What's something you don't understand the appeal of?

There's something very amusing to me about how worked up people can get about things that just... aren't that important (i.e. text editors, muscular women in video games), and I don't think this is necessarily unique to myself. The premise of r/HobbyDrama is just that, and it has 140k subs. The appeal of r/SubredditDrama is very similar and it has even more. I don't think it's that weird that people find deliberately provoking such reactions entertaining, even if it's kind of unethical.

Sometimes trolls aren't trolls, though. Text-based conversation is difficult on a good day... there will always be missed nuance. It is up to the reader to interpret everything - a horrible approach when you think about it!

So there's quite a few possible reasons someone might watch a gaming livestream. Live-coding is a separate topic (which I personally don't enjoy) so I'll leave it aside for now.

For me personally, it's going to be:

1. "Hanging out" with the person playing. I can't watch a Twitch stream if I don't like the guy/girl on stream. I watch for a good time, and positive people (such as Sean Plott aka Day9) will make my day more positive. I like hearing them, listening to them talk about various shit, etc
2. Watching games I like, but don't have the skills to play, or the time investment to put into them. This is a bit like watching sports: You enjoy the skill aspect of a game, but it might take hundreds or even thousands of hours to get to that level. Watching a stream is low commitment.
3. Discovering new games. Watching Day9 for example is how I discovered The Witness, The Talos Principle, Rocket League, Subnautica, Stardew Valley, Ori and the Blind Forest and Two Point Hospital. All of which I ended up buying and playing to the end (or in Rocket League's case, give up and cry when I realized it's fucking hard to play well). I'd recommend all of them.

In many cases, "just go play the goddamn game" isn't really a viable option. Not everyone that wants to have a good computer or phone or console to do those things can just go and buy what they need (or ask their parents to do that for them.) As for watching livestreams specifically, Adys' reply is pretty good IMO.

I'll just add one thing, and it's that watching someone program specifically definitely makes me understand the process more, and the occasional bug can ^{(keyword: CAN)} be pretty funny to see and watching something you like get made and see the slow but steady progress of the developers coding the features for the game definitely makes me a lot more more confident that shit's getting done and you will see the project come to light eventually, because you are watching that be done right now.

In my case, I don't have the patience to actually play the games. I have other things I want to do with the time. But games as an art form is something that interest me and seeing people play and react to them is a way to get exposed to that.

Watching programming (which is mostly also related to game development for me) is another aspect of the same underlying thing. I want to see how game designers and game programmers solve the issues that come up in the development of games. Realizing the the path to a polished published game is paved with years and years of solving small paper cuts is something that's both humbling and inspirational.

I still don't really understand this (I do not watch streamers game and have no interest in this), but I have come to an appreciation I didn't recognize over the course of this pandemic because for a period of time the only way for me to get access to live music and listen to my favorite DJs has been through twitch and other streaming platforms.

What I've come to appreciate from this is an intimate familiarity with these artists that I do not usually have access to. Over the course of these streams, it's not uncommon for the performer to be interacting with the audience in a way that simply does not happen in clubs - talking about tracks, sharing life stories, reacting to what's going on in the chat. I've learned a ton about the history of music, tracks I enjoy, and other music related information through these streams and I really appreciate that.

I still have trouble relating to caring about this for a professional gamer, or someone who's streaming programming or anything else, but I'm guessing a large portion of the appeal is the aspect of humanity and a look into the lives of the people we admire, look up to, or simply wish to socialize with.

Thank you! I've had people look at me like I'm batshit insane for not getting the appeal of streaming games/programming and the like. Obviously not the case for these streamers, but I'm one of those people where having eyes on me just makes me flustered and turns my performance poor because a chunk of brainpower is being devoted to trying to work to appeal to said audience instead of what I'm actually doing. It feels almost physically wrong to me to be one of those sets of eyes for anyone else.

Plus I think they give a false sense of community and social interaction. As if these streamers will ever know who you are or even interact with you personally outside of a shout-out in the stream or chat. It's fake bonding. I'd much rather watch a personal friend play a game while we chat and connect, rather than watch some stranger do so with other strangers.

I'm much the same way, although I've begun to find the appeal in watching certain people play certain games with certain challenges in place. Like for example, I've been really getting into Many a True Nerd's Fallout 4: You Only Live Once series. He's basically taking the most challenging difficulty Fallout 4 has to offer and making in several multitudes harder by imposing restrictions on himself. And that's just fascinating to me because I'm awful at FO4 at higher difficulties and because he can't heal himself at all, every single interaction with an enemy becomes this high-stakes events I can't stop watching. Add to it that FO4 is notoriously buggy and the physics are wonky at times and every second is just completely enthralling. Everything, the game itself included, wants to kill his character!

All that's to say that I think the appeal is that you've got a game you really enjoy, someone playing it in a way you can't (be it because you suck, or they're just extraordinarily good), and that person has an appealing personality. Also probably comes with a good sense of community as well. One of my favorite things to do after watching a new FO4: You Only Live Once vidoe is to head to Many a True Nerd's subreddit and chat about everything I just watched.

Makes sense with competitive games or when looking for a walkthrough, but not much otherwise though

I don't often watch live streams, but I do watch video-game-related videos on YouTube from time to time in order to improve my performance in a given game. You can definitely learn a lot from videos and subreddits and gaming wikis, and make tangible improvements in your level of play. Some videos are edited tutorials, but you can still learn things just by watching arbitrary game play by highly-skilled players for a game that you're trying to get better at.

I guess maybe it seems more odd to people that don't take video games that seriously, but there are lots of people around the world who are even just a little competitive (they might want to improve their rating or position on the global (or even regional) leaderboard, or want to improve their win rate). Going beyond that, e-sports is a booming industry, with thousands of professional players, and millions of avid fans and viewers.

Same, but i'm going to confess that i did this with the Final Fantasy VII remake.

Since i'll not buy it and probably never play it, might as well enjoy seeing it for free. I watched for one or two hours a gameplay (not live, obviously). It was enough.

I absolutely love traveling. I want to see different landscapes, different forests and plants, different architecture, different art. I want to be warm when it's cold at home. I want sunshine in the middle of winter. I want to smell the sea rather than the traffic. I want to meet new people and hear their stories. I want to physically move myself away from the worries of work and let myself really relax. I want things to go hilarious wrong, because those times make for the best stories. I want to get snowed in for three days and see a whole new side of the people I'm with. I want, perhaps most of all, to sit under a tree by a dusty road and eat the best bowl of soup I've had in my entire fucking life.

I'd recommend thinking of it in the same way that you think of media that you consume. I think it's in the same sort of prat of the brain that encourages people to seek out new movies, new television, new books, and not just read or watch the ones that have already been read, always. There's so much world out there, and so many people, too. I enjoy going to other places and seeing what's there.

Also similar to books, it's a way to share experiences broadly with other people, who may not still be alive. I don't know if you've watched "The Good Place" but there's a moment where Chidi is at a cafe in Paris, and he talks about how he could have been sitting in the same place as his idols, doing the same thing that his idols have done. It's a way to bring yourself closer to the experiences of other people.

Also, the world has so many cool geographical things to see. I've loved hiking in the Rockies in Canada, or hiking in the Trossachs in Scotland - similar activities, but so very different. Swimming in Tofino and swimming in the Caribbean; cycling in Vancouver and cycling in the Dominican. It's interesting to see how these things stack up to each other, and I guess that's the real reason; it's interesting. For some people, life is a long search for novelty.

So I grew up in Michigan, but had relatives in Pittsburgh. We would travel to Pittsburgh to visit them about once or twice a year. I absolutely cannot imagine anyone wanting to go to Pittsburgh for a vacation or as a tourist. It's city a lot like any other. I mean it has its share of locally unique things, but they didn't appear to me to be anything so interesting that I'd plan a trip there when I could go somewhere else.

But going to see a volcano in Hawaii is very different from anything I was able to do in Michigan or Pittsburgh. It was interesting because it's so large, and you can watch part of the earth going through a process you can't see in too many other places and you can do it up close. I'm also a photographer, and there are lots of interesting things to photograph in Hawaii. Likewise, you can do all the ocean-related activities (swimming, fishing, sailing, etc.) Granted, you can do those things on lakes and even the Great Lakes, but it really is a different scale and there's a different flora and fauna and traditions. It's fun to see for some people.

I also lived in Chicago for a while. I knew people who had never left Chicago. Chicago's a great town, but I was like, really? There's nothing else anywhere that you want to see? A Broadway show on actual Broadway? The Eiffel Tower? The Grand Canyon? The Chicago Bears playing in a stadium other than Soldier Field? Nothing? To me, it's interesting to see things I haven't seen before and meet people I haven't met before, and learn about customs I didn't know about. For others it might be about seeing how they party in one city or country, or how they relax, or how they worship, or dance, or sing, or work. To me, I can't imagine never traveling anywhere else. It just seems so insular. But at the same time, I'm not sure what I'd get out of visiting, say, Omaha, Nebraska. I'm sure it's lovely, but is there anything there that I can't experience elsewhere?

For me a big part of the appeal of travel is to experience a diversity of cultures and learn to empathize with people who aren't like me. If you spend your whole life in one place, immersed exclusively in the culture of that place, you're going to have a dangerously narrow view of humanity and your place in it. That environment fosters an ignorance and bigotry that are very difficult to overcome through other means.

There are different kinds of travelers, and people like different things.

I care very little about museums and traditional tourist spots. When I travel, I mostly care about a few things:

• language, accent, slangs
• local customs
• how cities/countries work
  • urbanism
  • transportation (bus, train, subway)
• LOCAL FOOD

Traveling just for the sake of traveling really is stupid — everyone is looking for something.

'Proper' golf is still bougie bullshit in my book, but the appeal of it started making sense once I started playing disc golf of all things. All of the chill of real golf, with far less pretension. It is nice to just have a semi-leisurely activity to do outdoors that's still competitive, but allows one to be social with the group they came with.

Still would never get into the trappings of golf culture, but hey, if it's culturally coded for ones group to play it, and for it to be a leisure activity that can be turned into a 'working' event too? Who doesn't want excuses to do something fun that can still be treated as working too?

Golf actually teaches you to relax. Angry is tense. Tense is bad, both for you and for golf. Sure, it can occasionally frustrate the hell out of you, but how else will you learn to relax? :)

Golf is socially distant. It is one of the few activities that is open in California.

Golf is social. With so many people playing now, what else do you have to do while waiting?

Golf is a nice long walk through a beautifully manicured park with your mates punctuated by the occasional hitting of a tiny ball hundreds of feet/yards.

As an aside, my wife only golfs with a seven iron and a putter, and she does remarkably well. If you are using anything else while learning, that is a path to frustration.

Playing a sport: It feels good to accomplish something physical with your own body. Not just for the exercise of it, but for the pure satisfaction of doing something challenging. I cannot describe the feeling of striking a volley perfectly off my laces for a goal in soccer or the feeling of draining a hole-in-one from 135 yards at my local municipal golf course. It's just joy and satisfaction to accomplish something for yourself, even better if people are around to share the moment with you. Always nice to see practice pay off in the form of a personal accomplishment.

Watching a sport: I like seeing professionals accomplish cool things at the highest level, plus there's the tribalism of having certain teams in my local area or family. And fascinating stuff happens every single week. Like this or this. Following a sport is a great way of staying connected with people through a common interest while enjoying the best a sport has to offer.

Golf: I love to get outside, walk a course for exercise, and be alone with my thoughts or with friends while playing a challenging and fun game. Personally, I'm a chill golfer because I'm out there to relax after all. I agree that it is wasteful and prone to bad tempers though, but just as bad, it is also classist in many ways.

I don't think we need anymore golf courses; however, I disagree with the group of people in my small city saying we should shut down the two city-owned municipal golf courses and repurpose them as public parks. Of course a net greater number of people would be able to theoretically benefit from a public park, but you're just taking away something that is super popular with working class people since they're the two cheapest courses in town and make the sport more accessible. They basically have a working class history in my city and were a response to the wealthy private course many years ago.

In my experience sports games tend to be super fun to play and super boring to watch unless you watch them a lot.

When you know a lot about a sport (and a sports team) you start seeing all kinds of patterns that are fun to identify, predict, and share with others.

For me, I love playing the "RPG" parts of sports games. You create a character and go through a career in the sport, from rookie to retirement. You build your character's stats along the way, and make career decisions like deciding among offers when your character becomes a free agent. I will never, and would never have become a professional athlete, so being able to participate in a simulation of top-level play of an interesting and fun sport is the next best thing.

I can also see the appeal in the non-RPG modes of sports games, even though I don't really play them. Every game or match of every sport is a competition between sides or opponents. Humans love to compete, and have fun doing so. So, in that sense, there's that appeal (to people who like to compete).

endurance hockey

What's this? A cursory / courtesy search reveals nothing. (Or is it a poke at golf?)

As with anything in life, it also depends on your temper, or why you do the things you do. I love golf. For me it's about being outside with friends. It's relax. I don't care if I play + 40... I try each time to do better than last time, but it's not the end of the world if I'm not playing well. It's a 4 hours well spent, in nature at that.

I understand it may not interests you. As for sports games, there is a lot to love about that too in my opinion. Like working together with somebody else toward a common goal while spending your energy. Disconnect from what is happening in your life etc.

I don't think it is mandatory in life to do something "usefull" or for "the greater good" 100 % of the time. Sometimes you have to disconnect and do meaningless stuff... whatever that is :)

I have voice mail but I dislike it. Voice mail is strictly worse than written communication. It's understandable that people I don't know will leave a voice message if I don't answer, but I would prefer a text message.

I used to dislike voicemail because I had trouble hearing it when it mattered. I would play the same message multiple times to try to get some important information out of it. (Since I got hearing aids with bluetooth, it's not so bad now.)

These days, most voice mail is spam that i just delete, and it takes longer to listen to a voice mail in order to see if I should delete it or not than to scan a text message. On a good day my phone transcribes it so I don't have to listen, but unfortunately, this transcription is rather flaky. Half the time it's unavailable.

Since I don't have a "home phone" or whatever the boomers call it, there is no plausible scenario where I could receive a phone call but not a text message.

So for me, a text message is always preferred. There is no room for distortion, background noise, or nervous talking to render the message indecipherable. I can absorb the message instantaneously and make a judgement on it's importance, without needing to stop what I am currently doing. I can't think of any reason why a voice message would be better in any circumstance.

I assume I'm an edge case, but here's a different perspective: For several years of my life, I have been more or less on call, and/or have duties and responsibilities that require me to answer the phone when called by certain contacts. I have come to resent this requirement. I am awaiting the day when answering the phone is no longer a must. Until then, here's how I cope: I never answer the phone if I do not recognize the caller, and sometimes I do not answer if I recognize the caller but it is not a high priority contact. I have voicemail, but my voicemail message is something to the effect of: "I am not likely to check voicemail. Please send me an email", and I deliberately do not provide my email address in the voicemail message, with the intention of filtering out spam. (Anyone who must communicate something important to me already has my email address.) I very rarely listen to voicemail messages, because every contact that knows me already knows not to leave voicemail, and so pretty much all voicemail I get is spam.

I hate voicemail, but I don't understand Person 1 in this scenario. That doesn't seem like a reasonable way to be. If someone rings me, I answer the phone. If I can't answer for whatever reason, the missed call is noted, and I'll call back. I do this because I don't like voicemail. I don't think it's reasonable to both hate voicemail, and not answer your phone; that seems logically inconsistent to me.

I don't like voicemail because people often take leaving a message as a fait accompli, and it is frequently not. There's any number of ways that a voicemail might not get through. In the olden days, when I had an answering machine, sometimes the message would get listened to by someone else, and the message wouldn't get transcribed to me, and I would lose out on something important, which is also a roommate problem in addition to being a voicemail problem. Now that cellphones are ubiquitous, voicemail is more reasonable, but I'd rather just answer the phone and also know who is calling.

When I leave a message, I generally only respond with my name and number and request a callback, because I want to avoid that feeling of "I have communicated this issue". Obviously if something is a huge issue, I may outline an issue and say it's of great importance, but I mostly try to avoid using voicemail as anything other than a note to have someone call me, and by not having voicemail, I get the same effect on my phone - missed calls.

I actually don't hate voicemail anymore now that we have voicemail transcription. The best part is how it picks up the call back phone number and let's you click it to dial.

Vocaloid isn't a genre, it's a meta-genre.

To be honest, if you don't understand Japanese, you're missing out on a lot of the meaning of the songs. A lot of the more popular songs have a very emotional core to them, and a lot of them are linked to the "personality" of the vocaloid in question. For instance, the song "Odds and Ends" is about how the composer used Miku to overcome his negative self-image and find his voice.

Likewise, because these characters are just basically ideas, they can represent just about anything. Songs like Black Rock Shooter show her as a bastion of confidence, while News 39 has her representing pure positivity. The ones you tend to hear about the most are all promoted specifically as being very wholesome in general.

My current best guesses are convenience, since some people are better at making lyrics than singing them, having that AI/software be famous like Hatsune Miku so people can look up to it or that convenience having a FOSS-like appeal of just downloading some software and making it sing whatever you please.

It's not just that singing is inconvenient, it's that being a good singer in certain styles is incredibly hard. It's so dependent on your whole body that most people never really reach beyond a passable level, and that's before you start going into more advanced vocal techniques. A skilled vocalist is actually really hard to come by.

Vocaloid opens up ways for people who would otherwise not be able to make the kind of music they want to make, with the trade off being the more robotic sound. In that way it's sort of like synthesized instruments vs the real deal.

(at least in Brazil) Peaky Blinders

I'm brazilian and like Peaky Blinders. Is that a thing? Never knew.

The last two seasons got on my nerves, tho. There is so much "mysterious" Thomas Shelby that i can endure. I hate that pretentious dark vibe he presents, it's too formulaic and superficial. And when he says his "deep musings" i keep rolling my eyes.

I've done this on occasion and, yes, after a few days I get tired of a song. It needs to be a song that clicks in a certain way. However, I can listen to it on repeat for 5+ hours a day for a week before that happens. For me its kind of like this comment above where the music is just something to fill a void and distract myself from the world and my own thoughts. A song that I know very well makes it easier to work on other things while listening, after a while my brain no longer latches onto the music.

It does take a few weeks/months to be able to listen to that song again though.

For me, that only happens when I discover a song new to me that I love. I basically have to wring every drop of of dopamine out of the new shiny before I can move on. Yay for ADHD perseveration?

Also, much like rereading a book, repeated listens can help make parts I didn't notice on the first listen stand out to me.

20 times in a row, no. Two times every day for weeks? It happens a lot.

Metal is a style that never stops delivering new releases and some times there is a banger.

The last ones i remember doing this:

Visigoth - Traitor's Gate

Vredehammer - Aggressor

But i tend to listen to the entire album, not a particular song in repeat. If the song is in there i will play the album almost everyday.

The record Exercises in Futility from Mgla was playing daily on my car for weeks on my way to work.

I did that when it took days to download an MP3 file. It took a lot of effort to download a song, and I made sure to enjoy it as much as I could!

Listening to a song until I can't stand it anymore can help me focus, although yes, the end result is often that I end up liking it much less for a little while. When I'm working on something, music can serve as a track for my passive train of thought to circle around.

I drink coffee of varying origins and qualities daily, but I can understand this one. Especially if your palette identifies coffee as being quite bitter, combined with only having bad coffee for most of your life. It takes a while to train yourself to identify notes and actually dial in the correct process for making a good cup, and for a lot of people—possibly yourself—that simply isn't worth the time and effort.

Same with alcohol, spicy food and pretty much everything. You get used to it and enjoy it more.

I like tea a lot and the better quality ones get very bitter. I started with sweetened and fruit flavoured stuff. As I started dropping sugar from my diet I started appreciating the rest of the flavour profile, the astringency, etc. The bitter gets less "shocking" to your taste buds over time and it gets easier to try more bitter stuff, not because it is more bitter but because the rest of the flavour is richer.

How do you feel about mate?

There is a very wide variance in beer types. They vary not just in flavour, but appearance, aroma, bitterness (see IBU ), texture/feel (smoothness or apparent viscosity), carbonation level, and how much foam (head) is produced upon pouring. In addition to the common main ingredients (water, hops, etc.), some beers have things added, like milk or coffee or lactose. Besides these variables, what would otherwise be a good beer can provide a different experience depending on how it's handled. Left out for hours (days?) vs. served right out of the tap or bottle. Chilled vs. not. There is also the concept of skunked beer.

Anyway, my point is that there's a huge difference between a good beer and a poor beer. If you've only tried a handful of beers, that could be skewing your opinion. For starters, I'd stay away from anything mass produced and sold in double-digit packs, and anything that would have a TV commercial that aired during a sports broadcast. The very best stuff, in my experience, can be purchased as individual cans or in packs of 6 or fewer, and are brewed by local breweries. So-called "craft" beer.

I can make a few recommendations that ought to be internationally available, if you like. I can guarantee you they'll be night-and-day compared to stuff sold in 24s.

I'll echo what @Pistos said, there's a huge variety of beers to try, and almost any craft beer will at least be interesting even if you find you don't like it.

I wasn't "in" to beer for many years, until I moved to a state that had a pretty active craft brew scene. Made friends who both enjoyed them and made some of their own sometimes, so I got to sample a wide variety of things. First thing they taught me was stop drinking soda (or other sweet things) for awhile, and let your brain adjust to not expecting every liquid to be as sweet as soda is.

After that, exploring the various genres and types of beer has been fun. There's a local market near me that has an entire isle for beer, and 95% of it you will never see advertised on things like ESPN. There's a lot of stuff in there from just the state I'm in, a bunch of others from around the US, and a whole section just for things imported from Europe. It's been a fun game to try and sample as many weird things as possible.

I used to drink beer only to get wasted. Then I realized vodka and cachaça would take me there faster. I don’t drink like that anymore.

A few years ago, a friend of mine made a point to introduce me to some quality beers, both Brazilian and imported. He also explained why those beers were considered superior. So I learned to appreciate the flavor and texture of a few good beers. Cheap everyday beer is frequently crap.

College football in the south, especially the SEC, is practically a religion. We rooted for a school that no one in my family had attended until I went. Tailgating was not my favorite past time, and the way people behaved at the game was extremely off-putting. I made my decision then that I'll watch sports ball on my couch.