Toxicity is the word you were looking for.
The only streaming I do is taking a piss.
Remember to hydrate my dude/dudette, nobody likes that yellow filter!
So, Dunbar’s number comes into play here.
Super summarized, in 1993 an anthropologist (guess his last name), made a compelling argument that the average person cannot maintain more than about 150 meaningful relationships.
This idea has since been generally embraced by many scientists, and to my knowledge, the basic concept has been reaffirmed many times.
A more recent study in 2021 criticizes Dunbar’s original methodology, but functionally reinforces the main concept, just concluding that via a more comprehensive statistical analysis along the lines of Dunbar’s methodology, the 95% confidence interval is basically between 3 and 520 people.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158
Anyway, yeah, the phenomenon of celebrity fame, and more recently parasocial relationships very clearly show that many, many people are seriously changed and challenged by being surrounded by, and interacting with a functionally endless number of fans, who are also critics.
The internet is, at this point, replete with people who turn into extremely shitty people, develop mental disorders, in some cases kill themselves, etc, because of the way that having a large ‘following’ warps your mind.
But, fast forward almost 15 years after Malcolm Gladwell largely popularized the concept of Dunbar’s number amongst academics, intellectuals, Social Media went from a curious internet phenomenon seeming like it might be neat, might be a fad…
…To basically warping the fabric of reality itself via cutthroat and extremely exploitative business decisions causing more or less the ‘norm’ nowadays to be constantly flooded with content and constantly pressured to post content.
Especially in America, but obviously also in many other regions… many, many people suffer serious mental health problems from using popular social media apps, but it has become the norm… because they have been intentionally designed to be addictive.
To conclude: go touch grass basically, but maybe also try to remember the before time, and just uninstall apps that control you and make you mentally unstable.
Very interesting, I have long been familiar with Dunbar’s Number, but I’d actually not thought about it connection with things like social media influencers/streamers. (Probably because that’s not my scene, I don’t stream/don’t watch streams.)
That sounds about correct though, I actually can’t even imagine trying to regularly communicate with that many people directly, in a chatroom style format. It sounds oppressive and demanding.
and just uninstall apps that control you and make you mentally unstable.
While this is good, at this point, the “apps” that “control you” are fully the operating system itself. Android and Windows now both especially push advertising in gross ways and spend way too much time sending way too much data back to home base. iOS and macOS are like maybe just slightly better in that regard, but not a whole lot.
Which leaves you with Linux for computing and android alternatives like LineageOS or GrapheneOS, all of which demand a little bit more technical knowhow on the individuals part.
It’s so so much harder to escape than it used to be. It’s pretty pervasive at this point and damaging to the average person, in terms of how “apps that control you” can really be the whole computer or phone.
I completely agree regarding mobile OS’s.
I am currently writing this on an Android phone that is basically as de googled as i can get it via installing f droid, then the aurora store and neo store to replace everything I can with open source stuff, remove as many permissions for everything as possible such that it still functions, etc.
Problem is my computer was trashed, and I cannot risk accidentally bricking this phone right now, so no safe way to root this thing, using only itself, in a way that is 100% guaranteed exists, at least as far as I am aware.
Anyway… good luck explaining any of this to non tech savvy or non tech nerds. Quite literally the vast majority of them have already had their brains rotted via aforementioned social apps…
I stream because i enjoy playing single player games and it’s nice having people to hang out with and share the experiences. I know I will never “hit it big”, I don’t have enough time to put in since I work full time. But I enjoy playing video games and it’s cool to make a little side cash on your hobby.
The biggest toxicity in streaming is typically from yourself. Always watching your followers numbers and viewership, wondering what you did because one stream did worse than another. I find myself falling into that trap as well sometimes and it definitely makes wanting to stream again hard.
