The morning the update shipped

The first mass parasocial grief event caused entirely by a business setting, and the point at which the whole history of this subject arrives at once. Nobody was going to marry this thing. And the industry response was to call it a feature change. Every other entry in this file explains how that sentence can be written.

Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.

Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.

Manipulation. One-sided attachment engineered for somebody else's benefit. Paid intimacy, parasocial persuasion, sasaeng, grief extraction, the streak. The lane that pays the bills and the lane that causes the most harm, frequently at the same time.