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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

That makes sense to me. With a big influencer/creator it's a one-way relationship to the audience. With a smaller influencer/creator, it can be more two-way.

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.

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OTOH, for me, chat is part of the entertainment.

Yes, it is. But you can't chat if the messages scroll by to quickly. Just watch an asmongold stream live if you want to see an extreme of what they were talking about.

100-200k people writing in the same chat is just too much for anyone to read it

Chat becomes highly memetic in large channels but that's part of the fun and highly engrossing. It's like being at a concert and becoming fully immersed with the rest of the hive mind. Many religions base their practices around this feeling of collective ecstasy, only on Twitch it's by using a sea of pogs and pepegas.

> With a big influencer/creator it's a one-way relationship to the audience. With a smaller influencer/creator, it can be more two-way.

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.

Still "insane", but certainly a different beast...

I don’t know why you are being downvoted rather than being argued against.

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 that's not what they said.

>I don’t know why you are being downvoted rather than being argued against.

Because people would rather down-vote than change my mind!

> It's still delusional thinking you can have a 'relationship'

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.

In regards to streaming and content creation platforms, i largely agree - it's more akin to improv theatre with one artist, but the kind where you could affect their act in subtle ways.

> 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.

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