[codazoda]

I wonder how people recognize you from your writing since your face isn’t attached to it.

I do see the micro-celebrity in action with my adult son, who is a YouTuber. People recognize him pretty often, so his small following must be relatively local and has this effect. But that’s video where he can easily be recognized.

On a related note, I often wonder how people are so sure it’s him. If I see a video of someone, I’m not likely to recognize them in public. Perhaps I have a bit of this condition of an inability to recognize faces mentioned in the article.

[kall]

Depending on the kinds of videos he makes, people may have spend more hours focused on his face, and paying attention to his mannerisms, than some friends of theirs.

[andreyk]

It depends on how you publish - on medium the face is hidden, but if you have a personal blog it's easy to make your face and name up front (eg my own https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/life/lessons-learned-...).

[spoonjim]

Most YouTubers are not geographically scoped. How do you know he has a small audience? His views or his subscribers?

[rhizome]

tl;dr: faces usually don't matter

I read blogs from authors I have no idea what they look like or where they live or anything, some for almost 20 years, and longer than even that with ppl on IRC. All you need is some consistent identity for people to internalize, which in a lot of cases is a nickname, username, or whatever. Heck, I'm certain a site that used only database IDs to identify users would see (stronger, perhaps) connections form just the same as you see on LinkedIn. "On 11/21/21, 384372 wrote:..." Furthermore I'd bet that there are people who still think to themselves something like "I wonder what happened to 'gardenfloot' on Napster."

>On a related note, I often wonder how people are so sure it’s him.

It's him because it's his (I assume) channel and username. That's a reasonable assumption under the social contract such that any aberration would likely be an emergency or a successful hack or something. There have also been groups of people who act as a single online identity, but yours doesn't sound like it's that at all.

I also think celebrity itself is transforming into something a little less oriented around mobbing and paparazzi, and that being recognized is something relative nobodies can get and somebodies can lose, increasing the number of doppelgangers and diluting the entire celebrity industry.