>Are we stuck in the game of attention engineering forever?

More or less. As the content generated exceeds limits of human attention, it is our ability to pay attention that is scarce and much sought after. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

Joe Edelman talks about an alternative that I find compelling, if not slightly idealistic.

https://medium.com/what-to-build/how-to-design-social-system...

Basically, if you focus on how people want to approach their goals/passions, instead of the goal itself, you get a really good idea of why they're doing something. If you know why they're doing something, you can design systems allowing get better genuine engagement. So, you stop designing for attention (which can be exploitative and bad) and start designing for meaning (which is empowering and enjoyable).

Applied to this problem of the lonely blogger/streamer, I'm not sure what the solution is... I'll think about it and post a reply later to avoid a wall of text.

There's no silver bullet, but I think you just have to pick a scope of specialization. I'll see if I can analogize it to my day job: I work for an ecommerce platform with built-in search, CMS, and business insights. That doesn't sound like specialization compared to, say, Shopify, but often times the companies that fit well for us are ecommerce companies that find they're spending too much effort being an IT shop, instead of focusing on marketing, merchandising, and branding. You can absolutely have a go at building a homegrown ecommerce platform that suits your needs, but are you thinking about maintaining that effort in-house five years down the road?

My wife's a composer, and between the work the two of us have put in around her music, she's gotten pretty good exposure - a piece of hers went fairly viral in 2009, with peak exposure probably being a couple of segments on the Rachel Maddow Show (and a lot of law blogs leading up to that). I built a custom CMS for showcasing the music she writes, and we take advantage of social media... but we've also seen friends of hers, also composers, short-circuit that by hiring a PR firm, and suddenly they're being reviewed in the New York Times. Throwing that cash around is way more efficient than, say, marrying a web developer and dabbling in media creation alongside maintaining a career in music composition.

On a larger scale, Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails has been through a couple of cycles of this. Started out on an indie label (1988), found it wasn't serving them well, basically struck out on their own to earn enough credibility that a big label bought out the contracts (1991), which worked well until it didn't (2000), went almost entirely in-house (2008), which did okay but didn't scale, and post-2010, works with different people or agencies with different strengths, between selling merch, manufacturing & distribution, tour management, publicity, and so forth.