Agreed. One of the first times I encountered Twitch IRL was in the laundry room of my apartment building, where a neighbor who I knew had a young child was watching a streamer play a game while he did the laundry. Good for him, I thought.

I started watching Twitch when I started working remotely several years ago. It's good for background noise, keeping up with games that I can't justify spending money or time on, and sometimes good for a little chitchat. Some people will have an unhealthy relationship with it but to go back to the musician analogy, this doesn't seem too different from obsessive Beatles or Elvis fans. (Or Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift fans, etc.) They will always exist. I'm happy to support someone with beer money for this little bit of entertainment.

Yes, what you are describing is how you use Twitch as a person who Twitch makes no money from. That's fine! I'm not saying that every Twitch user is this one type of person.

You're the type of customer who will take an uber to the airport once every 6 months, that's not problematic, but it's not something uber can build a business on top of.

In the same way, you're not engaging with Twitch in a way that Twitch actually cares about from a business perspective, they can't show you 50 adverts a day and elicit $500 of donations each year. My comment is about the business model Twitch needs to actually run as a profitable large scale business. Twitch needs to operate at a scale where they impact the P&L of Amazon. It needs to sit next to the P&L of Amazon Prime Video and Audible and not be laughed at.

it seems many people read way too far into this with a distorted "back in my day!" mentality.

I watch twitch nearly every day and subscribe to (pay) a couple of streamers.

You know what I don't watch? TV. Cable, satellite, or otherwise.

This is simply modern entertainment. Streamers are professional entertainers. As for the people who seem to have a parasocial relationship--none of this is new. In my childhood I had a parasocial relationship with MacGyver and He-Man. Some grown men of questionable stability had it with Brittany Spears or whatever.

The only new thing is the platform. Everything else is just humans being humans as always.

The amount of MacGuyver content you got over the original 7 year run is about the same amount of content that a popular Twitch Streamer will put out in about 7 weeks. And MacGyver won't read your comment in chat and respond to you. It's a vastly different situation. Not least because in 1985 when the original Macguyver came out the entire television viewing population of the US were watching a handful of networks. Now the economics mean that there are 100,000x as many content creators to support, creating content at 52x the previous rate. So are we expecting revenue per viewer to be 5,200,000x times higher? Because that's the ratio of the content being produced.

There seem two be two different things here.

1. "100,000x as many content creators to support"

Hollywood has always been flooded with countless failed would-be actors / entertainers. Just because you can't see them like you can in Twitch, because they couldn't publish stuff in the 1980s, it doesn't mean they didn't exist. This is an old problem.

2. "The amount of MacGuyver content you got over the original 7 year run is about the same amount of content that a popular Twitch Streamer will put out in about 7 weeks."

We're not talking about the actor, by himself, winging it and producing an episode on the fly. With Twitch, that is typically the case. On Twitch, content being produced is of lower effort and higher volume. It's a huge difference but the math balances out.

As an aside, "fan mail" did exist back then too. Viewers would write in to a P.O. Box and if they were lucky their letters were read on air.

Lots of people had toxic relationships with pop stars. Just look how Kurt Cobain ended up.