She's a new kind of popular science presenter, with refreshing depth and command of the subject that's been lacking in this field for ages. She's popular and popular content is getting HN front page often. Add here the dynamics of social media engagement, meaning that more disputed/controversial topics get promoted and shared more.

As a physicist she does have certain opinions (would be strange if she didn't), they make for good material so naturally she brings it up. The disputed subjects however are a fraction of her content, which includes covering the well established basics.

I think it's probably fair to say most cosmologists would consider her views marginal, but she is certainly not a crank. My (limited) understanding is that ΛCDM fits cosmological observations extremely well; however, neither dark matter nor dark energy has actually been shown unambiguously to exist. 'Mainstream' cosmology invariably also includes inflation, which remains essentially a speculative idea unsupported by any hard observational evidence. Sabine Hossenfelder has become a popular commentator by drawing attention to discussions of these and other issues.

She might be right but, as of now, the evidence shows that she is probably not right.

But as with everything, contrarian point of view is always popular on the internet. And we all want be in the know (have some secret knowledge) thus posts like this are popular.

So if she is really right we will feel like winners - if not, who cares: it is internet.

I think she is a really credible voice, given her background in theoretical physics and her matter-of-fact demeanor, plus her tendency to express all the necessary caveats. As such, when you see a dissenting belief from her, you are more likely to have people actually believe there is something there and not just BS. I think this is a major factor - basically, dissenting opinions discussed by Sabine Hossenfelder carry more weight than others.

There are a bunch of people with similar thoughts. Just recently a blogpost by Peter Woidt showed up here [1]. While I'm only following this as a lay person I think you can say Woidt and Hossenfelder come from the same corner of "critics of contemporary physics" or however you want to call them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28325753

She's discussing findings that come from papers written by other scientists, so she is obviously not a lone wolf.

I also watch PBS spacetime series.

I think https://youtu.be/dsCjRjA4O7Y is relevant here.

I wonder if she heard about the Stationary Universe Model of Peter Ostermann [1]. He argues along similar lines reagarding the inference of dark energy from the supernovae data.

[1] http://www.peter-osterman.org/index.html

I have another error I'd like to discuss with her, but she charges to speak with one of her people. Sorry, I'm not paying for that :-)

She comes into the field from a mathematical background. In that sense she is an outsider.

I love her so much. Everything she explains is so crystal clear.