburb." They can be wildly different from each other. I grew up in Whittier, a suburb of Los Angeles, famous for car culture. You can find videos today all over the place of lowriders on hydraulics cruising Whittier Blvd. It's referenced in rap songs from the 90s. But you could also walk or ride a bike. Whittier Blvd itself is two lanes each way for much of its length and is the biggest street in the city. I lived two blocks from this street and walked places all the time. I knew all my neighbors. Kids played in the streets. We walked to parks and played there, too. Whittier even has a really nice wilderness park thanks to Turnbull Canyon, where you're not really remote but you can feel that way. In high school when we were assigned to read Walden Pond and produce similar journals, I found isolated creekbeds where you couldn't hear or see anything except the woods and kept a paper journal I wrote in.

On the other hand, my sisters have moved out to Murrieta, CA and are raising their children there. It's a radically different experience. My wife asked if we could walk to a convenience store when we first visited and my sister was almost laughing at us. It's miles away, some streets have no sidewalks, the streets are a hundred feet wide with 50 mph+ speed limits. It's also hot as hell because it's out in the desert.

Both suburbs, even both in Southern California, but very different experiences with very different communities.

Hacker News talks past each other a lot by not acknowledging this and reducing everything down to "suburbs" or "American" and assuming that kind of shorthand has a clear, universal meaning.

Even television and media consumption in general are not the automatic atomizers they're being characterized as. Aside from the old watercooler monoculture of having something to talk about when everyone watched the same five primetime shows, for sports fans and especially when pay-per-view first took off, gathering at one person's house to collectively watch together was almost ubiqitous. That's not even considering cinema in theaters, which were always a group event. I grew up with that. We almost never watched anything alone in the 80s. If people are now primarily watching video media on their phones from their beds while alone, that is a lot different than how we grew up 40 years ago. Reading was more characteristic of alone-time media consumption.