Me and my extended family have begun a tradition of giving each other silly joke gifts instead of serious ones.

• My father in law doesn’t drink alcohol so I got him “alcohol-free” beer. It was just an empty beer bottle. Technically alcohol-free!
• a couple of days before Christmas, my husband came back from doing the grocery shopping. I stole most of the non-perishable items when he wasn’t looking, wrapped them, and put them under the tree. He thought I was a mind reader and gotten him exactly what he was planning to buy for himself until he saw them all together and realized it was his own shopping.
• I went to a dollar store and just picked out anything with badly translated English and distributed them as appropriate to pad out numbers. One of them was a tiny plastic chopping board that claimed to be “high tech” and for “professionals”. Another was a roll of duct tape. There was also a pack of serviettes that had “serves you right!” in bright colors on the front. Anything that was silly and cheap but would still would see some use.
• I have a vegan sibling-in-law. A couple of years ago, we were joking about how plant-based chocolate treats for dogs were cheaper than the ones for humans. I think they’ve safely forgotten about that conversation now so this year I’m going to give them a little treat.
• I think at one point I just wrapped a big box of packing peanuts with absolutely nothing else inside. I vaguely recall adding some rocks for extra weight in a gift somewhere, might have been that one.

Some of these would not have been funny at all if my family hadn’t already been expecting shenanigans instead of real gifts, so keep your audience in mind!

The reason we started doing this was because our family stopped getting each other gifts many years ago and everyone enjoyed the lack of stress and being able to focus on quality time. And then my husband and I had a kid, and of course everyone wanted to buy her gifts. But we didn’t want her to be the only one with gifts under the tree and develop some kind of weird complex about it, so these playful low-stakes gifts to each other were our solution.

I think most viewers can be grouped into 3 main categories (please note these are just very broad generalizations)

Category 1 viewers watch streams because they like the game that is being played, and basically treat it like watching sports. They want to watch skilled people doing skillful and impressive things. Maybe they play the game themselves, but not always. They tend to focus on categories rather than channels, and are quick to unfollow if a streamer starts playing something else, even if it’s a similar genre.

Category 2 viewers watch streams because of the personality of the streamer and the vibes of the stream, and tend to have parasocial relationship. I won’t say much about this category because I honestly don’t understand the whole parasocial thing at all, I just know it’s a Thing.

Category 3 viewers watch streams because of the streamer’s community. They’re focused on not just the personality of the streamer, but also the kind of environment they foster and how they interact with the viewers. I’m in this group, I’m on twitch to meet people and make some genuine connections. I’ve made some great friends in streams, not just with the actual streamer, but the other chatters as well - we hang out off-stream and play games, watch movies, just chat, etc. This group tends to contain a lot of smaller streamers supporting each other (in a bit of a circle-jerk, I admit)

From what I’ve seen, categories 1 and 2 gravitate towards larger, well-established channels, while category 3 prefer smaller streamers and will be supportive but disappointed if someone they watch becomes “big”.

All of this is just my own observations hanging out on twitch and talking with other viewers and streamers, please take with a grain of salt. Also I have no idea how much of this applies to other streaming platforms like YouTube or Kick.