I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.
Twitch Streamers, all of them. The whole thing is predatory. People pretending to be your friend and make you feel part of a group for money is shitty.
Livposting, a leftie streamer for example: she does this thing where she keeps her sub count at 419/420 but just to elicit more subs because hahah funny number. That's extremely predatory, someone on the left, should know better than to do that.
I see your point, though I don't think Twitch subscriptions are inherently bad on their face. At least those streamers by-and-large own their labor, minus the cut Twitch gets.
Why would you ever give money to play video games though? People used to do it for free and fun.
Why does Streamer X play video games when hypothetical me works at Walmart? Why would I use that money for Streamer X? I think the parasocial relationships encourages people to do that.
Who cares if you own your labor when your labor is exploitative?
Yeah I find the whole parasocial tactic to be distasteful at best. It's not very healthy consumption to encourage and as a result some people get waaaay too invested in it.
In practice though, I don't see it being much different than paying to watch a movie or a show that you enjoy. Still shitty capitalist shit, of course.
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In practice, you can watch it for free. Why would you give people money unless you felt some sort of relationship with them?
I think the middle ground is to constantly inform your viewers about parasocial relationships and that Twitch is predatory, but then you're shooting yourself in the foot if you are the streamer.
I see it more as a tip. Do I have to have a personal relationship with my server at a restaurant before I tip them? I know that's not a perfect 1-to-1 comparison, but waiters and streamers are both workers being exploited to some degree.
Twitch as a company is absolutely predatory, I can't argue with that.
You could have a personal relationship with your server though, and it does happen right? Tipping is dumb anyway now that I think about it.
Tipping is good practice in hellworld, what's bad is that tipping is necessary for service workers to survive. Obviously in our ideal world it wouldn't even be a concept anyone would have to grapple with.
But we're talking about someone playing video games
Not sure how its predatory other than the streamers being exploited by big boss Bezos. Like consumers gonna consume, I think criticizing leftie streamers for marketing themselves comes across like the "yet you participate in a society" meme. Oh no! People who consistently criticize capitalism in front of thousands of proles who desperately need class consciousness aren't living like ascetic monks. Critical support for streamers like Hasan.
I like having background noise at work and at night. Makes the world feel less lonely imo.
you got baited too huh :/
seriously though, I was watching Hasan pikers debate stream and the amount of gifted subs was insane, like people were spending $100+ on that
I never spent a dime on twitch
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If you gave $5 to a small streamer, that's fine I guess, you could legitimately make a connection with that person.
Otherwise, that dude does not give a shit about you and you wasted your money.
But I don't want to be cold about it either, do what you want.