I think it's pretty clear you should feel sad for the guy, who is obviously, I try to say without cruelty, pathetic and misled. It's like people who are very dumb falling for obvious scams - e.g. send me your money and I'll double it.
I don't mean that everyone watching these streamers is like this guy, but some portion of them, probably a higher percentage of the donating "whales", likely think that they somehow do have some kind of chance or relationship with the steamer. These people, it seems to me, are essentially exploited for profit.
I realize it's not the same as a scam. Not the same exactly - because the streamer never says or suggests she'll be your girlfriend for X dollars or something, but knowingly or unknowingly the streamer is creating that suggestion for some and profiting off of it.
It strikes me as a really complicated moral issue, because some people do seem exploited by it, others like it, and the streamers benefit by it. I don't know what to think about the enterprise, but I think it's at least clear we can feel bad for that guy, even recognizing that he's being a jerk.
>These people, it seems to me, are essentially exploited for profit.
This has always been true of the online sex worker/camgirl/streamer world. There have always been some that feel that way and are emotionally led on by the actress, who knows exactly what's going on. It moved into Kik and then Snapchat, Twitch, and OnlyFans. There are also some that will profit off of manipulating emotionally questionable viewers and then calling them a simp when they're out with their own friends. It's kind of a vicious world.
This will also be going on with the next big thing too. And the one after that. I worry that it's actually causing MGTOW and intel culture to grow more widespread.
It's a good point that just as the actress bears some moral responsibility for exploiting the pathetic, the company bears responsibility for that too. Maybe easier to justify if you work for kik, but OnlyFans seems like it has a higher ratio of exploitation to non-exploitation than kik.
No reason you can't be sad for both. When you make money based on having a cultivated persona it benefits you to allow people to sink themselves as deep into your fandom as possible. You don't even have to be particularly active or purposeful about it. You just respond to your audience in whatever way gets you the best reaction and the most money, and like many other industries like gambling and mobile gaming you create dolphins and whales who will embrace a worldview where it's worth it to give you hundreds or thousands of dollars. The difference is that when the illusion is shattered the mobile gamer who wasted ten grand on Candy Crush can't send the CEO of King Digital Entertainment a private message telling him to go to hell.
There's no motivation for anyone to protect people. Twitch has no reason to stop viewers from devoting their time and money to a personal fandom and neither do the streamers.
One can either look at this superficially and just laugh at the guy, or can read deeper into it and realize that maybe the Internet isn't as great as we thought (personally I think it's been a net negative for society and humanity as a whole -- unlocking revenue for businesses isn't a positive in my eyes). There's now a whole generation of (mainly) men under ~35 who have been disenfranchised and are almost completely disconnected from their own reality. The Internet is their only conduit.
Those men are very real, but it's not obvious to me that the Internet is the cause or even exacerbating the issue. There are desperately lonely men in subcultures that don't heavily use the Internet too - they just end up doing drugs or crimes, which is worse for everyone involved.
I think this is different than the usual case of lonely men. The interactions that take place on these platforms can create the illusion that a person is in a relationship with the content producer. It's similar to the illusory relationships some people have with celebrities but it's much stronger due to the interactivity. It's much more dangerous than a lot of things, though perhaps not as dangerous as hard drugs or crime.
And just because someone is engaging in this kind of activity online rather than going out and committing crime does not we as a society should encourage it. In all likelihood, we may see some of these men have mental breakdowns due to disillusionment and then they can become extremely dangerous. It's these disillusioned, lonely men who are highly vulnerable to joining the incel movement and potentially committing terrorist attacks.
The internet and social media as a whole, and technology as a whole, has made our society less social. The screens are more compelling than what's off screen. People are holed up with their screens.
We are unhealthy and have unhealthy views of each other, what happiness is, what beauty is, what success looks like.
I think this is largely due to the fact that all the existing and thriving (post)modern social-network-as-businesses start off with cost structures that restrict themselves to serve the advertisers and medium/large businesses in a long run, and not the end users.
This reflects:
- the chasm between paid-to-use and free-to-use services in terms of frictions introduced during user on-boarding.
- the hyped-up vc eco-system that pour insane amount of cash into internet products that display crazy growth curve and that helps to destroy competitors to achieve maximum market coverage - so everyone wants crazy growth curve.
And the result is that existing social-network-as-businesses whose services majority of the human population use are simply not designed to serve the people.
Screens are more compelling than what's off screen only when what's off screen are less compelling than screens.
I want to believe that people learn.
And I want to believe that we as a civilisation are gradually shifting towards a reward system where wealth is accumulated by those who contribute to helping others to learn things (e.g. StackOverflow and Coursera just received another round of funding recently! So that's super cool!), and, on a long run, humanity's collective progress to enlightenment.
This is why seeing recent advancements in psychedelic and consciousness research (e.g. by John Hopkins, Imperial) always brighten my day =)
And I'm just super happy and grateful that great thinkers on consciousness (like John Yates, Roger Penrose, Joscha Bach) are getting a lot more media exposure in recent years! (And this is all thanks to the internet & new media!)
So cheer up mate! Always look on the bright side of life! (as much as possible, while appreciating the intricacies and emptiness within)
althought im sure people like that do exist, maybe not to that extent, this particular case isnt real.
source of the comment. https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/8t6yrp/stre...