Streamers are only useful as background noise for me. Whenever I try and just watch one, even smaller ones, I inevitably get annoyed - they have some personal quirk that bothers me, enforce the rules too little or too much, or when politics comes up, it’s usually either milquetoast lib stuff said sanctimoniously or people who are kinda left-leaning but their closeness to meaningfully good opinions is itself annoying as I want to push them on but I cannot because that would be creating a parasocial relationship. I prefer to just move on and remove them from algorithmic recommendations.

Having any kind of “allegiance” to a streamer or really any content (bleurgh) creator just seems unwise to me, no matter how amazing they are and correct they are on issues. Because the drama will come for them, and then instead of discussing real-world issues, you’ve delving into reddit threads about he-said she-saids to determine if they’re Still A Good Person or not.

It feels like the modern incarnation of celebrity culture but for people who say they don’t care about celebrities. “Oh no, I don’t give a shit about what’s going on with Taylor Swift or Megan Markle, caring about random people like that is kinda weird. HOLY SHIT have you seen the newest video by Blungle292? The video game challenge he just did is so INSANE and DIFFICULT.” And explicitly political streamers? Good god, I don’t even go near them, they’re inevitably uninteresting and annoying.