The Challenge of Being an Edgelord

I was watching this YouTuber/Twitch broadcaster play World of Warcraft for the first time. The video was an hour long and she was doing the Exile's Reach content. She was erupting constantly about how she liked this and liked that.

I went to go look at some of her other content and she just looked like a variety streamer who liked everything she tried.

When you're not an edgelord, the sentence "I like X" is devalued. I think running around on the internet posting one comment after another about something you dislike is a waste of time and not really in line with modern etiquette, etiquette I happen to agree with. It will also get you banned or involved in online altercations.

But you have to harbor feelings of disapproval about some of what gets published by mass media. If you don't, the time will come with someone checks you for taste, and you will be revealed to have none.

If the ideal state of a person is that they like everything happening around them, why do we even have the phrase "I like"? The verb like is supposed to draw a circle around something and make that something special. If you hand out likes to everyone, you're no longer drawing a circle. You're not saying anything. You're saying very little.

I feel like streamers, every day, face the challenge of being an edgelord. You want to make it as a streamer, and you can reflexively just pick whatever is popular and embrace it in the name of income. I face a similar issue as a programmer. I no longer believe in trying to build sturdy apps with Ruby, but are any employers going to hire me now that I've adopted this position? I have comparatively little experience in other languages.

I think streamers are different from me in that their streams are not really good places for conversing. It's hard to hold a conversation during a stream. You're busy playing a game. And I think that's the way it should be. I don't like streamers who are purely Just Chatting streamers. I prefer that someone I watch be on a treadmill of some kind, one in the form of a video game. But how can I get to know a streamer, to determine whether they are interesting? If streamers are playing gatcha-games and posting crappy content to their YouTube channel, how can I sift through this noise and see their interesting positions on life's subject matters? I can't talk to them because they're busy in a stream. And I'm not interested in their discords.

As a programmer, I can expect my peers to converse with me to find that I have high aspirations, even if I am coerced into taking on work in a language I don't believe in. But streamers have no such opportunity. Not really.

I think that streamers occupy a space closer to the cutting edge than YouTube. Than CNN. It's too bad when streamers do not see themselves in the way that I see them.