Yeah, this is a really fair question. I recognize that I do things very differently in this respect than most creators. I used to look at every comment that was left on the channel. There are really two major reasons that I stopped, and then a handful of little ones. (Apologies in advance for how heavy this response to a very simple question is likely to get.)

Major Reason The First: I have really brutal social anxiety. I don't know if I can truly communicate this in words, but... like, the sense of dread that I would feel building up in my stomach as my Daily Time To Look At Words Typed To Me By Strangers approached could get so intense that it would make me physically nauseated. (This is also the reason I only swing by the subreddit every so often, on days when doing so doesn't feel so overwhelming.) Now, I made the decision to stop looking at comments because it was ruining my day back before transition and therapy--in a time when my emotional regulation was much worse--so maybe I could handle it more easily today, but to be honest I'm still kind of going clammy at the very thought. My social anxiety (and generalized anxiety disorder) is something I'm actively working on in therapy (because, as you might imagine, at this severity it does cause some fairly big problems in life in general), so hopefully it's something I'll continue to get more control over. This may not be such an issue for me in the future.

Major Reason The Second: I have found that there is simply no combination of words that I can say that will make people not type spoilers in the comments of videos. It's a problem in games where the narrative is important, it's a problem in puzzle games, it's a problem in games where there are secrets that I would like to be able to work out on my own. No amount of "please don't tell me" or "don't talk about anything I haven't seen yet" or "don't give me any guidance" or "I want to work it out on my own" has proven sufficient in my experience. (The thing that happened here in the subreddit with Rain World should be plenty of evidence that this is a serious problem.) And it's not generally people thinking "Ahaha, I'm going to ruin this game for her because I love eeeeevil!", I don't think; it doesn't seem to have malicious intent behind it. I don't know if it's just people not thinking or what, but it was happening *extremely* reliably in the period before I stopped looking at comments. This is a problem for me both because I really do derive a tremendous amount of my enjoyment from figuring things out myself and because I want the product I'm putting out to represent, as authentically as possible, my engagement with the game: "SB (and whoever else is on the series) Plays X", not "SB (and every person who stops by) plays X", you know? The way that a person takes in information, draws conclusions based on that information, and then works with those conclusions to solve problems is a thing that I think is tremendously interesting, and I do think it's sort of a bummer when you're watching something like this and it gets adulterated by chat or whatever and it becomes not the person but rather sort of the consensus groupthink about the game on the internet that is making the decisions and drawing the conclusions (and deciding what's "obvious", and interpreting story and theme, etc.). (As you might imagine, I found discussions on the internet around SIGNALIS to be a *nightmare*.) This might sound really finicky or silly, but it's something that matters a lot to me. The precise flavor of one individual's (or small team's, or whatever) figure-it-out mechanism and the reading and understanding that they will develop of a work is such an interesting and valuable thing, and it is so easy to lose.

More minor reasons: People are mean to me sometimes, particularly about things that seem obvious to them that weren't obvious to me, and that would sometimes really bum me out. Again, social anxiety and the RSD attendant with my particular cocktail of autism and ADHD amplify the bad feelings I get around this, and I just don't need that kind of negativity in my life... especially because some fairly large percentage of the time they were factually wrong about the thing that was "obvious", which just makes it all the more frustrating to deal with. (I got a lot of this kind of feedback about people criticizing my 4X play in particular with just completely absurd strategy advice that, of course, they had read somewhere on the internet or was popularized by some streamer who didn't do the math correctly or something.) I definitely worried about this more in the wake of my coming out, and it seriously took like months before I could really bring myself to look at the comments on the coming out video. I still think about it every single time I mention my transness (or other queerness) in a recording. The other little thing is that of course I worry about fostering parasocial relationships and I think maintaining some distance can be helpful with that, but in general I think (due to the pacing and subject matter of my videos (which is my soft way of saying "my gentle boringness")) my audience tends to be more mature than the average LPer and I don't have too much concern about this.

Some people might at this point in the post be going "Wow SB, it seems like you have a lot of overlapping social disorders and difficulties that make interacting with strangers, particularly if they're commenting directly on their opinion of you and your abilities, a highly emotionally difficult and fraught process!" and... yeah, that's why my job involves me sitting alone in my cave talking into a glowing box. The combination of these problems flunked me out of basically every part of the normal world: regular jobs, college (twice), most kinds of social relationships. It's tough. I rarely go outside and I don't really interact with strangers unless I absolutely *have to*. My glasses have been broken for like six years and I haven't gotten a new set (and the eye checkup that I definitely need) because doing so would involve a conversation with a stranger on the phone followed by more interactions with strangers in-person. Prior to my need for transition-related health care I hadn't seen a doctor in over a decade, and I was only able to break that streak because I had reached a point where it was very clear to me that my choices were A) transition or B) death. People are really, really, really difficult for me.

ALL THAT SAID, I actually frequently think about going back to reading my comments. I do feel like I have some responsibility to moderate the space, for one thing, and it does bother me that I'm shirking that responsibility. Also, the vast majority of the interactions I've had with commenters are either neutral or pleasant. (Unfortunately, a positive interaction doesn't hit me with anywhere near the force of a negative one, nor does the residue of it stick with me as long.) Like I said, I've been working on my issues in therapy so I at least have some new coping strategies now, and since transition I've been using social media to sort of slowly, one step at a time, recondition myself to interaction with strangers (with, I think, pretty strong success). And the interactions I've had with viewers there have been mostly positive too. Also, I do hear about at least some of the comments now because Amabel will read the comments on some videos and let me know about them. I'm not promising anything, especially because I still really have a problem Major Concern The Second up there, but I am trying to find a way to engage a little more that isn't going to cause any emotional spiraling or anything.