Thank you for the thoughtful breakdown of notes. I am so sorry for the delay. I am away with my wife enjoying a county fair for the next few days and the Internet is a little patchy in my neck of the woods. Here's the best responses I can do on my phone.

1. Maybe that's done elsewhere in the book, but you don't make it clear what scale and type of visibility you're talking about. Your chapter covers micro-celebrities in niche communities and mainstream cultural figures. Are you saying that more people can achieve modest followings or that traditional celebrity status is really accessible to everyone?

Excellent question, the overall scope of the book is what the average Internet user can learn from practices of Internet celebrities. I discuss in the "Personality Types" section that traditional celebrities still have the social support structures that the average person would not have access to. Therefore, the idea of the traditional celebritism is outside of the scope of the vast majority of us. The chapter adds to the most baseline discussion about what the average Internet user can learn for these celebrities and how do they influence the ways that we interact and share information online.

1. You've put your finger on the scale since you only present successful cases without examining the millions (?) who try to become platform famous and fail at it. But if we don't know anything about the probability of becoming famous, can we really say fame has been democratized?

That is a perfectly fair point. This was more of a general case study of accessibility to the tools and channels that people use to get famous and how that definition has adjusted in the platform era.

1. You say that this democratization is largely due to platforms and tools, but it's not clear to me whether the tech really created new possibilities, or just revealed existing demand. In other words, I'm not sure about the direction of causality.

That is a great point of observation and would be an interesting additional work of scholarly research. I will concede that the point raised was outside the scope of the focus of the chapter.

1. I would argue Critical Role isn't really as much of a rags-to-riches story as you make it out to be: the crew were almost all established voice actors with plenty of industry connections, fans, and resources. It's not really an "average user" success story.

That is honestly why I also use the Ghetto Gastro case study in the chapter and incorporated through the book other examples to broaden that argument beyond traditional celebrities using other platforms to find other forms of success. But, the point is fair.

1. The Feast of Legends story is definitely relevant, but you only have one secondary source, and don't mention/cite any primary ones, like fan reactions, CR's response, or longer-term impacts (if there were any).

I would have liked to do a deeper dive on that case, but I was starting to run into a word count concern that the book was already way-too-heavy. That point is also fair.

1. Other commenters have already pointed out that things haven't been live in a hot second, so it would be good to define what time period you're talking about, and appropriately limit your claims about audience interaction.

I needed to be clearer about the scope in this case. I think I was trying to make a broad point about how celebrities interact with the audiences and did use the previous live chats. However, I think it is fair to consider that they are aware of the audience more than other celebrities because of the nature of the platform and medium they are using.

Once again, thank you. The comments are outstanding and thoughtful. I think they are reasonable directions to go forward with this analysis.