So, for example, I watch a variety of streamers on Twitch. On the larger streams, I almost never look at chat or chat myself. It's a sea of text and emotes already. No one in chat will read your message. The streamer certainly won't. So you're just listening or watching like to the radio or TV.
But a streamer with 200 viewers? You can often ask questions and get a response. It's a completely different dynamic.
It's still delusional thinking you can have a 'relationship' with someone on the other end of a screen that you are never going to meet in real life.
I agree with you in spirit. To an individual with thousands of followers, no single follower is more important than the mass. Obviously one of these followers could become a true friend, but friends dedicate time to nurture their friendships, and realistically nobody has enough time to keep that many friendships.
Because people would rather down-vote than change my mind!
It's overly cynical to think that you need to be intimate and in the flesh to call it a 'relationship' (in scare quotes?). It is a relationship. There's a real exchange of ideas and emotions.
> It's still delusional thinking you can have a 'relationship' with someone on the other end of a screen that you are never going to meet in real life.
With this, however, i disagree. It's old fashioned to think that friendships can only happen in meat space. Plenty of people actually prefer online and remote communication in many circumstances, since those can offer a way to meet people from wildly different cultures or with similar interests, whereas for others it's a great way to keep in touch with friends who are a long distance away.
For example, i currently live about 60 km from the nearest city in which I could find a significant amount of fellow developers, yet this very platform allows me to see what people all over the world keep themselves busy with. There is definitely a community aspect there.
In regards to personal relationships, some of my online friends are people with whom I can be more honest about my life circumstances than those that i face every day - since they could also have a larger impact on my life with their reactions and differing views.
100-200k people writing in the same chat is just too much for anyone to read it
My guess is that smaller creators have a greater ability to respond to their smaller fan base, deepening these connections. Also, as some creators grow their content becomes more high-production, polished, and #sponsored which might feel less “organic” compared with smaller creators just starting out on a budget.
I would think that goes both ways, no?
Someone small is going to take good care of a $100/month donator, for example.
(For the real biggest streamers who still get giant donations, like Hololives, it seems like the chat is actually in a parasocial relationship with itself…)
Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric, “marginal minutes of viewing content gained per marginal dollar given to personality.” If you meant real ROI (“dollars of revenue minus ad expense per attributed channel”) there’s no way this is true. This is how people observe that only the top 10 or so web destinations make any sense to advertise on but Google sends you traffic from 99,990 more trash websites that never convert, because in aggregate you might barely break even but the extra non converting traffic enabled Google to spend all your budget faster. D-Listers are definitely not ROI positive and anyone who measures that to be so is almost certainly making an attribution error or has a product that is already good enough to sell without targeted ads.
I'm not saying D-Listers are worthless. They aren't! They are ROI negative today. D-Listers are exclusively valuable for the potential of becoming A-Listers.
Anyway this parasocial relationship stuff is a huge red herring because people who aren't sick in the head and need followers for weird reasons are only doing this to become Hollywood stars.
Strongly agree…
And also won’t be surprised when some small team, or solo entrepreneur, turns this idea in to something they can sell for $obscene_sum
> Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric...
Except that you're responding to an obvious counterexample to your boldly-stated claim