> For years, I was profoundly puzzled by people that are willing to give hundreds -- if not thousands -- of dollars to (mostly women) they'll never meet for wha

> For years, I was profoundly puzzled by people that are willing to give hundreds -- if not thousands -- of dollars to (mostly women) they'll never meet for what's basically freely available offline. That's because you seems to misunderstands theirs needs and misunderstands the cost of what you consider "freely available offline". I recently saw a tiktok of a girl crying because she fake one, well they are just putting a price over that effort. > It's a bit sick that the internet -- the very thing which was supposed to bring people together -- ends up cannibalizing its own. Yeah, it's something that I realize day after day. In the past it wasn't like this, I've seen so many people make real connections, but since a few years, maybe a decade, making friendship over the internet seemed to have changed (maybe it's just me though). I feel like you got something with theses fake relationship. They are so much easier to maintains, they are easy source of dopamine and they still "feel" like real ones, but they aren't. Some pay for them sure, but Youtube videos are another cheap ones, mostly the vlog format, are most probably source of many of them.