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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

These streams are closer to pornography than most people realize. There's a reason that these streams get so much attention: 14 year old young men love watching video games, so they go to sites where they can watch video games. If you start serving softcore pornography on the same website, well gee wiz, who could have guessed that it would be pretty lucrative?

You don't have to be a prude to have a problem with this. It's not a matter of stigmatizing sex work or being anti-women, it's about profiting by serving porn-lite on the same site where children are likely to be.

I don't personally care, but I'm floored that a company like Twitch/Amazon, with hundreds of people in HR and PR, would not play it safe and just ban it.

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Given the sheer amounts of money being flung at streamers of all stripes by their audience directly I doubt the majority of the audience is 14!

That doesn't follow; maybe the oldest 10% of people are 90% of donations.

See: “whales”.

And maybe they’re not, I made no statement of fact just doubt the characterisation of Twitch being full of 14 year olds.

It seems pretty clear to me that they’d do so immediately if they felt they could do so without being called sexist.

First they group them into a particular category. Then they restrict that category behind a login. And then they restrict it further, and finally ban it entirely.

If your kid is on the internet, it's on you to manage that. Full stop.

Sure, and it's reasonable for parents to express to twitch that if they don't actively control sexualized content (or provide parental controls), that they will lose the eyes of their child. It's reasonable for advertisers to do the same. Unless your concept of that is control the mouse and keyboard for the child at all moments, what's the issue?

Becomes hard to manage when soft-core porn is allowed to co-mingle with "safe" content without the ability to filter out.

Twitch has no spine. If it was up to Amazon they'd probably ban it though.

I can go on Amazon right now and buy a 55-gallon drum of sexual lubricant and a ten-inch, anatomically-correct silicone horse dildo. If it's making them money, they won't complain.

There's a pretty big difference between selling between selling sex related goods on a shopping website and showing softcore porn to children on a video game streaming site.

It is up to Amazon, right? Don't they own Twitch?

My understanding is that Twitch is a separate org within Amazon. Amazon might oversee Twitch on an org level, but I'm pretty sure they're not involved with stuff like this.

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