[whstl]

I think you're the first here in this topic that talked about Twitch and streamers.

I know a few streamers and we're aware of people that spend sometimes up to 5 hours a day on every single stream they do. Some of those donating hundreds of dollars a month to a single streamer. The stream chat is their hobby and the majority of their social interaction. The streamers are also burned out.

I'm all for people finding a community, and that's sort of what we do at HN. But that's a bit extreme for me.

IMO things are only going to get worse from here.

[smolder]

Streamers who aren't big enough to be financially successful (which is 99.999%) but have dreams of high viewer counts and big advertising checks (they work hard at growing their channels) are like an underfed child army of influence. The desperation to be popular online fuels a tremendous aggregate effort with little return for the streamers, but which is very effective at drawing their peers and adjacent peer groups into this unhealthy viewership, all in the service of showing ads.

The whole culture around twitch, TikTok, and social media influence generally is very exploitative of teens and younger people with more time and energy than wisdom.

I don't think it's the technology itself that is harmful to kids, not even slightly. It's the environment created online by adults who act to make a profit that drives the pathological use of technology. It's exploiting people's psychology, their need for attention or belonging, and constantly driving engagement that makes the impact of tech on society so ugly. The biggest danger to our youth online is arguably unfettered capitalism, not child predators.

Capitalism can and does work synergistically without the kind of pathological, societal self-harm that's so broadly accepted. Modern technology has just enabled perverse new ways to chew up and spit out the young and disadvantaged en masse while essentially looking the other way, just seeing the participants as rows in a DB table. From most parents' point of view, the threats posed by the profiteering actors in tech are hard to detect and reason about, and hard to protect from in ways that aren't net harmful & draconian, so many young people are left very vulnerable.

Further, for many tech workers, or for those that use the tech to generate business, it's hard to steer away from "evil technology" that is so effective in paying the bills.