I think the majority of people wasn't really fetishists, just the usual encuragement to do it and then when the shit hit the fan everyone was like "fuck, somebody needs to call 911" (op said that he go "woozy"). The stream got mirrored on different sites and was offline a few times and it wasn't clear if he passed out but apparently a medic friend of him knocked down his door and stitched him up/ stopped the bleeding. Then everything started again. Personally I was more appalled than fascinated (I hate the idea of cutting apart body parts even when a professional does it) but I wanted to know since I'm tg myself and knew the op a bit via tranchan or 420chan etc. But I just can't understand why somebody would do this, the pain must be unbearable.

Some people like pain. It IS a fetish. No I wasn't suggesting that the people on 4chan who watched and disseminated the video were fetishists, but most of them are people i'd still steer clear of. Sometimes it's self loathing. Pain can be a very cathartic experience. It can feel cleansing. I'll raise a personal example. Most folk hate squeezing pimples. I like it. The pain from having it squeezed feels very cleansing to me. Everytime the pain of having a pimple squeezed is felt, it's something impure being purged. So perhaps self-harm is an extreme extension of that.

Thus is 4chan. I'd say the dude really wanted it, and was just trying to build hype.