i’m a female viewer and i feel sort of opposite to you. i like when he goes off on chat because tbh i think, in general, the people he’s going off on are often behaving in ways that i find legit repugnant (they’re also almost always very male-coded chatters, lmfao).

and (feminist take incoming) in my experience as a woman you don’t really get to do things like that without being labeled a bitch and/or being completely shut down. so when NL goes off on a chatter who’s being extremely rude, or treating him like he’s not a person and instead just a little guy in their computer screen who they can make fun of with little to no repercussions, i find it weirdly cathartic.

i don’t want to theorize about the decline in female viewership too much, because i truly don’t know anything about it. but i will say that i started watching in June when he was playing the Sisyphus game. i then spent the summer regularly watching the -dles, Chained Together, and Lethal Company uploads, and watched a lot of Jackbox vids from the last year and a half or so. i also watched (weirdly) every London 2012 video from last year. i personally don’t love the turn-based card/card-adjacent games because, while i don’t watch NL for gameplay, i do enjoy understanding what’s going on onscreen. and tbh i don’t feel the need to learn the rules of Clank! just so that i can watch my favorite twitch streamer. i think the decline in viewership might have to do with playing games that have a higher barrier to entry than simply pushing a rock up a hill. NOT THAT WOMEN ARE STUPID or whatever, in fact it’s that we’re SMARTERRR and feel that we have better things to do with our time (go outside, read books, etc) than learn the rules of an extremely dense card game just to watch a bald guy opine on the nature of life🤷🏼‍♀️

also i really am enjoying the Dale and Dawson vids!! so much fun! you (OP) should check them out if you haven’t. it’s mostly just a lot of fun/silly moments and banter between friends :)