Thread by @InnuendoStudios

I'm thinking of shutting down my Curious Cat.

I get a steady - if not enormous - influx of messages asking for advice on extremely personal and sensitive problems that I am not remotely qualified to answer.

Like, I'm a cishet white YouTuber, I don't know how to help you out of your dysphoria or internalized homophobia.

But when someone asks me something so vulnerable, I figure if I don't answer, or if I answer saying "I can't help you with that," I'm likely making a person in pain feel even worse, so I fumble at being some kind of helpful.

I try to foreground my lack of lived experience and stress that I'm probably the wrong person to ask, and try to link to resources from qualified people if I know them, and mostly just do my best not to make the person feel worse.

But answering at all means, to a degree, encouraging more people to send those kinds of messages, and they keep coming.

And, aside from the fact that it's a task I'm not entirely up to, it's not the kind of relationship I'm trying to foster with my audience. At all.

I didn't start a Curious Cat to be a progressive-left Dear Abby. I'm not Daniel Ortberg. And f people are coming to me for that kind of advice, it means they're developing a relationship with me that I don't want and can't deliver.

And, the more I think about it, the more I wonder what kind of relationship I *am* trying to have with my audience, and whether Curious Cat is actually able to provide that.

I feel like I'm butting up against the problem of a need for community intersecting with the nature of internet notoriety.

I would like something that feels like interacting with likeminded peers, not "interacting with fans" or developing parasocial relationships.

But I don't know if there's any way to get community without all the rest.

So I don't know. Maybe it's served whatever purpose it was going to serve for me.

Like, you can't have an audience and *not* get people investing in you emotionally in ways you can't reciprocate. That's part of the territory.

But you have some control over how much it's encouraged and how many opportunities they have to indulge that fantasy.

I worry keeping the CC open is indulging it.

Also, like, I do actually think my audience is pretty cool? There are a ton of ways I'd like to interact with them, I just don't know how without opening up the lack-of-boundaries stuff.

I realize this issue would be almost entirely solved if Curious Cat had an "answer privately" button like Tumblr does.