Complete speculation on my part, but I think the biggest appeal is supply side, that people can be Internet personalities with an avatar without sharing their real identity. That helps a lot of people who would like to start sharing content but are otherwise too shy, or for various reasons think they can’t/shouldn’t use their real identity.
On the consumption side, I find the VTuber method to be more compelling than pure voiceovers, even if it’s silly. An avatar helps create a sense of engagement. It’s also interesting to see what sort of characters people come up with.
Maybe I'm old too, but I don't have a problem with avatars and virtual ones, it's the extremely high pitch and cartoony voices VTubere tend to have. And why does it have to be anime or furry aesthetic every time?
Give me Optimus Prime doing kernel Rust coding. Even better, gimme the sarcastic high pitch of Skeletor. I'd also be fine with, I dunno, Lara Croft or other virtual female character.
Everybody has their own preferences, fine, but outside of that overrepresented niche of sexually ambiguous anime and furry there's just... nothing.
People don't do it probably because of copy rights. Don't know what constitutes enough change to the original character to be considered original work.
It is actually harder. The anime aesthetic was literally designed to facilitate easier 2D animation. Notwithstanding the aesthetic itself being very popular (and thus more familiar to designers), many "non-anime" v-tubers like Layna Lazar or Juniper Actias will tend to incorporate anime elements because it's what they know and it's easier to implement, even if they're not trying to follow the "virtual idol" model set by Hololive and the like.
Also, one has to consider that this is an entertainment market almost exclusively bound to Twitch and Youtube, and it's counterproductive having an avatar that isn't going to appeal visually to the masses, generate clips and be supported by the algorithm.
There's a lot of interesting and creative work going on in the v-tuber space, and a lot of tech involved adjacent to VR and AR. It's unfortunate that Hacker News isn't more interested in it.
