What has Twitch actually done new business-wise in the past 5-6 years? Every typical user still uses the same StreamLabs widgets and alerts for years without many new ones, and most of the streaming workflow improvements are upstream in OBS itself.
I honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014 would be the future of Twitch, and Twitch did allow some developer tools for interactivity between players and games, but very very few devs make use of it outside of an intentional gimmick because there's a massive chicken-and-egg problem there that Twitch hasn't facilitated.
Most of the innovation is driven by the streamers and target viewers anyways. Just check out the events that people like Ibai are doing - bigger and more fun than anything Twitch has done.
Which is probably part of the charm of twitch and part of the reason it stays relevant and people often complain that Youtube's implementation is limited (mostly because of how the chat communities work).
I find it difficult (outside of adding more dev tools and allowing for things like twitch plays pokemon as someone mentioned earlier in this thread) that a corporate implementation of a new "thing" will be as successful, partly because of the vicious backlash against whatever corporate sanitation measures would have to be implemented just to allow it on the platform.
I think there's a fundamental disconnect in what is most fun and engaging about watching and commenting in chats on twitch and what twitch as a company would allow if they tried to invasively step in an manage the product.
A good example of this was a few years ago, there was almost universally panned attempt to create some form of "moderation council" which turned out to be absurdly tone deaf and I haven't heard anything since.
Maybe I’m missing something about “hot tub streams”, but cute girls in bathing suits sitting in a hot tub doesn’t quite meet my definition of “adult content”. It might be unhealthy parasocial content for lonely boys, but it’s not porn.
They are porn ads, those girls makes their money on only fans and they stream to get guys to pay them for porn.
You can see this for example, she isn't allowed to pay for normal ads since most networks doesn't allow porn ads, but streaming is a way for her to advertise:
From what I know they can't link their OnlyFans directly on Twitch (they need at least one intermediary website) nor even acknowledge its existence directly on stream.
By keeping softcore erotica nudge-nudge on their video game streaming site, they allow viewers to tell their parents and girlfriends that they're watching games and chat. Spinning it off would kill the market for that content without doing anything for the video game side of the house.
Sexual content on platforms is in such a weird place. It gets tons of views, but you can't have a platform that's only adult content or it scares off advertisers. But if you have a successful platform that has adult content and you try to remove it, the platform becomes nearly worthless: see Yahoo and Tumblr. A mainstream brand like Visa has no issues advertising on Twitter, despite the massive amounts of adult content on Twitter. Yet you'd never see a Visa advertisement on Pornhub.
If you're running an ad-driven platform, you need to be in this weird Goldilocks zone where your platform has sexual content but isn't really known for sexual content. That's where Twitter, Twitch, Instagram and Reddit are, and it's why OnlyFans tried to push the "not just for porn" angle so hard for a while.
Eh—the draw of putting that content on Twitch is siphoning off part of a huge audience by sharing space on a popular non-porn platform. Separating the two would remove the reason people are streaming there instead of OF in the first place.
Same with instagram. I actually find it kind of shocking how obvious sex work is on twitter and instagram, it's generally frowned upon to pay for sex in the progressive circles I'm used to, but I guess on the internet we all live in San Francisco.
The biggest things I can think of that might fit that window of time are the adding of "bits" (a more streamlined way of donating to streamers) and Twitch Prime subs (where Amazon Prime customers get one free sub per month to assign to a streamer of their choice). Arguably the latter might be more attributable to Amazon rather than Twitch itself.
>I honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014 would be the future of Twitch, and Twitch did allow some developer tools for interactivity between players and games, but very very few devs make use of it outside of an intentional gimmick because there's a massive chicken-and-egg problem there that Twitch hasn't facilitated.
I've believed the same thing since 2014 which is why I started Muxy in 2015. We build tools that let viewers and broadcasters interact with gameplay in real-time. It's been hard to make bigger strides as management at Twitch seems to turn over faster than we can build working relationships. We're finally seeing some real traction with publishers and studios over the last 18 months. You might know us from the Bits days when we launched the cheer cup in summer 2016.
The guaranteed 30 second as on stream load was the final straw for me. I used to wander around the music streamers channel but ended up with as much as time viewed as the actual streams.
>Every typical user still uses the same StreamLabs widgets and alerts for years without many new ones, and most of the streaming workflow improvements are upstream in OBS itself.
So what, if it works well enough, which it seems like it does? Can't we just leave things be?
It’s more than that; there is no room to innovate here for a startup. We were #2 to Streamlabs with ~40% market share by minutes watched @ Muxy in 2016-2017. However, there was no way to monetize without dark patterning viewers to subscribe to our platform when donating, which others did, but we refused to do.
We have so many cool unreleased widgets for bits and streams that have been dormant because it’s not possible to monetize them. Twitch could fix this…
>I honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014
Most of the comments on Twitch strike me as pretty weird. If I look at Twitch their problem is that, as a business, they never really broke out of their gaming niche. It's strange to suggest that Twitch should have catered more to the audience that they had already captured. Not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but for a company that took tons of VC and was acquired for a ton of money I don't think the answer to their "we need to make more money" problem is to cater even more to gamers. It's like trying to squeeze blood from a stone; we already see it in the way Twitch is squeezing more of the revenue share from large creators and refusing to entertain Google's huge content contracts.
I don't see how Twitch continues to grow by just focusing gaming - especially when the esports side is going through it own struggles now and even teams are being forced diversify into content (e.g. 100Theives selling energy drinks).
Twitch's "problem" to me is while it was a stroke of genius to break out gaming into it's own site out of Justin.tv, is that same audience has become openly hostile to any sort of non-gaming content. If you ask me the future of Twitch is with creators like KaiCenat who are able to bring different demographics to the platform with other types of content. Of course the Twitch superfans would hate to hear this; I don't envy them at all.
> If I look at Twitch their problem is that, as a business, they never really broke out of their gaming niche.
At the least, Twitch has a de facto monopoly in the gaming niche, to the point that the only way YouTube/Facebook/Microsoft could compete at all was with exclusivity contracts, which didn't even work as it didn't bring other streamers to the platform.
Encouraging the development of highly interactive programs like TPP isn't gaming specific either.
1. The top 3 gaming categories eclipse Just Chatting; and there are hundreds of gaming categories on Twitch
2. Most Just Chatting creators are gaming creators. There are exceptions (KaiCenant, Hasanabi, various female streamers); but the site is still geared toward gaming.
Honestly, it's not that surprising... from an outsider, Twitch has been incredibly mismanaged in the way that they treat their content creators. And now that Youtube is robust enough to allow streaming (also with the features that streaming has) it's catching up to them.
The most curious is the alienation of creators which were raking up like 60k viewers per stream by the threat of banning. If you have ever seen one of these streams, the creators are so limited in what they can do.
Another shock was this new Kick platform which is managed by a creator itself, and apparently is doing quite well on the surface (wondering how their balance sheet looks) but I think this is what Twitch needs: a creator at the wheel.
I think that part of what limits what creators can do on twitch comes down to what the advertisers are willing to put up with, it's likely more that advertisers are leaning on twitch who are then leaning on creators, vs just twitch leaning on creators.
As for kick, they seem to be actively ignoring/rejecting these limitations (potentially because they at least partly externally funded by stake (online gambling platform) and kick was a response to most gambling being banned on twitch). I'm not sure how long they can maintain this if they want to stay profitable/attract people to their platform.
I'm tired of advertisers being averse to content most people find unobjectionable.
Advertisers need to get comfortable with nudity, swearing, and the whole range of non-abusive human behavior. They're almost as bad as the credit card companies with linking morality to commerce.
YouTube is slowly starting to relax, so I'm hoping the shift is happening.
It's okay if the person appearing next to the Big Mac says "fuck".
They are. Brands are starting to stream directly. Game companies especially.
If not streaming directly, they're in channels where the streamer is playing their game. They'll give out DLC codes so that the streamer plays the game longer and the game studio makes a mint off the back of the viewers. Content created.
A 20 quid DLC key gifted to the streamer will buy you an hour long gameplay ad easily, usually way longer.
There's so many streamers out there they just sort by view count and cherry pick the brand safe ones. They don't need to change their criteria.
These online gambling platforms have no shortage of money, they were paying out 7 figure amounts to content creators for one stream in some cases. It's possible they can run the whole site through their marketing budget.
Isn't youtube also incredibly mismanaged in the way that they treat their content creators?
For example, making up new rules about swearing too close to the intro of videos being grounds for demonetization, and retroactively applying it to everyone's back catalog from before the rule existed?
Youtube was much better before it was monetized. With monetization came the same pressure on content that had already been present on commercial television; advertisers. Advertisers are the reason television content sucks, they are the ones who demand that the content be formulaic milquetoast crap, and television sucking was the reason Youtube got huge in the first place. Now youtube is becoming the new television.
Retroactive application of new standards? That's newish to youtube but standard for television. Old TV episodes that don't meet present advertiser standards don't get reruns.
Thankfully there are still some video creators on youtube who don't care about money and are doing it for other reasons (passion, hobby, etc.) But youtube has lost most of their incentive to promote that sort of unmonetized content, so it's becoming harder to find.
Is ANY platform in a position to treat creators well?
I hear nothing but complaints from everywhere. I wonder if it is possible to treat creators well…?
Are creators even worth much on average considering the volume of people willing to just grind out content continuously without much regard to … themselves?
It seems to be an endless search for more subscribers, more views, more patrons of some type, more questionable sponsors.
The the youtube, twitch, etc video creators ecosystem seems perpetually messed up, and creators seem to keep at it, sometimes seem to be flogging themselves.
How? Youtube will take automatic action against peoples channels and then there will be no way to interact with a real human to resolve the situation. The whole system seems like a random black box that does not care for its users.
A channel I like is having to test various patterns of swearing and swear-bleeping to try to narrow down what exactly suddenly changed that wrecked their monetization, which had been fine for years and years. They can't just ask YouTube what they need to do to be OK again. It's really dumb.
Also, creators on a platform that grew its original userbase through piracy and media re-mixes with little or no content-policing now have to be extremely careful about even very clear-cut fair-use of commercial media, or risk losing one of their copyright strikes (as in, three strikes and you're out—that is, we kill your business). It makes their videos worse—so, it's also bad for viewers—and causes them stress.
> Also, creators on a platform that grew its original userbase through piracy and media re-mixes with little or no content-policing now have to be extremely careful about even very clear-cut fair-use of commercial media
Monetization is a big part of this problem. It is possible for something to be fair use and commercialized, but once you've commercialized it you're fighting an uphill battle to claim fair use.
> A channel I like is having to test various patterns of swearing and swear-bleeping to try to narrow down what exactly suddenly changed that wrecked their monetization
This seems like such a stupid, pointless effort. Instead of pentesting to find exactly where the line is so you can toe it perfectly, why not... just stay far away from the line and stop swearing. Wouldn't that be much less effort and less risk?
Might lose them audience & differentiation, depending on what's getting people to show up. Any change in tone or content would carry that risk (or, might improve it—hard to say until you try)
That's weird, as my understanding of the YT creator community is constant strife, ever changing rules, arbitrary bans, strikes on their account for vaguely matching copyrighted work, and most recently swearing too much, or too early, in a video.
YT is not friendly to creators, for the same reason Twitch is not friendly to creators: advertisers hate what people want to watch.
Even Patreon, where people pay rather than watch ads, repeatedly runs into issues with creators because of pay schedules, amounts, percent cuts, platform features, and more.
If its someone else's platform, creators don't win.
It's funny to me the "restrictions" being placed on content creators like it's a new thing. It's only new in that more people are being made aware of how there have always been rules applied to what could or could not be "aired". Yes, there were government rules enforced by the FCC and the infamous stories of getting things past the censors, but there were always deference paid to the corporate sponsors and advertisers. This isn't unique to internet streamers.
If you started out without any consideration of this, then you're just a babe in the woods type of situation, but if you thought you could do this and "disrupt", then you're just living in a delusion. You want to make money from advertisers, then you're going to play by their rules.
Maybe I missed it, but Wordpress seemed to handle creators really well.
I've been saying for a while that the next big thing in streaming is Wordpress but for Streamers.
Something relatively easy for small streamers to set up and manage on their own, cheap enough to start small and scale up as it starts to make money, with the ability to handle large-scale streams if necessary.
I don't know how you would handle provisioning the servers and such. Maybe it's not easy enough to automate. But I think this sort of thing would take a huge bite out of centralized streaming sites.
They built a platform and the will also provide hosting. You can download WordPress from wordpress.org and just run it. Or you can go to wordpress.com and buy a whole hosting plan where wordpress.com manages the software for you.
But WordPress doesn't give fuck number one about what you do with it. So you are free to monetize it in any fashion you want. They'll even help you with that. WordPress doesn't have to worry about if any of the people on their site are making money because they still get paid.
Twitch and YouTube are free for creators. You don't have to pay to stream on Twitch or to post videos to YouTube. All the cost of hosting and serving is borne by the service. Which is why they were doing ads in the first place. But with creators now needing actual production, they realized they were pouring in serious money into their channels, but getting none of that sweet ad money.
So shit got complicated. It's free to post and free to watch. But that doesn't make it free to host or produce. Which is why you have YouTube showing you ads and the video itself being sponsored by AG1, Dollar Shave Club, and Mystery Box of the Month Club.
I think ultimately, these places are going to need to charge for hosting. And yes, that's going to kill a lot of channels. But ok. You can afford overpriced, under-engineered rainbow glowy keyboards, you can instead put that towards a $30/month hosting fee.
They're running the Software, but they're not on wordpress.com.
If we're talking about Software, then wow, Microsoft is really treating those game streamers well, because they can use it to play games which they stream.
> Something relatively easy for small streamers to set up and manage on their own, cheap enough to start small and scale up as it starts to make money, with the ability to handle large-scale streams if necessary.
Self-hosted social networks and microblogs are all over the place and have been for decades, and Twitter is falling apart, but the audience is still on Twitter. Self-hosting streams has never been easier, but even if it were one-click it invariably costs money out of pocket for the bandwidth to self-host a stream, and Twitch does not. WordPress is trivial to host for nearly nothing; streaming, not so much.
The appeal of Twitch isn't livestreaming, it's the culture and existing social network of users and streamers who are already there, and the ease of starting up. The architecture or centralization of the next big thing in the space won't matter, it's whether both the creators, audience, and money will all show up at roughly the same time.
From what I've heard from big streamers (Ludwig Ahgren and his gang specifically), he was incredibly out of touch with Twitch culture. Basically zero awareness of what was happening on his platform.
Really should be a monthly subscription, that will get shared by all creators based on minutes of view time, or some other metric. Then maybe gate it behind some artificial limit, so that only serious creators will get a cut. I mean Spotify can share profits between every single artist, why cant twitch do the same? It would benefit both the consumer, higher likelihood of subscribing, and also the creators. They could also keep running ads on a free tier. It’s not exactly rocket science.
It seems all YouTube has really done is offer massive contracts to Twitch streamers to poach them. It’s still a terrible streaming platform. Unless you already have a well established audience, you’re not going anywhere there.
As for Kick, that is not a legitimate business. One, they’ve ripped off the entire UI from Twitch. Two, the anything goes attitude is not going to fly if they ever get real advertisers.
They didn't just "rip off the entire UI". Couple of years ago the entire sourcecode of Twitch leaked along with user data, SDKs, security tools etc. They used all that to create Kick after Twitch banned slots.
Last time I checked, Kick still mostly used Twitch logos and their policy documents were still talking about Twitch, since they didn't even bother looking at them.
Way to gloss over those streamers you're mentioning were streaming gambling.
Kick is a front for Stake the bitcoin casino, not a legitimate streaming site. It exists purely because Trainwrecks wanted to keep making money streaming bitcoin slots. It's been an utter shit show with people streaming porn, sex, the super bowl, incredible amounts of racism... Twitch absolutely is not going that direction with good reason.
Not knowing, understanding or having any experience of the "streaming" community of the internet. What is the purpose/fun with watching someone not just gamble as in playing poker or whatever for money, but slots specifically? Feels like watching someone rolling a dice by themselves, but with fancier graphics.
People get a second hand buzz when they see people win and the streamer will react in a way that gets people excited. This naturally leads to playing slots yourself and feeling like you are part of a community. It's incredibly lucrative for gambling sites.
My favourite example of this was seeing a popular gambling streamer who had a permanent overlay reading "DO NOT GAMBLE, YOU WILL LOSE", but still raked in sponsorships from gambling sites regardless. Maybe the overlay helped him sleep at night but the sites know that wasn't actually going to deter anyone.
Then there's the shadier casinos that provide fake balances to streamers so they're never at risk of going bust, and can keep perpetually hitting the big jackpots that entice the audience...
> And now that Youtube is robust enough to allow streaming (also with the features that streaming has) it's catching up to them.
Do you have some up-to-date numbers for this? Because YouTube has streaming since 2016, and they never caught up to twitch. Not in the pandemia, when Twitch was growing like crazy. And also not when they bought some big Streamers from Twitch. IIRC, at some point they were even worse than Facebook Gaming for some while. Though, I haven't seen the numbers for 2023 yet.
> Another shock was this new Kick platform which is managed by a creator itself, and apparently is doing quite well on the surface
Kick seems to be 99% bots. I wouldn't call that doing well.
I worked at twitch for almost 5 years and they had no idea what they were doing at all. Emmett was eternally condescending to staff and continuously listened to whoever was playing politics best. His replacement dan was equally checked out and they had no good tech or content ideas. Tech was a joke, spending 50-80% of some teams time on checking off items in huge spreadsheets to be compliant with new systems and processes that were regularly replaced by new requirements and often required rewriting services that were not in use/working just fine in new languages and frameworks to check new boxes and then the cycle repeated itself.
> And now that Youtube is robust enough to allow streaming (also with the features that streaming has) it's catching up to them.
YouTube does not want you to be able to search Live content because they want to sell you YouTube Red or YouTube TV. I can't possibly agree that they are anywhere close to Twitch.
Unless you are already following a creator, or see their published content on the platform, you wouldn't even know live streaming existed on the platform.
I agree I still enjoy catching streams I just wish Mixer or one of the other platforms had fought longer to create real competition.
You hit the nail on the head tho “our creators and viewers are the enemy of capitalization”.
I think one of the problems with our current fiscal model of "year over year growth or die" is that some products have a ceiling before the only way to squeeze more is to hurt the overall experience for users.
As one example, I can't even login to Twitch since a few months ago because "my browser is not supported". (EDIT to add: Tried with Firefox and Chromium, from both v3.17 and edge Alpine Linux repositories.)
I don't know what kind of fingerprinting are they doing, but it's definitely not just user agent nor IP address nor browser version. I suspect they somehow detect that I'm using Alpine Linux (it's my main OS) and don't like it, because this doesn't happen on different distros.
I think this started happening shortly after they got a massive amount of new accounts being created.
Like, my account has existed for years, has MFA enabled, and has given them money frequently. But I can't login from my main device. Alright.
Neither Firefox nor Chromium work for me, from neither stable (v3.17) or edge Alpine Linux repositories. And back then when this started happening, I also could not login with Firefox from FreeBSD.
But I can login with Firefox from my Steam Deck without any problems.
I know musl libc has weird compatibility issues (e.g. Nvidia, Widevine, etc), but as far as I can see I have no other issues with the website; I can play streams, and I can see chat messages and stuff. It's only the login form that for some reason responds with an error when I try to login.
I can't speak for the first two, but as for the softcore porn bit - there are a lot of very popular streamers who are just hot women that wear bathing suits or less and either do something mundane while looking hot or "exercise" or something that is also mostly just them looking hot. Maybe softcore porn is a bit much since there is no nudity, but it's close.
To add to this: Some other hot women are using 3D* microphones and they do nothing but moan into the mic (like if they were having sex or similar), and making "licking noises" and other similar stuff.
* Edit: no idea what are these called, but sometimes they moan and lick the left side, sometimes the right so you can hear it in your corresponding ear.
softcore porn is "softcore" because it doesn't involve nudity or explicit intercourse
the fact wearing a bikini at the beach is not sexual does not mean streaming yourself wearing a bikini in a hot tub while making moaning noises is not softcore porn. the intention is what matters eg attract teenage simp boys.
It seems like you're talking about something you've never seen. If you saw what I'm referring to outside of twitch, you'd immediately assume it was an onlyfans video or something. You can absolutely not see the same thing at a beach or a sauna, and if you did, the person would get kicked out.
I'm not commenting on whether it's good or bad, I'm just stating something that anyone who has ever been on twitch is well aware of and would never argue. It's a thing.
It's the difference between being at a beach with people in bathing suits and just doing normal beach stuff... and one of those people moving their beach towel and umbrella so that they're directly in front of you, while making hard eye contact, then proceeding to stretch suggestively, wink at you occasionally, moan from time to time, and "accidentally" drop things in front of you with bizarre frequency so they just "have to" keep bending over in such a way that you get a great view.
One's not sexual. The other one super-duper obviously is, to everyone involved, even if the bathing suit stays on.
Hell, I kinda wish we'd kept it up everywhere. Not having anyone in my house get so much as the flu for about 2.5 years was kinda awesome. I think we had a single mild cold go through our house, that entire time.
How so? There's no evidence for that with respect to respiratory viruses.
> Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence).
And googling the key line there reveals a full page of Google results with articles explaining how both the initial assumptions and methodology was flawed. It was surprising even to me how easy it was to find rebuttals.
Speaking as someone who actually has an advanced degree in science and understands how to read papers and interpret medical evidence (unlike Tufecki, who has literally zero scientific training or understanding of statistics) has read ~every paper on masks ever published, the "rebuttals" there are nonsense.
The Cochrane review was not incorrect; it was not retracted. The "apology from Cochrane" was not about the paper itself, and they didn't say that the conclusions were wrong. The NY Times and the Washington Post and Gavi are just wrong, and they're lying. Full stop. By literally the same standards of evidence they are using ("the lower bound of the confidence interval crosses 1.0, so we can't exclude the possibility of benefit"), Ivermectin and HCQ "work" against Covid. So you either accept both claims, or you reject both.
We have two political teams, each advancing separate-but-equal forms of pseudo-sciencey twaddle, and neither side is willing to admit that the actual data doesn't back their opinions:
Gonna go with "wearing a mask to stop particulate spread" is not separate but equal from taking horse dewormer. (And it's not an exaggeration to characterize it as such when they're literally buying drugs from farm suplly stores and injecting amounts meant for livestock over the course of a few days.)
Similarly, I don't know anyone who has died from wearing a mask.
This is not even to mention the numerous other studies, experiments, and demsonstartsions of all sorts of respiratory protective gear that show effectiveness against particulates smaller even than COVID-19.
As per your first link, rate of infection with masks was 90% the rate of infection without masks. I mean, technically it "works" even if reduces the rates of infection by 0.0000001%. But most people are not going to see much benefit in masking if it only reduces the rate marginally.
The intensity of the push for masking was not at all matched by the effectiveness of masking. From most people's perspectives, if the rate of infection with masking is 90% the rate with no masking then masking doesn't work in layperson's terms.
Could I get a citation for this please? Just about every source I've seen has since admitted that masks did absolutely nothing for the purposes for which they were advised to be used.
> This is the event that still required everyone to wear a mask late 2022 only after Twitch was guilted into it.
Not spreading a deadly virus at a convention filled with strangers from all over the world is now considered "leftist extremism". The last 8 or so years really have done a number on people.
The funniest part of that was how it entirely backfired, their trantrums just got more people interested in the game and pissed off at these activists.
We're also seeing more people rallying behind JK Rowling these days too, perhaps after seeing through the lies and realising that, actually, she bravely put herself out there to stand up for women's rights, knowing this would make her a lightning rod for the abusers and harassers of the pro-gender movement.
Sure, let's explore that. What are Hasan's extremist views? And keep in mind that I'm gonna cite Aden, Sneako, Trainwrecks, Mizkif and more in response.
Conservatives where saying Netflix was doing this when they released that weird show about girls that were dressed up very suggestively on their platform. We probably went through the same for broadcast TV, cable, video stores, etc, etc...
The root cause I don't want to speculate short of getting banned from HN also for having opinions about when people should start having sex or be allowed to watch videos of adults having sex.
Am I the only one who takes it at face value that somebody would quit being a CEO because of the birth of their first child? Even if the platform has all the issues folks are saying?
Getting into a position like this (and keeping it!) requires an extreme amount of dedication and sacrifice. People who are willing to go to such lengths are unlikely to be the kind of person to give up all that for their child.
Additionally, you rarely hear the actual reason for someone quitting from a position like this; there will nearly always be a nice cover story. Being honest this time around, especially given the actual problems the company has, seems unlikely.
I'm not saying the child was no factor, but intuitively it seems quite unlikely that this is the full story.
I don't know why you'd say that, for a lot of people, the birth of their first child changes their priorities very fundamentally, especially if they have the luxury of being able to do so. Like, for example, if they had sold their company to Amazon for a literal dump truck of money. I just calculated it, it went for about 11 tons of $100 bills (the capacity of a large dump truck is about 14 tons, apparently, 7 for some smaller ones).
I don't know Emmett, but if he was totally set in terms of wealth, and if the main thing keeping him there was because it was satisfying work, well, then he could quite reasonably decide that doing something less demanding so that he could have the spare time and energy to be a very good father to his child might be more satisfying. That's certainly the decision I'd make.
> for a lot of people, the birth of their first child changes their priorities
CEOs are not a lot of people. By definition they are extremely few in number, and those who become CEOs of top companies have a perhaps pathological drive to get there. For someone like that, an entirely predictable event -- like the birth of a child -- is the last thing that would make them sacrifice the position they've worked so hard for.
Now would I quit my job for $100 million? Absolutely! But maybe that just means I'm most people...
He’s been at twitch since 2006. How many founders stay that long? Mark Zuckerberg I guess? I just don’t think the numbers back up your premise that being a CEO of a top company requires a pathological drive to stay there until death
I honestly don't understand the mentality that drives someone to keep working after they've made, say, $100 million. Maybe that's why we're all not that person. Even if you're the most single-minded, driven person ever, once you get that much wealth you've pretty much won the game. You did it, you're done. The show's over.
It's like continuing to play your Civilization game for "Just... One... More... Turn..." after you defeated everyone and you're the only civ left.
I imagine the work gets less stressful when you have FU money. As a CEO you're delegating a lot of the day to day work, and as a subsidiary of Amazon they're probably giving a lot of the macro direction.
So you get into the office (maybe) at 10am (maybe), reading some emails, firing off some responses, maybe taking a call or two. Then a ritzy lunch for an hour. Coming back to some more emails and meetings.
Some days you will be putting out fires all day. But the more mature the company is the less you have to do that. After 15+ years the company should have a mature executive team that can handle all but the biggest fires by themselves.
> I honestly don't understand the mentality that drives someone to keep working after they've made, say, $100 million.
Most people reading this site are in the 1% of the world and could easily retire to a lower cost of living area right now or after a few years of saving. They usually don't: Firstly, because the drive that gets you to earn that kind of money also keeps you going. If you're used to and can handle 80 hour weeks, going to 0 is likely to make you feel unfulfilled quite fast (which is also why I don't fully buy the child story). Secondly, you always judge yourself in regards your friend group, and usually quite badly. This might seem absurd to us, but they might be looking at their friends with private jets, yachts and paintings valued more than their total net worth and not feel like they are at the top.
There are exception, of course, but I doubt you'll find many of them in the extreme environments at the top of the business hierarchy.
I don't think we're talking about the same group of people. A highly paid tech worker who makes, say $250K a year, and maybe has a little $800,000 retirement account? Sure, they could retire in Kazakhstan or something, but there's still something to work for (maybe they want to step up and retire in Thailand or heaven forbid the USA).
But if you've banked $100 million, that's a totally different world. You have wealth that grows by itself passively, and you'll never be able to spend it. You can live wherever you want in the world and never have to work, and neither will your offspring for multiple generations. Any work you do at that point is firmly in the "Play the video game after you won" territory.
Paul Graham wrote an article [0] on this that provided some insight into this for me. I still don’t completely get it but that’s probably because I’m not that kind of person either, or maybe we just haven’t found the thing yet that is able to drive us on all cylinders with no brakes.
If you read the article, or know the story of Justin.tv (one of the very earliest YC startups, from before YC was a big thing), you’ll know that he’s a cofounder, not someone who climbed up the ranks via ruthless political maneuvering to get there.
It’s not the “position” he worked so hard for, it was to build a company. Being CEO is a means to doing that, not the end goal. He did that, it is extremely successful, it will probably continue to be successful without him.
He even says it in the article - that for a long time, he wasn’t sure if he could leave and have it continue to function well. As someone who started, ran, and sold a (much, much smaller) company, I understand that viscerally. If you’re somewhat tired of it, it can feel like you’re trapped. But then you work on that, making sure that the things you do get well covered by someone else. And then, one day, there’s nothing it needs you for anymore, and you’re finally free.
The person who's stepping into his spot has been President for three years, and has been attaching his name to public communications/policy, this doesn't seem like a rushed replacement.
I don't disagree, but quitting from a position is certainly a sacrifice.
I'm certain it happens once in a while when someone has a personal realization and decides to change their life's trajectory fundamentally. Maybe their own (role model) parents died and they discovered that time with your children cannot be substituted with gifts and money.
Now in this case it's unlikely given Twitch problems but sometimes important humans are just humans.
Maybe there are those who can simultaneously raise a baby and be the successful CEO of a sizeable operating unit, but in practice usually one or the other is prioritized.
Both can be true, especially since they don't contradict each other. When it comes to human decisions, it's usually a multitude of reasons. It could be that Twitch is in trouble and he has a child and maybe a host of other factors. I too take what he said at face value while allowing other things people have said about the platform to be true too.
Platforms always have issues, that will never change. Despite that, Twitch is doing pretty well. Most of the complaints are saying that it could be better, not that it's bad. Though, there is the problem that Amazon is juicing the platform, and that's also something that won't change. And I would say Emmett Shear generally did improve the platform over the years. So he is going on a height.
Nope, I totally agree. Most of the complaints I'm seeing are valid, but a lot of people see Twitch as a dying platform when in reality it's just getting bigger and bigger. There was a momentary huge spike in viewership during covid, but I believe viewership in total is still climbing.
What's wrong with that? Working since 2006 watching some dude named Justin livestream his life to what it has become is quite an accomplishment that seems justified for an early retirement?
Quitting because of family is the standard "everything is fine stockholders, don't freak out" message. Same message from Susan Wojcicki and countless other execs.
Twitch's revenue is up 5x from 2015 and 2x from 2019, and generally has been on an uptick since COVID, so I doubt this is anything to do with the companies stability. I think he genuinely was just ready to step down and be with his family/do something else
If there was one thing I wish Twitch would change, it’s the entry ads to streams. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve closed the tab while browsing for something to watch because I get an unskipable 30 second ad before I even get to see if there’s something worth watching.
For reference, Twitch has invested very heavily in anti adblockers and it’s pretty difficult to sidestep the ads these days without paying $5/month for a subscription.
Compare this to streaming on YouTube, which has a (much) worse UI, but tolerates ad blockers and lets you watch the parts of the steam you missed. I’m not optimistic that Twitch will be able to survive if YouTube manages to get their shit together and make a half decent UI.
Which does nothing [1] for the streamers you actually watch, only for Twitch itself.
"Paying" the streamer for the ad(s) being not shown due to Turbo, i.e. fractions of a cent. If you're mainly watching 1-2 streamers subscribing directly to them does more for them for almost the same money. The streamer is still only getting 50% of the sub fee but at least that's ~ $2.50 rather than a few cents per month for many hours of watched content.
The worst part is they put more effort into stopping adblockers than they do into actually selling ads, so the ads they force you to watch are endlessly repeated from a tiny pool. It's just Squarespace ad after Squarespace ad after Squarespace ad, punctuated by filler ads for other Amazon properties like Audible because they haven't sold enough real ads to fill the space.
FWIW there is a GitHub repo [0] which keeps track of currently-working ways to block Twich ads. If you don't need chat, ff2mpv [1] can be used to send streams directly to MPV by right clicking on them in the browser. This bypasses the entire proprietary Twitch frontend and displays a silent purple screen during ad breaks.
I know this isn't going to be the most popular solution, but I find that Twitch Turbo isn't much discussed. I think it's $8 and eliminates ads from all channels. It may make more sense financially for some viewers, but it doesn't support any streamers.
I worked for Dan many years ago when he was an engineering director at Google. He's a sharp guy and has a lot of experience in the industry. I hope he does well at his new role.
Feels like twitch, although a massive success by any reasonable standard, has not really lived up to its potential. Weird niche platform really, and it's the internet's goto service for live feeds.
I've been a Twitch user since its first year. I have a select few streamers I watch, and I spend more time on the platform when there are new releases for games I personally like. But, I have been very in-tune with Twitch culture and I know how disorganized it is when it comes to "big" streamers.
However, my issue (and also disappointment) with Twitch right now is:
- Softcore porn allowed on the platform. Literally, girls doing ass up squats in front of the camera for a $3 donation. You cannot avoid this because its part of the platforms "culture" and even your favorite streamers will one day end up watching a clip or something on their stream. This also breeds incels and very toxic chatters.
- Ads. Twitch is fighting against ad-blockers. Fine by me, I can bare ads, but what I cannot do is bear 5 ads in a row every 30 minutes. This has gotten a lot worse lately. It is annoying and disruptive to the user experience, and thankfully there are streamers who disable them altogether as they can sustain themselves through subscriptions and donations from chatters.
Is there hope Twitch will fix this? I doubt it. I see them as weak and irresponsible bunch that are only interested in money and don't care about mixing things up in the community.
Well, I haven't watched TV for over 20 years now, so I wouldn't know.
Anyway, the issue is that it is a live streaming platform.
In comparison to last 5 years, in the last year I can recall at least 5 times where I missed significant moments because the platform automatically ran ads.
Have you seen YouTube ads lately? When I stream a video to the "app" on my TV, I get 1 minute 30 seconds of ads at the beginning. Then about 1:20 into the video, I get 2 more 30 second ads. Then at 3:00 into the video, 2 more ads come on. Sometimes there are more ads than content. Ads come on literally less than 5 minute intervals, and the part that really drives me nuts is that it's always the same 2 ads over and over. There are even ads that are 5 minutes long. So far at least, I haven't seen a 5 minute ad that I can't skip.
Don't get me started on youtube ads. Youtube will punish you for logging in with more ads. They punish you for watching popular content. I can accept 5 ads totaling 2 minutes every half hour
This is what turned me off to YT Music. When they migrated users from Play Music I tried it once, it took 10 clicks (including the dismissal of two interstitial modal ads) to get to a song that I own, and I still had to wait through a minute of ads to listen to it. I can't remove the app from my phone, but I haven't opened it in the 2-1/2 years since.
The ads can be interesting they tell me about the culture of the local tv channel city. There are many behind the scene messages and things you pick up on. Understanding who is advertising can tell you who the show is written for or why they made certain choices and that can change as a show evolves.
You get cultural references more memorable than the shows they prop up. Where's the beef still rings strong, wwwhat's up is a universal greeting.
Advertising can bring feelings of connectiveness to people. A familiar verizon song at Christmas makes life a little bit less sad for a solider in the battle field or a parent who is spending Christmas alone.
Advertising in many ways is more dynamic, interesting and long lasting compared to the shows they put on. Watching shows without them hollows out the experience.
Given that you have an issue with ads, how do you respond to the fact you can pay $5/month to subscribe to a specific streamer to avoid all ads? Would you prefer if there was a platform-level subscription level which allows you to avoid all platform-driven ads across all channels, similar to YouTube Premium, for example?
They already have a platform-level subscription. It's Twitch Turbo and costs ~$10/month. Removes all ads on the site. I don't think creators get any portion of it like with YouTube Premium though.
IIRC I heard years ago that Turbo "pays" the streamer for the non-watched ads which have been removed for the Turbo user, i.e. fractions of a cent, i.e. nothing. All it does is paying Twitch for doing fuck-all.
So Turbo pays the streamer the same amount per stream as the non-Turbo ad supported account? That sounds good and fair. I don't know why you would expect otherwise.
Heck, Turbo users probably watch more videos and so are better customers even at the same rate.
I'm in the US and have been subscribed to Turbo for over a year now, even though I rarely watch Twitch. I just keep my subscription so I don't have to be bothered with ads when I want to turn on a Twitch stream on my Apple TV.
There is Twitch Turbo, which as far as I know does not benefit creators, or does so on a very nominal level. I subscribe to individual streamers that I wish to see continue streaming. I do not care about supporting Twitch, so yes - your argument is valid that money can solve my issue, but then I have to choose between supporting a creator or supporting Twitch.
I play ARPG games specifically, so I follow a lot of creators for those specific games, and when new releases hit - I will most definitely be trying to keep up with the latest strategies and insights. And I will get that information either way, but does that mean I also have to miss interesting moments because I am not willing to support Twitch directly?
All I'm saying is that ads have gotten a lot worse lately and it is extremely noticeable.
I never understood this model. Can you imagine how much it would cost to support all my favorite streamers? I don’t even follow many. But let’s say even just 5 and now we’re looking at 25$ / month.
Obviously I must be out of the loop if this currently works… but I don’t get it.
Turbo is nice, but should be just a little cheaper. YT Premium Lite is 7 euros.
The ads are insufferable. Hate how they really want to shove it down your throat even when you back out of a stream and pick another.
Worse it’s badly implemented. Countless times I’m watching the same ads multiple times within 10-15 mins.
Only saving grace on AppleTV if you back out you can wait it out while the stream is still highlighted, with the sound off, then enter the stream again.
The UX for Twitch is downright awful right now. Browsing through multiple streamers almost always results in an ad being played for every streamer you check out, it's so bizarre, they actively punish you for trying out new streamers unless they're very small who don't have ads yet.
The workaround is to 'pre-browse' by opening multiple streamers in new tabs, muting their tabs and then checking them out a minute or two later, but that's quite a PITA.
Twitch could disappear today and I don't think I'd care, I couldn't say the same thing five or ten years ago.
The big issue with ads is that only 'partners' are allowed to turn off pre-roll ads, and in order to become a partner you need meet certain requirements all based around getting people to watch your channel, which is difficult because most people (me include) will not sit through ads in order to watch some small streamer for a minute or two to see if they are interesting. Twitch seems to actively work against small streamers trying to grow their brand.
My main problem is that frankly youtube streaming is technically better, I hoped twitch catches up but I still can't just pause a stream and "catch up" like on YT, watching archive of currently playing channel (say esport event) is also royal PITA.
On YT I can tune hour late, then just jump back to match that happened, watch it, skip the intermissions and catch up, on twitch that's much more complicated.
> - Softcore porn allowed on the platform. Literally, girls doing ass up squats in front of the camera for a $3 donation. You cannot avoid this because its part of the platforms "culture" and even your favorite streamers will one day end up watching a clip or something on their stream. This also breeds incels and very toxic chatters.
I dunno, I never got suggested one of those during at least last few years. If I scroll for like 3 screens I get some vtubers but that's about it. I think ability to filter out by stream tags would entirely solve the problem
> - Ads. Twitch is fighting against ad-blockers. Fine by me, I can bare ads, but what I cannot do is bear 5 ads in a row every 30 minutes. This has gotten a lot worse lately. It is annoying and disruptive to the user experience, and thankfully there are streamers who disable them altogether as they can sustain themselves through subscriptions and donations from chatters.
On top of that they often play in absolutely wrong moments. Like getting ad immediately after clicking a new stream, before you even know whether you want to watch them or not.
The comments and community feeling in Youtube streaming sucks. Ludwig who made the switch a year ago from Twitch to Youtube said that was his biggest nuisance with Youtube, and I agree. I stopped watching him because of it since there's more fun to be had on Twitch.
Twitch is more like a bunch of monkeys which is fun and builds hype. Youtube is too serious and the chat is too slow for the streamer to properly interact with.
Something about Twitch chat is magical, even though it is commonly just walls of copypasta, it feels like participating in a real, authentic audience. Often times it is more entertaining that the stream itself, just like on HN you would rush to the comments before even reading TFA to see what other people are saying.
I can't quite pinpoint why YouTube doesn't have the same feeling though.
Well for one thing Twitch has the advantage of being primarily gaming-focused, whereas YouTube is at its core a generic video host with no particular focus.
But YouTube has also completely destroyed their entire concept of having a "YouTube community" over the years. There might be something of various creator communities in various niches, but the heavy censorship, mess of a comments section that does everything in its power to halt any form of conversation, leaving only spam and idiots in most comment sections, etc. left it with nothing of a community, or any real creator/consumer dynamic.
YouTube no longer has private nor direct messages, so if people want to communicate they have to do it on another platform. It's also just a bit of a mess with the transition from the original idea of "everyone has an anonymous handle" to "every must have their Google+ profile linked and use their real name" to "Google+ is dead and now some people have silly handles and some people are real people." The whole thing adds up to make for a place with no coherent community.
It's been forever since I've looked at comments on either site, but hearing that youtube comments are "too serious" caused a double take. Hasn't that site always been known for the toxicity of its comments?
Twitch will never stop the softcore porn because it's a huge source of revenue and they DGAF that they are serving softcore porn to teens. Honestly I don't care that teens watch cammers or porn, but it's toxic to the platform to have it share the same site, and that also allows payment to be shared and basically makes it way easier for kids to pay cammers, which is super weird IMO. I also really dislike the encouragement of parasocial relationships on the platform. It's a huge problem in camming in general but twitch makes parasocial relationships a competitive sport through some really messed up crowd psychology.
"Mommy give me twenty bucks for twitch bits so I can pay XQC" and then becoming a hot tub stream simp is so much easier than "Mommy give me your credit card so I can create an account on this cam girl site"
I wish more in tech would stop pretending pornography is something benign. This isn't the case, though I personally thought the same just a few years ago. There is data, and victims available to see it is not.
Understanding a Context of Risk: Pornography and Child Sexual Abuse
https://osf.io/kf4uv/download/?format=pdfOne of the most troubling patterns emerging in the research relates to the increasing number of younger children (under the ages of 12-14) involved in perpetrating child sexual assault. Clinical and legal studies are reporting greater numbers of preteen children demonstrating interpersonal problematic sexual behaviors that intrude on the physical space and security of other children (Friedrich et al., 2006; Swisher et al., 2008).
<>
Most relevant to the purpose of this paper is the role of exposure to sexually explicit media as one of the explanatory variables in child sexual abuse. A meta-analysis of 22 studies demonstrates that exposure to pornography, particularly violent pornography, is significantly associated with increased rates of sexual aggression in the general population (Wright et al., 2016). Given that the average age of first exposure to pornography is age 11 (Wolak et al.,
2006), it is important to begin to consider what role, if any, pornography may play in child sexual abuse, particular if perpetrated by children. Several studies have included sexually explicit media as a contributing factor for child-perpetrated sexual abuse.
The Association Between Exposure to Violent Pornography and Teen Dating Violence in Grade 10 High School Students
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/Exposure to pornography in general has been linked with adolescent dating violence and sexual aggression, but less is known about exposure to violent pornography specifically. The current study examined the association of violent pornography exposure with different forms of teen dating violence (TDV) using baseline survey data from a sample of Grade 10 high school students who reported being in a dating relationship in the past year (n = 1694)
A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcom.12201Is pornography consumption correlated with committing actual acts of sexual aggression? 22 studies from 7 different countries were analyzed. Consumption was associated with sexual aggression in the United States and internationally, among males and females, and in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Associations were stronger for verbal than physical sexual aggression, although both were significant. The general pattern of results suggested that violent content may be an exacerbating factor.
I’ve talked to my friends about this (we all have young children) and they had no idea softcore porn is prevalent on twitch. Not to mention actual adult stars regularly streaming.
And before anybody replies “and whats wrong with that” blah blah, parents still think of twitch as a place where kids can watch minecraft.
Of course we do! That's why we're talking to each other about it. Twitch risks a backlash from parents if adult content comes more prevalent on the site.
I won't say "What's wrong with that" but I will point out that Twitch has in place safe modes for "Mature" streams that isn't much of a gate keeper, but neither is the little M that pops up in the corner of mature TV programs. The site also doesn't seem to do anything to intentionally market directly to children. Not that it doesn't attract kids, but so does TV. I don't think it's unfair to expect parents to keep an eye on what their kids watch.
Not saying it’s not there, but I’ve never seen anything like soft core porn on twitch. What’s wrong with me that the algorithm thinks I don’t like naked people?
- Softcore porn (I would not call it porn at all, search online for softcore porn and you get something completely different). You don't have to watch it and I never see it in my feeds, you have to actively search for it to find it. So I'm wondering how you notice it for it to be a problem? Yes; I'm calling you out.
- Ads: youtube has a LOT more ads, and a lot of twitch streamers don't do the ad program. So here too I'm not as convinced it's a problem, I definitely don't see many ads and usually if there are any the streamer is aware and takes a break or something so you don't miss much.
They had carte blanche and they literally made a worse version of the television model. The staff don't get paid for their work, and we have to watch more ads that watch us.
The most infuriating thing about Twitch ads is that it insists on running a thirty-second pre-roll ad. This is a platform where the focus is on liveness and immediacy, where you're very likely to open a stream because what's happening right this moment is interesting (e.g. a speedrunner on world-record pace), and then that same platform forces you to miss out on that live moment.
Literally any other form of advertising would fit Twitch better than pre-roll ads. Even a shorter pre-roll ad would be better (and probably lead to better retention). Gating people for a whole half-minute from a live event like that implies, at least to me, a company that doesn't understand their own platform.
Twitch has recently (within the past few months iirc) started giving streamers a lot more control over how and when ads are run. I don't know a ton of details, but it sounds like the streamer has some target [1] (like 3 minutes of ads per hour) and gets to choose exactly when those ads are displayed. If they meet that target, it disables Twitch's preroll and midroll ads entirely.
I exclusively watch speedrun streams, and from what I've seen it works great for those. No more preroll ads, and if the runner is paying attention to their ad schedule, they run a big block of ads for when they breaks to stretch/eat/use the restroom/etc, or during downtime like reset-heavy and cutscene-heavy earlygame sequences, so you don't miss anything.
It's a significantly better experience than the normal preroll ads and random/timed midroll ads, and from what I've heard it sounds like Twitch pays more to the streamers who use this system as well.
They did eventually ban gambling streams, so who knows. The trouble, I think, is defining what qualifies as "software porn". Do you start policing what streamers are wearing? Are some activities, like squatting, disallowed? And any definition will probably court controversy, especially because it will overwhelmingly affect female streamers.
They could add a general ban of "intentional sexual behavior", which is vague enough to apply common sense and affect just the people who were meant to be affected. Similar to how a judge can use common sense to interpret vague terms in the law.
One thing I have noticed with twitch is how stagnant viewership seems to be for most streamers. It seems like once you hit your peak in growth.... there is just nothing after that, no growth at all. Most streamers I watch have been on a slow decline in viewership and subs... Without "oilers" (people who gift a ton of subs or money) most streams would die completely. One main reason for this in my opinion is how terrible ads are on twitch. I watch a lot of GTA RP on twitch... and ads completely destroyed it from a viewer perspective. Steaming in general lends itself well to collaboration... but, when I want to check out a different stream and am met with 2 minutes of the most repetitive and annoying ads.. I quickly go back to my main streamer who I use my twitch prime on so I don't get ads.
I got so fed up with twitch ads that I actually use twitch turbo now.. which isn't marketed at all for whatever reason. My viewing experience is so much better now, and I am checking out a larger variety of streamers.
Ads on twitch are so horrendous that pretty much every streamer I watch apologize to their viewers about it.
Twitch's second failure is that it is so incredibly out of touch with what viewers want to see. Twitch run events are abysmal, yet they give no help or support to the creators who are actually making good events or shows. The fact that twitch didn't become a big player in e-sports is such a massive failure. Look at what happened with Chess... it exploded and is still in a pretty good position all because some smart people decided to run some actually entertaining events. Twitch could of easily dominated the e-sports market by partnering and helping the smaller tournament orgs... yet now those orgs are failing and the e-sports scene is once again cratering to the ground. If it wasn't for the surprise success of Valorant.. e-sports would be dead right now.
E sports is heavily investor dependent. Which means rates go up and itll dry up. I would be really surprised if any of it directly generated a profit. Its for game sales long term.
As a former Twitch staff, I wish Emmett luck. Twitch is faced with several challenges right now: increasing competition from all sides, perpetually disgruntled creators, and pressure from their parent company to hit aggressive revenue targets while shilling for Amazon Games. This is all nothing new, and Emmett has been navigating it for years. I'm ready to believe it just doesn't seem as important now as it did a year ago. Having a child will do that.
I think Twitch could benefit from a breath of fresh air. I'm a little surprised it's Dan and not someone else from Amazon, but I think that speaks to the fact Emmett went on his own terms on not theirs. Dan knows what he's doing and he'll walk the line between doing what's good for Twitch and doing what's best for creators.
FWIW this coincides with a pretty important Amazon-internal announcement about return to office details. That, plus new kid? Yeah, I'd quit my job too.
“We fucking fund the people who did 9/11—still, to this day. Donald Trump literally went on national television and said, ‘They bought $10 billion worth of weapons,’ so if they chop-chop-chop an American legal permanent resident, it’s OK.”
237 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadI honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014 would be the future of Twitch, and Twitch did allow some developer tools for interactivity between players and games, but very very few devs make use of it outside of an intentional gimmick because there's a massive chicken-and-egg problem there that Twitch hasn't facilitated.
I find it difficult (outside of adding more dev tools and allowing for things like twitch plays pokemon as someone mentioned earlier in this thread) that a corporate implementation of a new "thing" will be as successful, partly because of the vicious backlash against whatever corporate sanitation measures would have to be implemented just to allow it on the platform.
I think there's a fundamental disconnect in what is most fun and engaging about watching and commenting in chats on twitch and what twitch as a company would allow if they tried to invasively step in an manage the product.
A good example of this was a few years ago, there was almost universally panned attempt to create some form of "moderation council" which turned out to be absurdly tone deaf and I haven't heard anything since.
https://www.pcgamer.com/twitch-addresses-hot-tub-streaming-c...
As sibling posts explained - it wants to be in a one-foot-in-one-foot-out sort of position on the question.
You can see this for example, she isn't allowed to pay for normal ads since most networks doesn't allow porn ads, but streaming is a way for her to advertise:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/amouranth-reveals-her-on...
From what I know they can't link their OnlyFans directly on Twitch (they need at least one intermediary website) nor even acknowledge its existence directly on stream.
By keeping softcore erotica nudge-nudge on their video game streaming site, they allow viewers to tell their parents and girlfriends that they're watching games and chat. Spinning it off would kill the market for that content without doing anything for the video game side of the house.
If you're running an ad-driven platform, you need to be in this weird Goldilocks zone where your platform has sexual content but isn't really known for sexual content. That's where Twitter, Twitch, Instagram and Reddit are, and it's why OnlyFans tried to push the "not just for porn" angle so hard for a while.
Twitch is the top of the "marketing funnel" to onlyfans for a plethora of onlyfans streamers: https://i.imgur.com/jeOq6ek.png
OF spammers have also completely ruined NSFW reddit, because the simp mods do nothing about it.
I've believed the same thing since 2014 which is why I started Muxy in 2015. We build tools that let viewers and broadcasters interact with gameplay in real-time. It's been hard to make bigger strides as management at Twitch seems to turn over faster than we can build working relationships. We're finally seeing some real traction with publishers and studios over the last 18 months. You might know us from the Bits days when we launched the cheer cup in summer 2016.
So what, if it works well enough, which it seems like it does? Can't we just leave things be?
Unfortunately Twitch's current API is too locked-down/fussy to build a feasible alternative.
We have so many cool unreleased widgets for bits and streams that have been dormant because it’s not possible to monetize them. Twitch could fix this…
Most of the comments on Twitch strike me as pretty weird. If I look at Twitch their problem is that, as a business, they never really broke out of their gaming niche. It's strange to suggest that Twitch should have catered more to the audience that they had already captured. Not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but for a company that took tons of VC and was acquired for a ton of money I don't think the answer to their "we need to make more money" problem is to cater even more to gamers. It's like trying to squeeze blood from a stone; we already see it in the way Twitch is squeezing more of the revenue share from large creators and refusing to entertain Google's huge content contracts.
I don't see how Twitch continues to grow by just focusing gaming - especially when the esports side is going through it own struggles now and even teams are being forced diversify into content (e.g. 100Theives selling energy drinks).
Twitch's "problem" to me is while it was a stroke of genius to break out gaming into it's own site out of Justin.tv, is that same audience has become openly hostile to any sort of non-gaming content. If you ask me the future of Twitch is with creators like KaiCenat who are able to bring different demographics to the platform with other types of content. Of course the Twitch superfans would hate to hear this; I don't envy them at all.
At the least, Twitch has a de facto monopoly in the gaming niche, to the point that the only way YouTube/Facebook/Microsoft could compete at all was with exclusivity contracts, which didn't even work as it didn't bring other streamers to the platform.
Encouraging the development of highly interactive programs like TPP isn't gaming specific either.
1. The top 3 gaming categories eclipse Just Chatting; and there are hundreds of gaming categories on Twitch
2. Most Just Chatting creators are gaming creators. There are exceptions (KaiCenant, Hasanabi, various female streamers); but the site is still geared toward gaming.
The most curious is the alienation of creators which were raking up like 60k viewers per stream by the threat of banning. If you have ever seen one of these streams, the creators are so limited in what they can do.
Another shock was this new Kick platform which is managed by a creator itself, and apparently is doing quite well on the surface (wondering how their balance sheet looks) but I think this is what Twitch needs: a creator at the wheel.
As for kick, they seem to be actively ignoring/rejecting these limitations (potentially because they at least partly externally funded by stake (online gambling platform) and kick was a response to most gambling being banned on twitch). I'm not sure how long they can maintain this if they want to stay profitable/attract people to their platform.
Eh. Then those advertisers will have to create the content from now on...
Advertisers need to get comfortable with nudity, swearing, and the whole range of non-abusive human behavior. They're almost as bad as the credit card companies with linking morality to commerce.
YouTube is slowly starting to relax, so I'm hoping the shift is happening.
It's okay if the person appearing next to the Big Mac says "fuck".
If not streaming directly, they're in channels where the streamer is playing their game. They'll give out DLC codes so that the streamer plays the game longer and the game studio makes a mint off the back of the viewers. Content created.
A 20 quid DLC key gifted to the streamer will buy you an hour long gameplay ad easily, usually way longer.
There's so many streamers out there they just sort by view count and cherry pick the brand safe ones. They don't need to change their criteria.
For example, making up new rules about swearing too close to the intro of videos being grounds for demonetization, and retroactively applying it to everyone's back catalog from before the rule existed?
Retroactive application of new standards? That's newish to youtube but standard for television. Old TV episodes that don't meet present advertiser standards don't get reruns.
Thankfully there are still some video creators on youtube who don't care about money and are doing it for other reasons (passion, hobby, etc.) But youtube has lost most of their incentive to promote that sort of unmonetized content, so it's becoming harder to find.
I hear nothing but complaints from everywhere. I wonder if it is possible to treat creators well…?
Are creators even worth much on average considering the volume of people willing to just grind out content continuously without much regard to … themselves?
It seems to be an endless search for more subscribers, more views, more patrons of some type, more questionable sponsors.
The the youtube, twitch, etc video creators ecosystem seems perpetually messed up, and creators seem to keep at it, sometimes seem to be flogging themselves.
It's just that 'influencers' like nothing more than to complain.
Admittedly, Twitch is a clusterfuck though.
Also, creators on a platform that grew its original userbase through piracy and media re-mixes with little or no content-policing now have to be extremely careful about even very clear-cut fair-use of commercial media, or risk losing one of their copyright strikes (as in, three strikes and you're out—that is, we kill your business). It makes their videos worse—so, it's also bad for viewers—and causes them stress.
Monetization is a big part of this problem. It is possible for something to be fair use and commercialized, but once you've commercialized it you're fighting an uphill battle to claim fair use.
This seems like such a stupid, pointless effort. Instead of pentesting to find exactly where the line is so you can toe it perfectly, why not... just stay far away from the line and stop swearing. Wouldn't that be much less effort and less risk?
YT is not friendly to creators, for the same reason Twitch is not friendly to creators: advertisers hate what people want to watch.
Even Patreon, where people pay rather than watch ads, repeatedly runs into issues with creators because of pay schedules, amounts, percent cuts, platform features, and more.
If its someone else's platform, creators don't win.
If you started out without any consideration of this, then you're just a babe in the woods type of situation, but if you thought you could do this and "disrupt", then you're just living in a delusion. You want to make money from advertisers, then you're going to play by their rules.
I've been saying for a while that the next big thing in streaming is Wordpress but for Streamers.
Something relatively easy for small streamers to set up and manage on their own, cheap enough to start small and scale up as it starts to make money, with the ability to handle large-scale streams if necessary.
I don't know how you would handle provisioning the servers and such. Maybe it's not easy enough to automate. But I think this sort of thing would take a huge bite out of centralized streaming sites.
I don't think WordPress pays anyone anything.
They built a platform and the will also provide hosting. You can download WordPress from wordpress.org and just run it. Or you can go to wordpress.com and buy a whole hosting plan where wordpress.com manages the software for you.
But WordPress doesn't give fuck number one about what you do with it. So you are free to monetize it in any fashion you want. They'll even help you with that. WordPress doesn't have to worry about if any of the people on their site are making money because they still get paid.
Twitch and YouTube are free for creators. You don't have to pay to stream on Twitch or to post videos to YouTube. All the cost of hosting and serving is borne by the service. Which is why they were doing ads in the first place. But with creators now needing actual production, they realized they were pouring in serious money into their channels, but getting none of that sweet ad money.
So shit got complicated. It's free to post and free to watch. But that doesn't make it free to host or produce. Which is why you have YouTube showing you ads and the video itself being sponsored by AG1, Dollar Shave Club, and Mystery Box of the Month Club.
I think ultimately, these places are going to need to charge for hosting. And yes, that's going to kill a lot of channels. But ok. You can afford overpriced, under-engineered rainbow glowy keyboards, you can instead put that towards a $30/month hosting fee.
If we're talking about Software, then wow, Microsoft is really treating those game streamers well, because they can use it to play games which they stream.
Self-hosted social networks and microblogs are all over the place and have been for decades, and Twitter is falling apart, but the audience is still on Twitter. Self-hosting streams has never been easier, but even if it were one-click it invariably costs money out of pocket for the bandwidth to self-host a stream, and Twitch does not. WordPress is trivial to host for nearly nothing; streaming, not so much.
The appeal of Twitch isn't livestreaming, it's the culture and existing social network of users and streamers who are already there, and the ease of starting up. The architecture or centralization of the next big thing in the space won't matter, it's whether both the creators, audience, and money will all show up at roughly the same time.
https://www.twitch.tv/turbo
As for Kick, that is not a legitimate business. One, they’ve ripped off the entire UI from Twitch. Two, the anything goes attitude is not going to fly if they ever get real advertisers.
Last time I checked, Kick still mostly used Twitch logos and their policy documents were still talking about Twitch, since they didn't even bother looking at them.
Kick is a front for Stake the bitcoin casino, not a legitimate streaming site. It exists purely because Trainwrecks wanted to keep making money streaming bitcoin slots. It's been an utter shit show with people streaming porn, sex, the super bowl, incredible amounts of racism... Twitch absolutely is not going that direction with good reason.
Chat streams are second with 6k viewers, and the most viewed (non-gambling) game has a mere 1.6k viewers.
I can't imagine why anyone would stream games on there unless they're banned from Twitch.
Then there's the shadier casinos that provide fake balances to streamers so they're never at risk of going bust, and can keep perpetually hitting the big jackpots that entice the audience...
Schadenfreude
Do you have some up-to-date numbers for this? Because YouTube has streaming since 2016, and they never caught up to twitch. Not in the pandemia, when Twitch was growing like crazy. And also not when they bought some big Streamers from Twitch. IIRC, at some point they were even worse than Facebook Gaming for some while. Though, I haven't seen the numbers for 2023 yet.
> Another shock was this new Kick platform which is managed by a creator itself, and apparently is doing quite well on the surface
Kick seems to be 99% bots. I wouldn't call that doing well.
YouTube does not want you to be able to search Live content because they want to sell you YouTube Red or YouTube TV. I can't possibly agree that they are anywhere close to Twitch.
Unless you are already following a creator, or see their published content on the platform, you wouldn't even know live streaming existed on the platform.
You hit the nail on the head tho “our creators and viewers are the enemy of capitalization”.
I think one of the problems with our current fiscal model of "year over year growth or die" is that some products have a ceiling before the only way to squeeze more is to hurt the overall experience for users.
I don't know what kind of fingerprinting are they doing, but it's definitely not just user agent nor IP address nor browser version. I suspect they somehow detect that I'm using Alpine Linux (it's my main OS) and don't like it, because this doesn't happen on different distros.
I think this started happening shortly after they got a massive amount of new accounts being created.
Like, my account has existed for years, has MFA enabled, and has given them money frequently. But I can't login from my main device. Alright.
But I can login with Firefox from my Steam Deck without any problems.
I know musl libc has weird compatibility issues (e.g. Nvidia, Widevine, etc), but as far as I can see I have no other issues with the website; I can play streams, and I can see chat messages and stuff. It's only the login form that for some reason responds with an error when I try to login.
Smells suspiciously like a hack to combat botnets.
* Edit: no idea what are these called, but sometimes they moan and lick the left side, sometimes the right so you can hear it in your corresponding ear.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR
Hot is probably the right word. Well done if they make money from that I guess.
the fact wearing a bikini at the beach is not sexual does not mean streaming yourself wearing a bikini in a hot tub while making moaning noises is not softcore porn. the intention is what matters eg attract teenage simp boys.
I'm not commenting on whether it's good or bad, I'm just stating something that anyone who has ever been on twitch is well aware of and would never argue. It's a thing.
One's not sexual. The other one super-duper obviously is, to everyone involved, even if the bathing suit stays on.
Oh no, they bowed to people whose livelihoods depend on staying healthy and realized that masks actually do help when everyone wears them.
> Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence).
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/yes-masks-reduce-risk-spre...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/masks-work-cochra...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/16/cochrane-...
At least, unlike the other person in this thread, you didn't do the gaslighty thing of acting like 'we all know' masks don't work.
The Cochrane review was not incorrect; it was not retracted. The "apology from Cochrane" was not about the paper itself, and they didn't say that the conclusions were wrong. The NY Times and the Washington Post and Gavi are just wrong, and they're lying. Full stop. By literally the same standards of evidence they are using ("the lower bound of the confidence interval crosses 1.0, so we can't exclude the possibility of benefit"), Ivermectin and HCQ "work" against Covid. So you either accept both claims, or you reject both.
We have two political teams, each advancing separate-but-equal forms of pseudo-sciencey twaddle, and neither side is willing to admit that the actual data doesn't back their opinions:
https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-mask-fiasco
Similarly, I don't know anyone who has died from wearing a mask.
This is not even to mention the numerous other studies, experiments, and demsonstartsions of all sorts of respiratory protective gear that show effectiveness against particulates smaller even than COVID-19.
The intensity of the push for masking was not at all matched by the effectiveness of masking. From most people's perspectives, if the rate of infection with masking is 90% the rate with no masking then masking doesn't work in layperson's terms.
Could I get a citation for this please? Just about every source I've seen has since admitted that masks did absolutely nothing for the purposes for which they were advised to be used.
Not spreading a deadly virus at a convention filled with strangers from all over the world is now considered "leftist extremism". The last 8 or so years really have done a number on people.
We're also seeing more people rallying behind JK Rowling these days too, perhaps after seeing through the lies and realising that, actually, she bravely put herself out there to stand up for women's rights, knowing this would make her a lightning rod for the abusers and harassers of the pro-gender movement.
Incel culture: I don't agree with this one, I don't think it's something widespread
Softcore porn: The whole hot tub/asmr categories. Amouranth herself says she uses twitch as a billboard to get people to her onlyfans[2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/06/nothing-fore...
[2] https://twitter.com/jappleby/status/1597327662644858880
The root cause I don't want to speculate short of getting banned from HN also for having opinions about when people should start having sex or be allowed to watch videos of adults having sex.
Now if twitch were a perfect turnkey operation the CEO could step away for a few weeks here and there... But also maybe that's just not realistic
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/7dyi7r/requ...
Additionally, you rarely hear the actual reason for someone quitting from a position like this; there will nearly always be a nice cover story. Being honest this time around, especially given the actual problems the company has, seems unlikely.
I'm not saying the child was no factor, but intuitively it seems quite unlikely that this is the full story.
I don't know Emmett, but if he was totally set in terms of wealth, and if the main thing keeping him there was because it was satisfying work, well, then he could quite reasonably decide that doing something less demanding so that he could have the spare time and energy to be a very good father to his child might be more satisfying. That's certainly the decision I'd make.
CEOs are not a lot of people. By definition they are extremely few in number, and those who become CEOs of top companies have a perhaps pathological drive to get there. For someone like that, an entirely predictable event -- like the birth of a child -- is the last thing that would make them sacrifice the position they've worked so hard for.
Now would I quit my job for $100 million? Absolutely! But maybe that just means I'm most people...
It's like continuing to play your Civilization game for "Just... One... More... Turn..." after you defeated everyone and you're the only civ left.
So you get into the office (maybe) at 10am (maybe), reading some emails, firing off some responses, maybe taking a call or two. Then a ritzy lunch for an hour. Coming back to some more emails and meetings.
Some days you will be putting out fires all day. But the more mature the company is the less you have to do that. After 15+ years the company should have a mature executive team that can handle all but the biggest fires by themselves.
Most people reading this site are in the 1% of the world and could easily retire to a lower cost of living area right now or after a few years of saving. They usually don't: Firstly, because the drive that gets you to earn that kind of money also keeps you going. If you're used to and can handle 80 hour weeks, going to 0 is likely to make you feel unfulfilled quite fast (which is also why I don't fully buy the child story). Secondly, you always judge yourself in regards your friend group, and usually quite badly. This might seem absurd to us, but they might be looking at their friends with private jets, yachts and paintings valued more than their total net worth and not feel like they are at the top.
There are exception, of course, but I doubt you'll find many of them in the extreme environments at the top of the business hierarchy.
But if you've banked $100 million, that's a totally different world. You have wealth that grows by itself passively, and you'll never be able to spend it. You can live wherever you want in the world and never have to work, and neither will your offspring for multiple generations. Any work you do at that point is firmly in the "Play the video game after you won" territory.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ace.html
It’s not the “position” he worked so hard for, it was to build a company. Being CEO is a means to doing that, not the end goal. He did that, it is extremely successful, it will probably continue to be successful without him.
He even says it in the article - that for a long time, he wasn’t sure if he could leave and have it continue to function well. As someone who started, ran, and sold a (much, much smaller) company, I understand that viscerally. If you’re somewhat tired of it, it can feel like you’re trapped. But then you work on that, making sure that the things you do get well covered by someone else. And then, one day, there’s nothing it needs you for anymore, and you’re finally free.
I'm certain it happens once in a while when someone has a personal realization and decides to change their life's trajectory fundamentally. Maybe their own (role model) parents died and they discovered that time with your children cannot be substituted with gifts and money.
Now in this case it's unlikely given Twitch problems but sometimes important humans are just humans.
Maybe there are those who can simultaneously raise a baby and be the successful CEO of a sizeable operating unit, but in practice usually one or the other is prioritized.
Couldn't be happier for the guy!
For reference, Twitch has invested very heavily in anti adblockers and it’s pretty difficult to sidestep the ads these days without paying $5/month for a subscription.
Compare this to streaming on YouTube, which has a (much) worse UI, but tolerates ad blockers and lets you watch the parts of the steam you missed. I’m not optimistic that Twitch will be able to survive if YouTube manages to get their shit together and make a half decent UI.
"Paying" the streamer for the ad(s) being not shown due to Turbo, i.e. fractions of a cent. If you're mainly watching 1-2 streamers subscribing directly to them does more for them for almost the same money. The streamer is still only getting 50% of the sub fee but at least that's ~ $2.50 rather than a few cents per month for many hours of watched content.
I was a very regular user, 2-4 hours a day, then boom, forced ads, and I never went back.
[0] https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ff2mpv/
However, my issue (and also disappointment) with Twitch right now is:
- Softcore porn allowed on the platform. Literally, girls doing ass up squats in front of the camera for a $3 donation. You cannot avoid this because its part of the platforms "culture" and even your favorite streamers will one day end up watching a clip or something on their stream. This also breeds incels and very toxic chatters.
- Ads. Twitch is fighting against ad-blockers. Fine by me, I can bare ads, but what I cannot do is bear 5 ads in a row every 30 minutes. This has gotten a lot worse lately. It is annoying and disruptive to the user experience, and thankfully there are streamers who disable them altogether as they can sustain themselves through subscriptions and donations from chatters.
Is there hope Twitch will fix this? I doubt it. I see them as weak and irresponsible bunch that are only interested in money and don't care about mixing things up in the community.
Anyway, the issue is that it is a live streaming platform.
In comparison to last 5 years, in the last year I can recall at least 5 times where I missed significant moments because the platform automatically ran ads.
Funnily that's exactly what everyone is doing[1].
[1] https://www.fiercevideo.com/video/linear-video-subscriber-lo...
You get cultural references more memorable than the shows they prop up. Where's the beef still rings strong, wwwhat's up is a universal greeting.
Advertising can bring feelings of connectiveness to people. A familiar verizon song at Christmas makes life a little bit less sad for a solider in the battle field or a parent who is spending Christmas alone.
Advertising in many ways is more dynamic, interesting and long lasting compared to the shows they put on. Watching shows without them hollows out the experience.
Heck, Turbo users probably watch more videos and so are better customers even at the same rate.
I play ARPG games specifically, so I follow a lot of creators for those specific games, and when new releases hit - I will most definitely be trying to keep up with the latest strategies and insights. And I will get that information either way, but does that mean I also have to miss interesting moments because I am not willing to support Twitch directly?
All I'm saying is that ads have gotten a lot worse lately and it is extremely noticeable.
Obviously I must be out of the loop if this currently works… but I don’t get it.
Turbo is nice, but should be just a little cheaper. YT Premium Lite is 7 euros.
The ads are insufferable. Hate how they really want to shove it down your throat even when you back out of a stream and pick another.
Worse it’s badly implemented. Countless times I’m watching the same ads multiple times within 10-15 mins.
Only saving grace on AppleTV if you back out you can wait it out while the stream is still highlighted, with the sound off, then enter the stream again.
The workaround is to 'pre-browse' by opening multiple streamers in new tabs, muting their tabs and then checking them out a minute or two later, but that's quite a PITA.
Twitch could disappear today and I don't think I'd care, I couldn't say the same thing five or ten years ago.
On YT I can tune hour late, then just jump back to match that happened, watch it, skip the intermissions and catch up, on twitch that's much more complicated.
> - Softcore porn allowed on the platform. Literally, girls doing ass up squats in front of the camera for a $3 donation. You cannot avoid this because its part of the platforms "culture" and even your favorite streamers will one day end up watching a clip or something on their stream. This also breeds incels and very toxic chatters.
I dunno, I never got suggested one of those during at least last few years. If I scroll for like 3 screens I get some vtubers but that's about it. I think ability to filter out by stream tags would entirely solve the problem
> - Ads. Twitch is fighting against ad-blockers. Fine by me, I can bare ads, but what I cannot do is bear 5 ads in a row every 30 minutes. This has gotten a lot worse lately. It is annoying and disruptive to the user experience, and thankfully there are streamers who disable them altogether as they can sustain themselves through subscriptions and donations from chatters.
On top of that they often play in absolutely wrong moments. Like getting ad immediately after clicking a new stream, before you even know whether you want to watch them or not.
Twitch is more like a bunch of monkeys which is fun and builds hype. Youtube is too serious and the chat is too slow for the streamer to properly interact with.
I can't quite pinpoint why YouTube doesn't have the same feeling though.
Twitch chat is for emoting, especially in ways that please the streamer. Trying to actually chat with someone on an active Twitch channel is futile.
But YouTube has also completely destroyed their entire concept of having a "YouTube community" over the years. There might be something of various creator communities in various niches, but the heavy censorship, mess of a comments section that does everything in its power to halt any form of conversation, leaving only spam and idiots in most comment sections, etc. left it with nothing of a community, or any real creator/consumer dynamic.
YouTube no longer has private nor direct messages, so if people want to communicate they have to do it on another platform. It's also just a bit of a mess with the transition from the original idea of "everyone has an anonymous handle" to "every must have their Google+ profile linked and use their real name" to "Google+ is dead and now some people have silly handles and some people are real people." The whole thing adds up to make for a place with no coherent community.
"Mommy give me twenty bucks for twitch bits so I can pay XQC" and then becoming a hot tub stream simp is so much easier than "Mommy give me your credit card so I can create an account on this cam girl site"
Understanding a Context of Risk: Pornography and Child Sexual Abuse https://osf.io/kf4uv/download/?format=pdf One of the most troubling patterns emerging in the research relates to the increasing number of younger children (under the ages of 12-14) involved in perpetrating child sexual assault. Clinical and legal studies are reporting greater numbers of preteen children demonstrating interpersonal problematic sexual behaviors that intrude on the physical space and security of other children (Friedrich et al., 2006; Swisher et al., 2008).
<>
Most relevant to the purpose of this paper is the role of exposure to sexually explicit media as one of the explanatory variables in child sexual abuse. A meta-analysis of 22 studies demonstrates that exposure to pornography, particularly violent pornography, is significantly associated with increased rates of sexual aggression in the general population (Wright et al., 2016). Given that the average age of first exposure to pornography is age 11 (Wolak et al., 2006), it is important to begin to consider what role, if any, pornography may play in child sexual abuse, particular if perpetrated by children. Several studies have included sexually explicit media as a contributing factor for child-perpetrated sexual abuse.
The Association Between Exposure to Violent Pornography and Teen Dating Violence in Grade 10 High School Students https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/ Exposure to pornography in general has been linked with adolescent dating violence and sexual aggression, but less is known about exposure to violent pornography specifically. The current study examined the association of violent pornography exposure with different forms of teen dating violence (TDV) using baseline survey data from a sample of Grade 10 high school students who reported being in a dating relationship in the past year (n = 1694)
A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcom.12201 Is pornography consumption correlated with committing actual acts of sexual aggression? 22 studies from 7 different countries were analyzed. Consumption was associated with sexual aggression in the United States and internationally, among males and females, and in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Associations were stronger for verbal than physical sexual aggression, although both were significant. The general pattern of results suggested that violent content may be an exacerbating factor.
And before anybody replies “and whats wrong with that” blah blah, parents still think of twitch as a place where kids can watch minecraft.
Twitch is playing with fire here.
I don't have a stance on the Twitch/softporn thing, but "think of the kids" is used too often for evil these days.
Sure you can see gaming there, but it's not what dominates and is pushed by the platform.
But how many people want to log in to watch someone with a face for radio and a voice for silent movies narrate some random game?
By comparison, the chaturbate crowd is far fewer in number but has an outsized impact.
We have onlyfans for the other stuff, do they need to mix it?
Isn't that the entire value proposition of twitch?
not even a joke. a lot of OF performers use their twitch as a marketting arm.
- Softcore porn (I would not call it porn at all, search online for softcore porn and you get something completely different). You don't have to watch it and I never see it in my feeds, you have to actively search for it to find it. So I'm wondering how you notice it for it to be a problem? Yes; I'm calling you out.
- Ads: youtube has a LOT more ads, and a lot of twitch streamers don't do the ad program. So here too I'm not as convinced it's a problem, I definitely don't see many ads and usually if there are any the streamer is aware and takes a break or something so you don't miss much.
But this doesn’t prevent the other problem where streamers will watch those others on their stream.
I’m not that bothered about it but I think it might be a problem that it’s a part of twitch culture.
This is basically how Television used to operate. I think it was more like, 4 ads every 15 minutes. So way more actually.
It's definitely about time for a new long form media company.. maybe one that doesn't sell itself to Microsoft
Literally any other form of advertising would fit Twitch better than pre-roll ads. Even a shorter pre-roll ad would be better (and probably lead to better retention). Gating people for a whole half-minute from a live event like that implies, at least to me, a company that doesn't understand their own platform.
I exclusively watch speedrun streams, and from what I've seen it works great for those. No more preroll ads, and if the runner is paying attention to their ad schedule, they run a big block of ads for when they breaks to stretch/eat/use the restroom/etc, or during downtime like reset-heavy and cutscene-heavy earlygame sequences, so you don't miss anything.
It's a significantly better experience than the normal preroll ads and random/timed midroll ads, and from what I've heard it sounds like Twitch pays more to the streamers who use this system as well.
[1]: https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/ads-incentive-program-getti...
It can't skip ads completely, but it will prevent showing them.
I got so fed up with twitch ads that I actually use twitch turbo now.. which isn't marketed at all for whatever reason. My viewing experience is so much better now, and I am checking out a larger variety of streamers.
Ads on twitch are so horrendous that pretty much every streamer I watch apologize to their viewers about it.
Twitch's second failure is that it is so incredibly out of touch with what viewers want to see. Twitch run events are abysmal, yet they give no help or support to the creators who are actually making good events or shows. The fact that twitch didn't become a big player in e-sports is such a massive failure. Look at what happened with Chess... it exploded and is still in a pretty good position all because some smart people decided to run some actually entertaining events. Twitch could of easily dominated the e-sports market by partnering and helping the smaller tournament orgs... yet now those orgs are failing and the e-sports scene is once again cratering to the ground. If it wasn't for the surprise success of Valorant.. e-sports would be dead right now.
Sorry, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. You have to make some hard decisions as a CEO.
I think Twitch could benefit from a breath of fresh air. I'm a little surprised it's Dan and not someone else from Amazon, but I think that speaks to the fact Emmett went on his own terms on not theirs. Dan knows what he's doing and he'll walk the line between doing what's good for Twitch and doing what's best for creators.
Granted, I treat Twitch as a CDN that occasionally cuts me a cheque.