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Comment by vimda | Hacker News Reader

God that's depressing. Even when you _pay_ for human connection you're being fobbed off onto an AI

Ironically, I was trying to explain to someone I know that was somewhat considering getting into that milieu that what such people are really doing is selling affection to an affection deprived audience. Every person that sells themselves has the same orifices and they more or less all look the same, and everyone has seen thousands of them by now. The differentiation is the connection and being able to identify the particular sad void needing to be fill.

AI will make this really bad, because it will surely quickly learn how to tap into your deepest impulses and desires for connection and affection. It sounds weird, but in a way, there is some strong correlation between other forms of fraud, the most obvious being romance cons/frauds; where women are not looking for big rods, but for romance lady boners... yet another form of seeing affection.

Some of us harm ourselves for a lack of an affection, others fall prey to it making them vulnerable. I do hope that AI could and will also be used to help people get a semblance of healthy affection, if not maybe even facilitate making real connections that can provide real human affection.

To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.

At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed, and computers are pretty good at producing convincing video feeds now.

>To pay for a human connection, take someone out for a dinner, and foot the bill.

I'm married now, and never used any parasocial platform OnlyFans or another, but trivializing the problem of young adult loneliness is either ignorant or condescending.

A large fraction of young males don't have anyone to "take out for a dinner", or at least have no idea how to initiate that. You may scoff at that, but I certainly wouldn't know how to do it, and money was not a problem. Paying for human connection, especially online, was tempting.

The solution to loneliness isn’t fake connections. And I think makes it even worse because fake friends don’t act like real people and make it harder to form real relationships with people who have their own desires and needs and aren’t just sycophants receiving pay.

Taking someone out for a dinner and footing the bill does not require you to be some cassanova. Escort services are a thing and honestly somewhat increasingly normalized. The latest chris hemsworth movie had him using an escort and didn't paint him as weird for it or anything, kind of just seemed like a gym membership or any other service the way it was casually broached (he played a certain healthy/rich/clean cut professional thief/perhaps even autistic character).

LA is weird and not everyone wants to live there.

Escort services are still a very niche interest in most of the world.

And they provide a simulacrum of human connection.

Escorting is more similar to OF than to "real" dating. In both cases the "service provider" pretends to be a perfect match for the customer, actively molding their persona to fit them. The more someone interacts with such tailored experiences the harder it is to adjust to the "real" experience.

Which is probably fine if you're a successful man in his 40s who has more time than money and treats escorting as a shortcut. Not so fine if you're a man half his age who is struggling to find a partner.

I bet a lot of people would get into escorting if they expected their customers to look like Chris Hemsworth. Who's Hollywood got playing the next normalized John, Emma Watson?

> At OnlyFans you're paying for a video feed

Then they can prominently state the chat is not with the actual creator, or they can go to jail for fraud. This "oh they say they're providing you X but you're actually paying for Y" argument is getting even more tiresome than the "fraud is so widespread why worry about it" one.

Bet you had some really deep human connection with that guy chatting to you from the Philippines.

You betray your ignorance of how parasocial OnlyFans and their ilk get. Yes, people get real connection out of it, whether its with who they think they're talking to or not. I think that connecting those people into a chat bot instead of a real human is depressing, and a bad thing for society, but you're welcome to disagree with that

Talking to a real human seems more depressing to me, especially when they're making less than $2/hour doing it, have multiple chats going all trying to hit sales targets, and they feel bad for you in the interaction. Paying for female attention is pretty bad, but not even getting the attention you paid for is just bleak. At that point go with the machine. At least it's not thinking "what the hell am I doing here?" while it's generating messages.

What's the difference? The users think they talk to some specific person and form a connection with them, and they don't.

Whether they get strung along by a human, a chatbot, or a simple cronjob - does it matter?

It’s not a real connection. It’s completely invented in their mind. Probably more accurate to call it a delusion.

I'll admit. I' too old to 'get' OF.

I don’t think it’s an age thing, I think is desperation. I’m not desperate enough to get it

I'm also often not desperate for a pun from a stranger, but I think a 'get' it.

Now that you got the balls rolling in an unwanted direction, I'm sure you're not the only one here with blue jewels.

What's there to get? People, overwhemingly men, pay for adult content from performers, majority women.

It often involves a supposedly personal touch (like chatting with (someone pretending to be) them, or being able to pay for custom content).

Nothing really exceptional in any way other than scale, democratisation (anyone of age can sign up to post content) and the digital transformation. Back in the day people used to buy porn magazines with their niche preferences, and write in letters to share their stories / fantasies and get responses back.

It's going to kill the software industry as we know it!

We're literally killing our field by making the devices and internet so repulsive that people are actively unplugging. You can't hear about this online because the bot generated content is filling the gap and the people doing it aren't online to tell you about it.

Children are getting addicted to everything because the internet has killed any sense of self-stimulation and they are growing up into gamblers with cards, sports, and prediction markets or rage-addicted media consumers.

There is plenty of human connection to be had out there, it is free, and all you have to do is put down the phone or computer. It is getting extremely compelling as an alternative for increasing large groups of people.

The tech industry is energetically strangling its golden goose.

There will be some interesting game theory studies in the aftermath.

I think that's just a good old prisoner dilemma. You can't have a free-range golden goose, because if you grow it responsibly, others will abuse it first and you will get out of business. The only way is to be as greedy as legally allowed, because otherwise you're left behind.

What do you mean by "human connection"?

It appears a lot of people using OF are using it as a parasocial medium, not strictly for porn. They want to believe they're actually in touch with the performer and part of their lives to some degree.

What does "para-" mean?

Edit: Right, 'beside', 'outside', like in paranormal. Now, are parasocial relationships "human connection"?

para- has a variety of meanings [0] depending on which word it’s used to form.

Parasocial itself means “one-sided” in a relationship [1].

0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/para-#English

1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/parasocial

It means that it shares some, but not all, aspects of a social relationship.

It's often applied to one-sided relationships with celebrities, where you feel a personal connection to them but they literally don't know you exist.

Social relationship is much broader than human connection.

If I fall in love with Harry Potter, is that a human connection?

The term "parasocial relationship" is usually reserved for actual people. You could stretch it to include fictional characters, but it misses out on some of the reasons we coined the term.

For example, you can't stalk Harry Potter. There are surely people stalking JK Rowling, and that is a better example of a parasocial relationship.

Not all parasocial relationships are pathological. It's just a useful extreme to illustrated why the distinction exists.

“Para-“ tends to mean “around” or “beside,” kind of in the sense of “close to" or "almost”--paraprofessional teachers or lawyers, paramilitary groups, parallel lines, parasitic symbiotes. In this specific context, American sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl (1956) [0] coined the notion of “para-social" relations, in order to describe audience members’ intensifying, one-sided sensations-of-relationships with media characters as American-style mass media came into its own:

> The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in the circle of one's peers; the same is true of a character in a story who comes to life in these media in an especially vivid and arresting way. We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship.

They contrast para-social relations with face-to-face ones, which they call ortho-social:

> The crucial difference in experience obviously lies in the lack of effective reciprocity [...] To be sure, the audience is free to choose among the relationships offered, but it cannot create new ones. Whoever finds the experience unsatisfying has only the option to withdraw.

> ...the media present opportunities for the playing of roles to which the spectator has–or feels he has–a legitimate claim, but for which he finds no opportunity in his social environment. This function of the para-social then can properly be called compensatory, inasmuch as it provides the socially and psychologically isolated with a chance to enjoy the elixir of sociability.

It's a brisk accessible read, and spookily still relevant. Thanks for the impetus to dust it off :)

Anyway—in the 2010s, social scientists began to use the idea to think about the emerging class of even-more-intimate, confessional celebrities—like the Kardashians—as those celebrities started to use the socials ‘round the clock and to broadcast seemingly intimate, unguarded moments [1]. “Healthy” doesn’t seem to be the word the researchers and clinicians tend to choose...

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00332747.1956.11...

[1] e.g. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research_all/7/

> Now, are parasocial relationships "human connection"?

No, they are a proxy people attempt to use as a substitute for more genuine, two-sided relationships. It's quite common. I think lonely people are most susceptible to it, though.

Yes, and it's sad.

I wish someone would create a business that profits from people forming actual connections with each other, but every opportunity has been displaced.

Dating sites replaces meeting IRL, and foster superficial relationships anyway. Bars are passé. Social clubs, golf clubs, etc, seem to belong to a past generation. Social media killed the social part. The damage to society is real.

There is one: universities. They're just really expensive so you can't stay there for more than a few years, and people aren't properly advised of how important the opportunity is.

Meetup is kind of like that. I use it for ongoing hiking clubs and book clubs and movie clubs.

Comically, Facebook sort of serves this way as well by brining together hiking clubs and d&d groups.

Every time someone says something like this, I can think of examples of every point just from the limited scope of my own life to the contrary, which from the frequency it happens I'm guessing indicates my experience isn't so unique and the world isn't this doom and gloom black and white world as described on the internet. People still meet serendipitously. People still go out. The golf club at my municipal course still throws out several tournaments a year with enough demand for like four each mens and womens handicap flights. Maybe the people alleging these things have to look inwardly and ask why they aren't themselves doing these things that can still be done today.

Golf clubs are super niche and self-selecting.

There are almost no spaces left which are easily discoverable by "analog" means without relying at all on social media.

The UK used to have a very strong pub and club culture. That's been collapsing for most of this century - some of it helped by government legislation.

This hasn't changed direction recently.

https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/graph-of-the-day-how-...

They did, but it turns out that people’s most common social activity/interest is sex-based.

Omegle wasn’t known for making BFFs.

Meetup's still fighting the good fight :)

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