Quoted By:
I'd say react content, having watched Asmon do quite a bit of it lately in fact, is more like "the streamer is acting like your buddy recommending you cool stuff to watch and sometimes having commentary on it" and there's also an air of "maybe you wouldn't have found or watched this yourself without the streamer, who doesn't know if he's even gonna like it, but we can watch it together and see what's up with it" which I would say as basically easing-in the audience to random stuff because at least this other dude you know is 'watching' it with you in a sense.
It's actually really parasocial as fuck feeling, as in the real definition of "this person feels like your friend" instead of the vtuber-specific meaning that's been ignorantly twisted to mean "stalker murder rapist incel hitlers."
I'd also say the problem with it isn't that it's inherently evil but because it's just so fucking, fucking easy for a streamer to do they tend to fall into a trap spamming it and basically they are demoting what they call streaming to being really just that kind of thing you do cruising around Youtube watching stuff only technically it's "content" if you comment on it out-loud. Sometimes Asmon will pause and actually talk/lecture for a couple minutes about a subject and that's kinda neat to hear his thoughts but also quite often he's just kinda mumbling "i agree" or something every minute or two and there's not a strong reason he needs to be there reacting.
>tl;dr in theory it can be nice and even useful if the streamer really-cares/thinks about the video and has a lot of interesting commentary to add, but in practice most streamers have jack shit to add to a video like ironmouse going "oooohh" and shit and they also abuse the shit out of the format to kill the good will people had for it, it's like the Minecraft spam of Twitch
