[ericdykstra]

There's a kind of vicious cycle here where people feel disconnected from their surroundings and communities, and attention-stealing apps make a business of providing a surrogate through parasocial relationships and infinite access to the spectacle and new ways to interact with it.

Parasocial relationships aren't real relationships, and the spectacle replaces doing anything directly, there is no fulfilment and the cycle continues. There's an epidemic of people who can't have hold a conversation or relate to anyone without mediating the conversation through a common topic that they've experienced on mass or social media. They're addicted to watching a simulation of having a life, and not actually living the one life they have.

[klabb3]

This is the big one for me, even though I do 0 social broadcast apps (only 1:1 chats, news, reddit and hacker news). Huge improvement, yet still I use it in the same parasocial way, using your terms. It sucks!