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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

Should I point out the obvious that you aren't friends with the youtuber doing the Let's Play? You can't form a real two-way bond with one another, and that is the foundation of friendship. Real friendship could bloom in many other ways and you guys could go get a pizza, go climb Everest, help them work on their car, etc.

In a nutshell, that describes my fears and reservations about the way the current age is going. It's all watching and commenting and not enough back and forth interaction and doing.

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There's a concept called Parasocial interaction that describes the relationship between an audience and a media personality (originally observed for tv personalities, but more recently YouTube and internet ones apply too).

"Viewers or listeners come to feel and consider media personalities almost as friends."

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

You're not friends with the cast of a TV show either. Game streaming can be much more interactive. I follow a player on YouTube who plays XCOM 2. His followers build the characters, write their biographies and so forth. Then the characters appear in the game and their authors contribute diaries about what happens to the characters in-game ... and since XCOM 2 has a "bond" mechanic, and since it takes 100+ hours to play through, and since unlike other games it's very common for characters to get killed in-game, the experiences can be pretty rich. It's just a bunch of self-organized randos on the internet, not friendship or community, but as far as what you can get out of staring at screens it's near the top in terms of interactivity.

It’s different but similar. Streamers usually build a community around their streams, and this is the part that is equivalent to the friendship part in the “physical let’s play”.

One way to look at these communities is that in many ways they are similar to IRC, except the interactions take place in twitch chat and discord. For example, the one game streamer I follow I certainly wouldn't consider a friend, but I do have some friends I have found through the community (in the same loose internet friend sense as some of the people i met through IRC and still talk to). Just like IRC channels were formed around a common theme/topic, these communities are formed around a 'personality' and shared videos.

For a technical equivalent to this, look at the EEVBlog forums. It's arguably the premiere forum online for hobby electronics discussion, but a lot of it also revolves around the EEVBlog YouTube videos. There are some people who don't watch, but they are in the minority.

I wonder if async forum communication / semi-interactive celebrities can adequately replace the 'piece' of human interaction that makes prisoners go insane in solitary confinement. I'm sure we'll find out soon.

You may not be their friend, but they are (frequently) interacting with you.

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