Responsibility Over Parasociality

One way relationships cannot be the default

Parasociality or one way relationships have come to defined much of the social media landscape today. Twitter specifically has turn many people into "poasters" and niche micro celebrities. Personality is the default and assumed mode for many content creation creation-centric sites such as YouTube twitch, TikTok or SubStack for that matter. Now, what's wrong with parasociality? People may have fun poasting all the time, you may encounter a lot of good content and occasionally mutually parasocial relationships between content creators can transition into actual friendships. However, if you dig even a little deeper you will find that this model of interaction has many problems. These problems include: followers becoming stalkers, micro celebrities with thousands of followers who complain about having no friends, general lack of reliability of much of the content, especially when it's culture war related. You also get proxy fights between big accounts where their followers hurl insults at each other; not to mention some of the content creators look like they have perpetual posture problems from sitting at the computer all the time. Many people lament the fact that American children want to be YouTube stars, while Chinese children wish to go to space. Despite all of this, parasociality has become such a default, that I doubt many people envision a social media site which takes a strong stance against it. Facebook has maintained its core structure of two way relationships, which I believe is more healthy, but it's still pretty deficient in terms of encouraging actual community.  

The big and simple fact of reality is that people or not built for parasociality at all. Historically and evolutionary speaking, people are used to two kinds of relationships. First are relationships between peers or or near peers who are kin. Second are relationships which are unequal but carry with them a notion of responsibility, such as the relationship between parent and child, a tribal leader and a tribal member, a manager and an employee. Generally people don't get used to manager and employee kind of relationships until they have some experience with them. However, parasocial relationships were likely restricted to an audience member and a performer in the past. This probably did not constitute the majority of people's interactions in most of history. My theory is that a large portion of "strong" parasocial relationships are actually misunderstood by one of the parties to fall in one of the above categories. Followers either end up mistakenly treating the micro celebrity as a close friend or someone who leads them in some way and has at duty to help fight battles on their behalf. The micro-celebrity of course does not wish to alter the relationship in any way.  

Now, just because I don't like parasociality as a system, I don't want to be negative towards the current "poasters" or content creators. They are trying to succeed within a particular system of incentives in the best way they know how. The question is - can we as a society do better in creating, curating, consuming content and providing structure for each person to feel genuenly connected to others. Can some of the energy of hot takes be redirected towards more personal community organizing? You can probably guess the answer is yes, and YouTiki solves this problem, but more on that later.  

It is worth understanding difference between a merely unequal, but a responsible relationship compared to a purely parasocial relationship. A parent has a responsibility towards a child and while they could lie to the child sometimes, they generally have an incentive to give the child a proper correct and well-rounded view of the world as they understand it. A post on the Internet has a much lower incentive to be accurate. If they provide some information that ends up backfiring to their followers they might lose some followers and a counter might go down, but it's not as big of a deal as accidentally hurting someone you are responsible for. No individual Twitter commentator feels the need to strive for maximum accuracy, such as by improving their calibration, pausing and considering opposite points of view. However taken in aggregate, this culture frequently gets major things wrong. Many people "poast" with an excited feeling of getting info out there, which is great for sharing feelings, and can occasionally work for advancing the state of knowledge, but does not work to advance the social *structure*, the kind of community where everyone feels like they can really belong.  

Now, there are temporary celebrities who transition into a more "natural" leadership role or sometimes a reasonably healthy community can theoretically organize around a celebrity, but I haven't seen this happen often. Politicians in a democracy tend to need to be celebrities before being elected. Also many people move to event organization after content creation. In this case, a parasocial relationship can serve as a stepping stone into a relationship of responsibility. Also some content creators stick to a topic and don't share their personal life as much. This does not give as much of an illusion of friendship, though the moral hazard of keeping this topic being reliable is still a problem. I don't really want to uphold the relationship between a politician and their voter as an example of a truly "natural" relationship, due to the frequent problem of one politician being responsible for too many voters. This brings me to the big variable of "parasociality" - how many followers one has. The number of views / followers is something that everyone wants to increase, however it also decrease the potential quality of a relationship one might have with any individual viewer. Even relationships which have a stronger sense of responsibility about them, such as a forum moderator and a forum member seem to degrade as the number of members increases. A practical corporate or military solution to this is to appoint officers or managers to keep the team sizes small, however most forums do not have good support for this behavior.  

The situation is complicated by the presence of journalists - the parasocial class, who feel even less attachment to their readers than the average YouTuber. Many top Twitter poasters aim to undo the damage done by journalists, which is a vital social function. In other words, it is still worth having a class of people working on decentralized content creation to combat the problems of centralized content creation even if this doesn't have a great pathway to the more natural style of relationships.   

What do people want or need instead? I suspect many people, especially younger people want to *belong* to something, a group with a formal membership structure where members and leadership take an interest in each other's well-being. Clubs and interest groups can and do take this form, which is great, but I suspect that many people want the feeling of "being among their people," where the primary identity of members is intertwined with the group. Effective Altruism and rationality does this reasonably well for some people, though it's not really welcoming to everyone. A notion of formal memberships is key. People need to know who's in the group and who isn't. Having anxiety about whether someone is truly "part of something" isn't a great use of mental resources. Many offline communities have functioned perfectly well as communities, the issue is that online media platforms do not encode this structure.  

Now the description above might spur the charges of "tribalism," which carries with it an implied fear of tribal conflict, which bring me to my hottest take of all:

what America needs today is *more* tribalism and *better* tribalism.

You see, the realization that "tribal" or "political" affiliation is at the root of a lot of online and offline conflict is correct. However, if you dig beneath the surface and try to see which people are more likely to be hostile, you realize that "hostility towards outgroup" is more prevalent among members whose ingroup status is somewhat questionable. People who are secure in their community and know they are part of it tend to have a more reasonable and nuanced approach to outgroup relations or they ignore conflicts altogether. This is as true in your local high school as it is in the geo-political arena. Creating a structure where people belong to a tribe "better" will create less of a need of bonding through conflict with outgroup. Of course, this is easier if the tribes are organized around hobbies, projects, religion or ethical movements rather than political notions.  

This brings me to why YouTiki made groups the core structure of the social graph. Each person belongs to one group. Each group is at most 150 people. Admins approve new people and can kick people out. The creator and admin of the group can make moderation decisions, such as removing content posted by members. The structure encourages a creation of groups with the notion of "this is me and these are my people." Of course, many real-life groups are larger than 150 people, which within YouTiki would be handled by a leader creating a top-level group and members of the top-level group creating their own sub-groups. This create a hierarchy of groups - a tried and true social technology used by corporations, military or basically any serious project oriented group.  

The power levels of groups can rises and falls together. If someone makes a good post that is liked within their group, then that person's local and global power rise. However if someone makes a good post that is liked *outside* the group, then the global power of their admin and everyone in the group rises as well. This creates some incentive for groups to maintain politeness and quality of their member's content. Creating good content is not just an individual endeavor, but team one, making it ever more important to build your tribe!