alt Hacker NewsI don’t see the hype as inherently related to social media. There was a lot of hype for the 1999 eclipse that passed through Europe. Everyone was talking about it and where they would go. That’s what it felt like.
It’s a rare and impressive occasion. It’s ok for people to be excited about it.
Buy your glasses in advance.
The BBC news site has a particular boner for slightly unusual moon appearances. If you search the site for moon, there's abundant stories on topics like "blood moon", "buck moon", "super new moon", "strawberry moon", "blue moon", "orange moon", "worm moon", "snow moon", "wolf moon", "harvest moon", the moon being quite near in the sky to Venus, "beaver supermoon", "hunter's moon", "pink moon", and whenever anything even approximating an eclipse happens they write multiple articles about it. So I am given the impression that eclipses happen every other week.