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Comment by nurettin | Hacker News Reader

Many people enjoyed his works (his gui gem, his executable poetry, his drawings) and felt a loss when he disappeared.

And some months after he disappeared, he teased everyone with his printer outputs. So it wasn't just some uneventful disappearance of someone unimportant.

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Who cares if they felt a loss? That doesn't give them the right to invade anyone's privacy. People have a right to stop being Online.

Yes people shouldn't invade things. I was hoping to make an emotional connection. But this is highly illogical. Silly me.

I think the moral of this story is that people should be careful about their impulses to create emotional connections with strangers, which are not always welcome.

It's interesting how parasocial interactions form, often without us consciously doing so or meaning to. The drive to form these associations seem to be wired more deeply than the side of our brain that listens to reason.

There's a decent article called "Parasocial Interaction in the Digital Age"[0] that describes this phenomenon occuring through YouTube, and I would not be the least bit surprised to find that it's applicable to the situation of _why discussed here.

[0] [PDF] https://thejsms.org/tsmri/index.php/TSMRI/article/download/3...

It is, but people that had long-lasting direct social interaction with him were cut off too.

This type of problematic parasocial relationship is amplified by the internet, because the internet changed the mechanics of fame. In the past, becoming famous required infrastructure. Media access was scarce; you had to actively work with various gatekeepers if you wanted the opportunity to become famous. This often required putting on the mask the audience wanted to see. Removing the mask and retreating back to your "normal life" was easy: without regular upkeep, access to the media infrastructure moved to someone else.

On the internet, anybody can become famous at any time, because the internet is media access. People now become famous without the mask that differentiated their famous persona from their normal life. Giving up fame now requires giving up the part of your normal life that made you famous.

For a much better explanation, see this[1] short video essay.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

Yeah, humans making inefficient decisions. Preposterous.

This sounds like the "community" felt entitled (which they are not)

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