[Dumbdo]

As someone who is following chess more intensively for over two years now, I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Netflix.

With the pandemic there was a huge influx of new chess players. You can see it in [0], the player count rose over 50% from February to April.

After that chess suddenly got popular on Twitch as well, which I would attribute mostly to GM Hikaru, who played chess together with well known streamers such as xqc. That rise is well visible in June/July [1] in the twitch chess category.

Queen's Gambit was just recently released (end of October). This of course led to chess being even more popular, but I wouldn't attribute all the chess posts to it. I maybe would even go so far and attribute it partly to frequency illusion [2], now that you're watching out more for chess posts I assume.

[0] Games played per month on lichess (open source chess server): https://database.lichess.org/

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/743

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

[hellodang]

Cool, I never heard of frequency illusion. I experience it all the time.