I think we're still just seeing the vanguard of this. Youtubers, maybe a few politicians. It's hard to predict, from this vantage point, where it will go. IMO,

I think we're still just seeing the vanguard of this. Youtubers, maybe a few politicians. It's hard to predict, from this vantage point, where it will go. IMO, we're this is about many-2-many communication figuring itself out, at scale. Many-2-many is our default mode, what we naturally do. A group of people talking shop over dinner, a bunch of kids deciding between soccer and tag. Most "non-natural" modes are a diminutive version. Mass media, telephones, letter writing & most other technology enabled modes of communication cut down on the complexity. In journalism, one person writes, and the others read. In democracy, we have many-to-one communicates by voting... reducing communication to "yes/no." The telephone works for one-to-one chats. Add more people, and problems crop up. Minor latencies are more noticeable. People talking over eachother becomes more grating. People zone out. Our innate abilities to handle many-to-many talking are subtle and hard to translate to technology. "Social media," from HN to Zoom to FB are all different ways of enabling many-to-many, an its unsurprising that this is fertile ground. Any difference to how the media, is designed yields major differences in form. Anyway the social/psychological side of this is rapidly evolving. Hard to see where it ends up. I suspect CEOs/managers and such may eventually cultivate parasocial relationships. As this article implies, it's a phenomenon of the mode and medium of communication. They're already in the space, one-to-many relationships cultivated in a many-to-many medium.