i know you wrote that this is just venting but reading it has kind of crystallized some things i've been thinking about lately so i hope it's OK that i write them here.

one of the side effects of the internet turning attention into money is that in order to extract the most money possible from this arrangement, it's necessary to focus as much of it as possible onto as few targets as possible, for maximum control of, and ability to profit from, that attention. this means there's a tendency for those lucky few who have an audience to be showered with so much attention that they can't really reciprocate in the natural human way, and for everyone else to become lonely and maybe even self-hating and therefore more likely to join the throngs of audiences.

20 years ago, having some friends over and taking turns playing video games and watching was a normal human social activity. now thanks to internet play, couch co-op is largely dead. instead we have a few thousand very popular streams where hundreds of people tune in at once and receive a simulation of human social interaction from fewer sources. the underlying human needs are the same, but the resulting social structures have been transformed in a way that magnifies human wants and therefore the ability to profit from human wants. what was a network of diffuse and largely symmetrical relationships, has been replaced by a much more directed graph of asymmetrical ones.

capitalism has a tendency to turn all symmetric relationships into asymmetric ones, because asymmetric relationships are the ones that are capable of generating the most profit.

this self doubt that you feel, sounds very similar to the kind of self doubt that i often feel-- of not being "good enough", or not having enough "personality", to be able to forge meaningful social bonds with others. i don't have an easy solution to make this feeling go away, but it's a problem that i try (not always successfully) to always remember to place in its proper context. because the real cause of this problem isn't internal to me. even if i am mediocre, unexceptional in every way, i am still a human being, and i believe that even average, unexceptional people deserve genuine human relationships. they could attain them in the past. even today they still might. it's just that the pressures of "market forces" have intruded upon the situation in a way that was not previously possible, and made it more difficult to achieve.