zlacker

>>mef+(OP)
What I find fascinating/disturbing with OnlyFans and in some way with Twitch and streaming in general is more the client side than the creators. Here are basically people paying, and paying a lot, for parasocial relationships. Because clearly it’s not about the content per see which is a dim a dozen and available for free in trove.

I think it says something quite dark about our society as a whole that we have basically commoditised distress and are encouraging some people often themselves in dire circumstances to prey on others to the benefits of the middle men. I find these new pimps scarier than the old sort in that they pretend to have clean hands.

>>Random+hPb
This view isn't matched by the stats. I have a friend who is a successful OF model and only a fraction of one percent of her subscribers ever DM her. A lot of them subscribe, see what they want and then immediately delete their accounts. There's no apparent relationship between her fans and her, for the most part.

>>qingch+Skc
Parasocial relationships don't require interaction, you could just watch a twitch streamer a lot. I think if we defined it by requiring interaction we would underestimate the percieved impact of these social phenomenon.

>>ehnto+Umc
Regarding parasocial relationships in general, I like [0]:

> a few exceptional people (many of them imaginary) get far more love than most people need or can enjoy.

> This seems an essential tragedy of the human condition. You might claim that love isn’t a limited resource, that the more people each of us love, the more love we each have to give out. So there is no conflict between loving popular and imaginary people and loving the rest of us. But while this might be true at some low scales of how many people we love, at the actual scales of love this just doesn’t seem right to me. Love instead seems scarce at the margin.

> Please, someone thoughtful and clever, figure out how we might all be much loved.

[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/alas-unequal-lovehtml