<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>kevingadd</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s an interesting set of tradeoffs - vtubing has made it possible for people to be on-screen personalities who normally would not able to as easily because it can be very hard to overcome problems with your IRL appearance. That stuff &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; matters if you want to succeed on YouTube or Twitch. In comparison if you want to be a vtuber, there are relatively affordable ways to grab a stock model and customize it. You can also just commission a custom one from an artist and rigger - though I think the cost of that is sadly out of reach of an amateur it&amp;#x27;s not as high as you might assume.&lt;p&gt;If you stream without a face camera at all it generally hurts your ability to grow an audience, and unfortunately our society is still pretty focused on appearance so if you don&amp;#x27;t look great you&amp;#x27;re going to potentially get a lot of toxicity in your chat. A vtuber avatar acts as an equalizer in this sense and also lets people express their personality and aesthetics visually in a way that might not otherwise be easy - they can pick eye and hair colors they think represent them without having to use colored contacts or hair dyes, etc.&lt;p&gt;A few different people I know found that having a vtuber avatar made it much easier for them to get into streaming regularly and it did grow their audience, so I&amp;#x27;m happy to see the technology catch on and improve.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Mistletoe</author><text>I like your optimism, but it seems more like a Phillip K. Dick novel to me.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerate effect called &amp;quot;nerve attenuation syndrome&amp;quot; or NAS. Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.&lt;p&gt;from Johnny Mnemonic&lt;p&gt;What can we do to make it more utopian?</text></item><item><author>dimator</author><text>watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen! it&amp;#x27;s easy to forget that this world is looking closer and closer to those dreamed up by Gibson, Stephenson, etc. what a time to be alive.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Tales of the M1 GPU</title><url>https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>mattnewton</author><text>Small nit but I was confused, I think Johnny Mnemonic is Gibbson? And I had to look up NAS, I think that part of the movie not the book. I think we have another couple decades before androids and mood organs of Phillip K dick at least but I could be wrong. But parts of Gibbsonian cyberpunk is already here!</text><parent_chain><item><author>Mistletoe</author><text>I like your optimism, but it seems more like a Phillip K. Dick novel to me.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerate effect called &amp;quot;nerve attenuation syndrome&amp;quot; or NAS. Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.&lt;p&gt;from Johnny Mnemonic&lt;p&gt;What can we do to make it more utopian?</text></item><item><author>dimator</author><text>watching a virtual persona stream their development of their M1 GPU drivers is one of the most cyberpunk things I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen! it&amp;#x27;s easy to forget that this world is looking closer and closer to those dreamed up by Gibson, Stephenson, etc. what a time to be alive.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Tales of the M1 GPU</title><url>https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/</url></story>