Markiplier said it himself that he wishes he could go back to having a small fanbase, not because he hates his fans, but because he feels like he cant have normal friendships with people now.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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The inspiration for the meme: I used to stream and treated it like a social thing. I don't have anytime, anymore for streaming but made lots of close friends. Recently I found out a few freinds that I thought were close were using me for exposure. Then another streamer I liked blew up mid stream that he had less than 10 viewers and started a piity party... Its a real 3-15 people decided to spend time with you, appreciate that fact.
Then another streamer I liked blew up mid stream that he had less than 10 viewers and started a piity party…
This seems like the fastest way to go from having <10 viewers to having 0 viewers...
Yeah I don’t understand it either. I dabbled in some occasional streaming of games I play, but I mostly do it for fun or when I play a single player game and miss the occasional chat you get to have in most multiplayer games.
Usually I have 4 or 5 viewers, from which I suspect two might bots, but it’s cool either way. I don’t try to monetize it or even build up followers, so that takes a lot of stress out of it and helps keeping it fun for me.
The last thing that came to me would be to bitch at my handful of regulars for being not enough lol.
Ya, there is literally endless amounts of content to consume. The fact that anybody at all thinks that watching you is better than the endless media pile is awesome.
I have about 800 YouTube subscribers and that took about 10 years for me to get with my very niche hobby videos. I think it's awesome that people take the time out to watch and comment. I would never blame the people watching for my view counts, that would be so silly.
My average viewership is like 5, with about 40 regulars. I fucking love that they take time out of their day to hangout.
Tom Scott is a brilliant (subjective opinion) YouTuber, and he seems to be the "Simpsons Did It" YouTube equivalent to unique and interesting topics to cover.
I was super surprised to hear him basically say - and I am paraphrasing because I forget the exact video to reference - "I don't want to meet all my fans, you don't know me, I'm a YouTuber putting on a polished front to make good videos", and it was beautifully brutal in how honest he was in keeping that distance between him and his fan base. I think it's nice to ride the wave of being cool and famous, but there must come a point where nobody's interested in who you are, they're just in awe of the channel you embody. That must be super tough - and it's a tale as old as time in showbiz but for the first time, it seems like the everyman (other genders and identities are available) can end up going through this on their own without the glitzy PR campaign behind them, without easy access to medical staff paid for by big production studios, or without big Hollywood wages to cry in to at the very least.
Geoff Marshall is another fantastic UK YouTuber, someone I imagine I'd quite happily buy a pint and chat bollocks for half hour waiting for a train - but even he's quite open about having his YouTube channel to address the world, alongside his own social media identities that are completely disconnected from his public-facing life.
I'm not sure if it's healthy for people to have to go through this, or whether it's just a necessary evil of wielding influence online.
That’s too bad.
I hadn’t seen him before (heard his name though). After a month maybe .06% of the world will see a video he puts out - I’m surprised he has trouble meeting people who’ve never heard of him.
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.
Thanks, I like your comment and I agree that I think people just aren't evolved to have millions of fans/followers. If you look at people that got famous at a young age, most (maybe almost all) of them turned out into pretty unstable people. I'm taking about tv/movie stars here. Nowdays young people not only get famous, but also are bombarded with endless comments, lots of them very negative.
Even for young people that are not famous at all, when other kids around you always share things online where it looks like they have a much much "better" life, it messes you up. So many people just pretend to have a great life online, but never share all the bad stuff that also happens.
If you grow up with social media, you grow up with a complete fake version of reality. I kind of fear for the moment my kids will be old enough to want to join social media. As a parent you can't really stop them and I also don't want to be the super controlling parent anyway. It's something that scares me because I know I will have to deal with it in a few years.
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...
Basically we more or less live in a kind of cyberpunk dystopian zombie apocalypse: nearly all social media apps are equivalent to hard drugs that cause dependency, ruin attention spans, and generally drive nearly all users into echo chambers that cause extremism of some kind or another, steal much of your attention, alienate you from real world interactions, and as you mention are functionally both mass spying devices for governments, and for corporations to perfect market research and become even more effective at selling what is nearly always overpriced garbage, or laughably mundane and unoriginal 'content' of some kind.
Try explaining this to people, and that the only way to avoid it, not even to fight this but just to avoid this is to... learn things and give up their digital drugs?
In my experience they nearly always respond with emotional violence, social ostracization, and sometimes even physical violence.
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!
Fine line between "chat is a bunch of friends and we have fun together" and "there are so many people I don't remember anything about anyone".
It's a weird dichotomy, I stream for fun and prevent me gaming in the dark, alone; but it also affects my game choice and starts to feel like an obligation because people start to feel at home there.
Analytics and gamification behind the scenes adds some stress too, number to up makes dopamine go brr.
🤷
Bad use of the format.
One of my favorite youtube channels is lotaeri. He gets like no views but he's always having fun and is just a genuinely good dude.
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.
Hey look it's Myth
The middle is what usually happens if people are on the verge of breaking even. Then it's immensely stressful, because they have to switch jobs otherwise. And where to do you go if you are uneducated and have experience in nothing else but streaming? While being not successful at that.