Go on some of the most popular Twitch.tv channels, you'll see lots of that happening. Too many to count on two hands. It's unbelievable and quite sad.

> quite sad.

I wonder if you can expand on that.

Observers generally experience sad feelings from seeing someone waste resources, and experience anger when someone is taken advantage of, probably because we perceive our risk increasing (in a tribal sense). Soliciting (and receiving) outlandish "donations" from strangers can look like both a waste and a con.

By tribal risk increasing I mean that if Ogg loses his harvest fording the river, now the tribe has to feed him. Or if Ogg is swindled out of his pelt, now the tribe has to worry about him freezing and make sure nobody else falls victim. In context, this is when your uncle Ben donates to some internet personality and then has trouble making ends meet, and you might have to step in to assist him.

A third unrelated explanation is relative value, where the observer might feel upset watching someone throw good food to a dog, rather than giving it to a starving person nearby because the observer feels the starving person is more deserving of the resources than the animal. In context, this is when your uncle Jerry donates to some internet personality instead of using the money to help you or some other more deserving local charity case (not using that pejoratively).

> from seeing someone waste resources

I think the word "waste" really doesn't apply to just shifting money between people. Although there may be waste elsewhere (or it may be just unfair).

1. If you have enough money to throw around $2,000, you should be able to invest in yourself enough to get real attention, not buy it. If you can't, due to some dysfunction, that's sad. Not sad in a derogatory sense, but sad in the sense that you are so *cked that even $400,000/year can't fix it.

2. If it's not play money, it's sad how irresponsible the person is.

This isn't exactly complicated.

Invest in yourself how? Don’t just throw out empty rhetoric, lay out a plan about how you would spend that $2000 dollars to “get REAL attention”. Money isn’t a magical cure all.

You can pay a beautiful person for a few hours of their time for that price, where as this gets you a shout out and maybe a image of a boob. The former may boost your confidence to meet someone who likes you for who you are, the former will make it worse.

"Money isn’t a magical cure all."

Yes it is. Workout. Dress well. Eat right. Learn things. Time to do so.

Also, I called out $400,000 a year, not $2000.

It’s not sad if you can afford it and enjoy the content created by the streamer. I can see why one might call it sad though if you are donating significant amounts of money relative to your spending capacities to someone that you wouldn’t donate to if they looked differently.

I think the idea is the trope that people who donate "thousands of dollars" to a random person on twitch are probably lonely.

I'm not into the streaming community much though, but that would be my assumption of what they meant

I cannot conceive of how being able to view someone carries an equal value for a person as a week or two in Cancun chilling - or how they can spend money that easily that took them weeks of their life to earn through labour[1].

[1] There's a segment of the population that I'm ignoring those that are either trust fund babies or useless economic leeches, when those people blow 100k on a car that they immediate crash I just shrug - but I know a lot of the people following these cams are actually working people (probably white collar, but still actually working for a living).

I'm friends with a fairly well off single guy who has admitted a great deal of his spending to me at times. Keep in mind he's a steadily working guy in oil field inspections which pays close to $300k a year, which is pretty damn good in our poor area in the southern US.

According to him in the last year he's spent $18K+ in clash of clans alone and its not the only mobile game he plays. I've watched him drop thousands in a single night on cam girls when he strangely invited me to come along for the private viewing. He's paid for cam girls to come over for a week or more to his house. (nice house, nice looking guy tbh). He's dropped $30K on legos along in the last two years because he wants a lego room in his house. This is just a few of the things he's admitted and shown me the spending records on.

As a single guy in his 30's he has extreme amounts of expendable income for how cheap it is to live in our area. It blows my mind the money he spends on things. The Lego purchases alone were more than my last year's take home pay. I can't really fault him for using his money as he see's fit given he's a self made man who worked his way up from an extremely poor area.

Sorry, to clarify - 300k is a pay rate so far beyond what most people make that I'd consider it to fall under my caveat. Any person who is making enough money to be replaced with a well compensated manager leading three entry or low mid-level pay (120k for the manager, 60k each for the team member) is... sort of astounding. I don't know what level of productivity you'd need to hit to rationally be compensated at that level while other people get so little.

And to clarify a bit more, 11k for a person making 300k a year is just a single week's take home, so maybe a more measured response is just that this is equivalent (for a person making 300k to a person making 60k) as blowing 1k at vegas on a weekend.

It's a gamified leader board kind of thing. The more you donate the higher in ranking you go. The big whale of app games are moving to the camming world.

It is crazy, they aren’t even promising heaven or sex. I guess they must get a sense of companionship?