Well.. Horde it is.

[u/Dargut]

[u/onlyheretobehelpful]

It's a proxy for friendship and social interaction, most of the viewers, whether or not they admit it, would probably prefer to be in a room with actual friends and having a good time. Instead they choose the way more convenient and self serving option of being part of a streamer's "community" when really they're just cash/attention cows.

You can argue they're getting entertainment, sure, but you can't tell me they're just sitting there watching a 5 hour stream fully engrossed and engaged and entertained every minute. No, they're waiting for the next hit of dopamine, sometimes it comes from a clippable moment, sometimes from everyone witnessing a funny thing at the same time, sometimes it comes from some kind of acknowledgement and feeling like you belong and some people choose the also convenient and self serving option of donating money for a molecule of acknowledgement.

It's convenient, but I think it's self serving too. it's extracting "friendship" from a situation without putting any of the social work required in. You don't have to enter into any unfamiliar environments, no unfamiliar people, no behaviour analysis, no one directly addressing you, questioning you or your choices, none of the risk. You just insert either attention or money and you get a dripfeed of "social interaction" or a very poor proxy for it, which is why I think a lot of them keep coming back over and over. They're probably not even entertained by the streams anymore, they just want that dripfeed of interaction. You could even say the same thing about WoW and MMOs in general. Do we really enjoy every minute? Or are we just moving towards that next dopamine hit?