<story><title>YouTube millionaires are not your friends</title><url>https://www.vox.com/culture/23640192/sebastian-ghiorghiu-youtube-hustle-gurus-passive-income-dropshipping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>In person, I get it. You chill with someone you like, you don&amp;#x27;t need to do much to enjoy it. Like reading together, or just being there.&lt;p&gt;However, I don&amp;#x27;t get watching pewdiepie playing something. I just can&amp;#x27;t groke it. You don&amp;#x27;t know the person, the person is not in the room, the person is not even currently playing since it&amp;#x27;s a recording. It&amp;#x27;s a flat image of someone else having fun. And not somebody particularly good, interesting or special.&lt;p&gt;I tried to tell myself it&amp;#x27;s like watching porn: you watch somebody else having sex, why not play video game? But something doesn&amp;#x27;t click for me.&lt;p&gt;I miss the point entirely.</text></item><item><author>throw74648284</author><text>I relate to your sentiment, and then I think about how hard it was to explain to my parents why I enjoy watching others play video games.</text></item><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>Just an aside, but I&amp;#x27;ve noticed a lot of popular video trends among the younger generation revolve around watching somebody you don&amp;#x27;t really know, doing things I would I&amp;#x27;ve done with friends.&lt;p&gt;Reaction videos, eating things, hanging out and making jokes, making a stupid contest, trying some new experience...&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like there is an entire part of the children&amp;#x2F;teen population that have such a bland life they feel good while watching somebody else living it.&lt;p&gt;Just read my comment and realized how &amp;quot;old man yells at cloud&amp;quot; it sounds, but hey, maybe someone will have something interesting to answer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>satvikpendem</author><text>You enjoy the feeling of having friends, as you develop a parasocial relationship with the person on the screen.&lt;p&gt;It is essentially a hack for the brain&amp;#x27;s social processing systems. Generally, we&amp;#x27;d have only seen others in real life and interacted with them. This confers evolutionary advantage so we feel good interacting further with people, and perhaps even seeing people do things we find enjoyable in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Now with video, we feel good as we &amp;quot;spend time&amp;quot; with the other person, even though they don&amp;#x27;t know of our existence. Our caveman brain doesn&amp;#x27;t know about this sort of one sided relationship at all, it wasn&amp;#x27;t present in the olden days.&lt;p&gt;We will see the same with AI and chatbots as the decades pass, only at least now we&amp;#x27;re actually able to interact in a two sided way. There are already people doing this with ChatGPT or even Replika.</text></comment>
<story><title>YouTube millionaires are not your friends</title><url>https://www.vox.com/culture/23640192/sebastian-ghiorghiu-youtube-hustle-gurus-passive-income-dropshipping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>In person, I get it. You chill with someone you like, you don&amp;#x27;t need to do much to enjoy it. Like reading together, or just being there.&lt;p&gt;However, I don&amp;#x27;t get watching pewdiepie playing something. I just can&amp;#x27;t groke it. You don&amp;#x27;t know the person, the person is not in the room, the person is not even currently playing since it&amp;#x27;s a recording. It&amp;#x27;s a flat image of someone else having fun. And not somebody particularly good, interesting or special.&lt;p&gt;I tried to tell myself it&amp;#x27;s like watching porn: you watch somebody else having sex, why not play video game? But something doesn&amp;#x27;t click for me.&lt;p&gt;I miss the point entirely.</text></item><item><author>throw74648284</author><text>I relate to your sentiment, and then I think about how hard it was to explain to my parents why I enjoy watching others play video games.</text></item><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>Just an aside, but I&amp;#x27;ve noticed a lot of popular video trends among the younger generation revolve around watching somebody you don&amp;#x27;t really know, doing things I would I&amp;#x27;ve done with friends.&lt;p&gt;Reaction videos, eating things, hanging out and making jokes, making a stupid contest, trying some new experience...&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like there is an entire part of the children&amp;#x2F;teen population that have such a bland life they feel good while watching somebody else living it.&lt;p&gt;Just read my comment and realized how &amp;quot;old man yells at cloud&amp;quot; it sounds, but hey, maybe someone will have something interesting to answer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theshrike79</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve explained it to myself like this: It&amp;#x27;s exactly like watching sports.&lt;p&gt;You want to watch it live on tv, even though the fact that you&amp;#x27;re watching has zero impact on the result. You&amp;#x27;re just watching other people play a game. You could do anything else and just check the scores afterwards, but still you want to watch it.&lt;p&gt;Some people will watch a recording of the game and still enjoy it even though the scores were determined hours ago.&lt;p&gt;The younger generation does the same thing, but instead of sports they watch someone play a game.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand either, but I can live with it =)</text></comment>