Plenty is written about how parasocial behaviour happens when the creator-consumer relationship gets smudged into an imaginary friendship, but Cohost has made me realize that this happens the other direction too.
I'm not much on social media even with real-life friends because the scaffolding of likes/retweets/virality smudges my actual friendship into an imaginary creator-consumer relationship, and it feels weird. It's an environment that fosters jealousy about others' joy and turns my own joy into a product that is pressured to "do numbers".
Experiencing a site that deliberately de-emphasizes "the numbers" made me realize how weird it was to be immersed in that sauce for so long. I don't really want to go back there.