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.

Toxicity is the word you were looking for.

Bad use of the format.

The only streaming I do is taking a piss.

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.