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Comment by bryans | Hacker News Reader

Making an option available isn't the same as nefarious marketing and intentional exploitation, which is the entirely false claim being made by the OC. You're also acting incredibly inflammatory by suggesting that I am "ignorant of functionality" and "couldn't possibly work with streamers at that level." Unfortunately for your claim, I've consulted with several of Twitch's top 100 music streamers and have years of direct experience with every type of fan, super and otherwise. The OC's claims are nonsense, and your pedantic nitpicking isn't appropriate or applicable.

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Please don't put quotation marks around words and claims which were not said. The quote was "If you haven't noticed that with the several hundred live streamers you've consulted with then it seems by definition the streamers you interact with do not have the Super Fans" and this does not contain either of those quotes or claims you're disparaging as they were never said. Not working with folks that try to get this type of viewer to press this button multiple times per months is a fantastic thing not something to get inflamed about. At the same time it doesn't mean these types of streamers and fans don't exist just because you don't work with them and clearly they do exist or Twitch wouldn't have bothered to make all of these types of options and fancy effects and the aforementioned bad example streams wouldn't have them triggered constantly.

I don't see this as a nit, the claim in question was:

> "The companies" aren't marketing high-cost options in any way. Twitch's highest subscription tier is $25/mo

Which is central to the arguments and the error core not inconsequential. Companies like Twitch have multiple high-cost options like the aforementioned $499 in one click gift button and the larger the cost for the option chosen the fancier/louder the button and after effects look. If you work with several of Twitches top streamers that's fantastic and it should be easy to verify there are many accounts spending orders of magnitude more than $25/month, super fans are the main folks being marketed to with these options and they make up the majority of their use.

Regarding the rest of the GP's claims when it comes to your response:

> Some people build cars for fun and spend their disposable income on that experience. Other people enjoy online content and spend their disposable income ensuring that content keeps getting made, or can be made even better. To declare an entire populations' preferred hobby as "dysfunctional" is plainly inflammatory and entirely inappropriate.

Super Fans donate hundreds of dollars per action to streamers who are sometimes making millions per year. This is not the "I'm tier 3 for my favorite streamer so they can stay full time" crowd it's the "I'm top bit donator/sub gifter on a top channel" crowd. I consider myself part of the former hobby/support group but I can't see any way to construe the latter group as part of the same hobby either. I'm open to hearing ways that whale segment could be though if you'd be willing to expound

> you haven't noticed [...] the streamers you interact with do not have [...] Please don't put quotation marks around words and claims which were not said.

You're pedantically nitpicking again, when you clearly understood that I was paraphrasing to highlight the obvious inflammatory intent behind your blatantly disparaging remarks. You're concocting confrontation. You even just edited your comment to include more disparaging commentary and suggestions that I'm ignorant of the existence of a group of people. All you did (before editing your comment) is claim that I don't know things because your extremely limited personal anecdotes somehow outweigh my professional experience, which is the definition of inflammatory behavior.

> Which is core to the arguments and the error major not minor. Companies like Twitch have multiple high-cost options

The core argument made by the OC was that "the vast majority of super fans" are "socially dysfunctional" and "companies pushing this have all the data and know exactly what's going on, but market to this demographic anyway." The suggestion here is that these companies are nefariously encouraging people to donate higher amounts. When in reality, the functionality to gift groups of subs isn't even visible by default on Twitch and the user needs to go out of their way to switch to the gift subs tab, before consciously deciding to click at the bottom of the list of amounts, which also requires scrolling on some mobile screen sizes before you can even see the higher amounts.

So, no, the higher-cost items are, in fact, not "pushed" or "marketed" as the OC or you suggest, which makes your entire argument a nitpick. All you did was mention that a thing existed, without providing any context or evidence as to how it's exploitative or how it could even be considered marketing. Twitch even makes a point in the site's verbiage of labeling any subs larger than $5 as "going above and beyond," which makes clear that even moderate amounts are more than is expected of the user. Again, the existence of functionality does not constitute nefarious behavior -- it doesn't even qualify as "marketing," and it definitely doesn't qualify as "exploiting dysfunctional users."

> Super Fans donate hundreds of dollars per action to streamers who are sometimes making millions per year. This is not the "I'm tier 3 for my favorite streamer so they can stay full time" crowd it's the "I'm top bit donator/sub gifter on a top channel" crowd. I consider myself part of the former hobby/support group but I can't see any way to construe the latter group as part of the same hobby either. I'm open to hearing ways that whale segment could be though if you'd be willing to expound

Super fans are not exclusive to million dollar streamers, so you're using a rare example to make generalizations which are not reflective of the overall industry or culture. The existence of a personality type which seeks attention by donating large amounts to see themselves on a leaderboard where thousands (or tens of thousands) of people are watching, does not magically mean that applies to all donors and, in fact, applies to so few donors that your argument really has no foundation.

For one of thousands of examples I could provide, a relatively small streamer I worked with has an average viewership of less than 150 per stream. Yet, roughly 20% of their regular viewers contribute more than $100/mo, with several over $500/mo, and exactly zero of them are doing it for attention -- a fact, given that there is no leaderboard and they receive no acknowledgement verbally or via overlays. In reality, most large contributors prefer to do so anonymously anyway, and streamers typically make a point of communicating with those supporters to ensure that larger donations aren't risking their financial well-being.

My edit was to add:

> Not working with folks that try to get this type of viewer to press this button multiple times per months is a fantastic thing not something to get inflamed about. At the same time it doesn't mean these types of streamers and fans don't exist just because you don't work with them and clearly they do exist or Twitch wouldn't have bothered to make all of these types of options and fancy effects and the aforementioned bad example streams wouldn't have them triggered constantly.

I'm genuinely interested in how/why this is being taken as disparaging or concocting confrontation. It's not intended to be so at all but often on the internet plain text can be interpreted many different ways, maybe ways I can't see from my point of view alone. Regardless, apologies if anything has come across as being written to incite confrontation.

Nothing I've talked to is about my personal experience vs your professional experience or anecdotes though, it's been about what is factually on the site and available for all to see. I do have some personal anecdotes I could bring but I haven't as I like to stay away from them when possible. Them same avoidance can be given as well to relying on any experience, be it personal or professional, when the information itself is readily available.

In general if there is something you find nitpicking, confrontational, disparaging, inflammatory, or so on I'd greatly appreciate if you could provide an example of what and how it could have been better worded to focus on the content. As it stands now I'm having a hard time distilling what or how you're expecting things to be different, just that you seem extraordinarily unhappy with every comment I make.

> The core argument made by the OC was that "the vast majority of super fans" are "socially dysfunctional" and "companies pushing this have all the data and know exactly what's going on, but market to this demographic anyway." The suggestion here is that these companies are nefariously encouraging people to donate higher amounts. When in reality, the functionality to gift groups of subs isn't even visible by default on Twitch and the user needs to go out of their way to switch to the gift subs tab, before consciously deciding to click at the bottom of the list of amounts, which also requires scrolling on some mobile screen sizes before you can even see the higher amounts.

On the contrary these things are extremely visible and advertised. Popping into a top Twitch stream right now with an incognito tab these are the things I see right away:

- The top gifters for the week are pinned to the top of the chat. The number 1 place has a large golden gift box with a 1 in it followed by their name and gift count (which is near 500)

- High spend actions result in ever more exclusive emotes next to names such as having max tier subscription and being the top gifter resulting in very elaborate icons while cheap actions like prime sub very plain ones. This is made apparent by these displaying by default next to every message these users type (both an advertisement and incentive system)

- High spend actions place themselves in chat with links to how you yourself can do the same thing

- Hype trains also appear on the page with much fanfare pushing the use of gifts and bits. These give exclusive emotes and individual callouts as well.

- Once subscribed (at any level) the gift sub button is actually displayed by default on the page and the section does list the $499.00 option by default. Hidden would be the $999.00 options for tier 2/tier 3 gifting I haven't even mentioned.

- Many of these are mirrored for bits

And these are just the things from Twitch itself, not the things Twitch is fine with streamers adding on top. On the flipside the strongest action you can do without spending money is highlight a message.

Marketing pushes aside though I also disagree with the premise that marketing is even central to whether it means it's not exploitative or not, to me it just makes it even more nefarious as a whole. Simply having a 100 gift sub button in the UI, well hidden and never mentioned otherwise, is still extremely hard to justify as anything but exploitative. There are very few select cases $499 is reasonable in one month let alone needs to be available in one purchase flow and Twitch is well aware it's being used more often than could ever be attributed to non-exploitative cases so I argue the existence itself is nefarious, before even getting into the whole incentive system built around it.

> Super fans are not exclusive to million dollar streamers, so you're using a rare example to make generalizations which are not reflective of the overall industry or culture. The existence of a personality type which seeks attention by donating large amounts to see themselves on a leaderboard where thousands (or tens of thousands) of people are watching, does not magically mean that applies to all donors and, in fact, applies to so few donors that your argument really has no foundation.

Million dollar streamers are the stealman case. One can still find this type of "Super Fan" in many other streams, no need to rely on generalization, but the example makes for a case where it's easy to show the exploitation is well known and large in scale.

Also the conversation was never about all "donors", from the beginning it was about "the vast majority of Super Fans are not buying courses or supporting the development of content". Disagree or not with the statement it never made claims every single

> For one of thousands of examples I could provide, a relatively small streamer I worked with has an average viewership of less than 150 per stream. Yet, roughly 20% of their regular viewers contribute more than $100/mo, with several over $500/mo, and exactly zero of them are doing it for attention -- a fact, given that there is no leaderboard and they receive no acknowledgement verbally or via overlays. In reality, most large contributors prefer to do so anonymously anyway, and streamers typically make a point of communicating with those supporters to ensure that larger donations aren't risking their financial well-being.

Sounds like a well built community :). Unfortunately even * 1000 these numbers pale in comparison and don't exactly line up with the "dump their life savings or steal a family member or relative's credit card" type users described in the GP, both in strength and volume, to the large stream examples and do not set what the majority is. The leaked Twitch payout data is a great example of this, a small handful of streams make the majority not the long tail of thousands.

Edit clarification: Remembered hard Twitch payout data was leaked and added a note on how you could help me with the items felt confrontational.

> If you haven't noticed that with the several hundred live streamers you've consulted with then it seems by definition the streamers you interact with do not have the Super Fans being discussed [...] At the same time it doesn't mean these types of streamers and fans don't exist just because you don't work with them

I'm trying to take your word that you don't mean to disparage, but I don't see another interpretation for what you've said. You suggested that I'm not aware of basic Twitch functionality (when I clearly am), then claimed that I must not have knowledge of the subject because the streamers I work with "by definition" don't have super fans (even though they clearly do), then claimed I said super fans don't even exist (though I never so much as remotely hinted it), then repeated the claim that I don't work with anyone who has super fans (even after explicitly telling you they do).

All of those things (and some that I left out) are disparaging, and the entire premise of your commentary has been that your perspective as a viewer can be applied to the entirety of the content creation industry as an absolute and indisputable fact, but that my perspective as a viewer, streamer and consultant strictly applies to a unique subset of streamers whom I've personally worked with -- because apparently I exclusively find the extremely rare streamers and whales who aren't part of "the vast majority" involved in an "exploitative" industrial complex, even though that would be a statistical impossibility. So, when you say "nothing I've talked to is about my personal experience vs your professional experience," that's patently untrue. It's the basis for everything you've said.

> Simply having a 100 gift sub button in the UI, well hidden and never mentioned otherwise, is still extremely hard to justify as anything but exploitative.

At the end of the day, you're attempting to perpetuate the completely false notion that "the vast majority" of large donors are "dysfunctional" and being "exploited." You witness people donate large amounts and for some reason automatically assume exploitation, but you have no actual evidence or justification for that assumption other than it seeming like a lot of money to you, personally. Unless you're a professional psychologist who analyzed these people, you don't get to declare that "the vast majority" of any population are mentally unwell or being exploited -- especially when your only knowledge of the situation is that you saw strangers push buttons on a website. That's not situational knowledge of anything.

In reality, there are magnitudes more large donors who contribute to be supportive and out of appreciation for the streamers time and talents. Some fans will spend 100+ hours per month watching a particular streamer, so if they can afford to donate $1,000, that works out to paying $10/hr for entertainment, which is less than many hobbies. Yet, I don't see you making claims that people who spend lots of money on other forms of entertainment are exploited -- just this particular industry, and for reasons you haven't actually articulated.

And that's all still ignoring the fact that your perceived observations do not apply to the content creation industry as a whole, or even the majority of it. When I tell you that what you're describing can't be applied to the nearly 1,000 whales I've personally communicated with over the past few years, it makes no sense for you to double down on a blanket generalization that "the vast majority" of streamers are exploitative and large donors are being exploited, because even basic math doesn't back your argument.

> On the contrary these things are extremely visible and advertised.

You listed the basic concept of subscriptions and rewards as evidence for nefarious activity and exploitation. That's rather silly, and I'm not going to engage with it.

> Also the conversation was never about all "donors", from the beginning it was about "the vast majority of Super Fans are not buying courses or supporting the development of content". Disagree or not with the statement it never made claims every single

Please stop making pedantic nitpicks. I've literally quoted "the vast majority" a dozen times in these comments, and you're choosing to pick a single instance where I generally referred to them as donors for the sake of brevity within a long sentence, which itself is inside a paragraph specifically about super fans and even started with the words "super fans." You know exactly what I was referencing, and that you continue to turn these false nitpicks into full arguments is both exhausting and starting to resemble gaslighting.

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Conveniently enough this is the exact kind of conversation I was just talking about trying to find! Certainly particularly rich, particularly interested, fans of a particular stream can spend $1,000 on actions without causing personal financial problems and it can be a reasonable entertainment expense for that particular combo. The same could be said for gambling which was mentioned in the original comment but is also still extremely problematic for the majority it attracts in practice and nowadays heavily regulated. Being able to find many individual anecdotes of such users would even be expected given the original claim was about the majority not every single one of what is probably a group on the order of the mid 4 digits, most of which. In regards to articulating why it's a problem despite these anecdotes something else I've previously mentioned to build off this is the millionaire streamers (roughly the top ~10^2 of payouts not ~10^3) are more heavily weighted to be the ones getting these kinds of donations. Not that the ~10^3 pool won't get any but it's not a flat or even linear distribution. In general it's more this misalignment in distribution that defines how exploitative an industry/service is with whales than the presence of whales itself. The idea about it being in majority for supporting content only works if the majority of whales are very evenly spread out not highly clustered. Unfortunately it's exceedingly rare to regularly have someone or multiple someone's like the user that donated nearly 500 gift subs within the last week unless you're a top 10 exception or one of the streamer types the GP was talking about.

> And that's all still ignoring the fact that your perceived observations do not apply to the content creation industry as a whole, or even the majority of it. When I tell you that what you're describing can't be applied to the nearly 1,000 whales I've personally communicated with over the past few years, it makes no sense for you to double down on a blanket generalization that "the vast majority" of streamers are exploitative and large donors are being exploited, because even basic math doesn't back your argument.

Again I'm not really expecting to make much progress talking about how you perceive my perceived observations. If you want to talk about this in terms the publicly accessible data or hard facts from twitch.com itself I think there might be more interesting discussion to be had there. Or dive into the math you're talking about as if I've provided my derivations and sources and came to a conclusion I'm not going to be able to come no a new conclusion with just the additional info "even basic math doesn't back your argument".

> You listed the basic concept of subscriptions and rewards as evidence for nefarious activity and exploitation. That's rather silly, and I'm not going to engage with it.

It's 100% up to you what you find silly or not silly. Some people find the basic concept of casinos having meanendering layouts, free drinks/meals, and machines/games designed to make you feel continually close to a payout or needing to up the bet as rather silly evidence for nefarious activity/exploitation. At the same time it's very hard to have any meaningful conversation with someone who simply says things like "that's rather silly, and I'm not going to engage with it" when confronted with the reasoning of the other person.

> Please stop making pedantic nitpicks... You know exactly what I was referencing, and that you continue to turn these false nitpicks into full arguments is both exhausting and starting to resemble gaslighting.

> In general if there is something you find nitpicking, confrontational, disparaging, inflammatory, or so on I'd greatly appreciate if you could provide an example of what and how it could have been better worded to focus on the content. As it stands now I'm having a hard time distilling what or how you're expecting things to be different, just that you seem extraordinarily unhappy with every comment I make.

In particular my initial "internet filter" reading whenever you say nitpicking multiple times per comment without trying to build off of it is that every time I bring up a counter point it's just a nit to be ignored while every time you bring up a counter point it's something that could only be disagreed with if I'm trying to incite confrontation or personally attack you. Of course this interpretation isn't going to help either of us so again I refer to my comment that if you do feel these things it'd be very helpful of why the non-nit interpretations of my comments are invalid and how they could have been better framed to focus around the core of the conversation.

Claims like gaslighting (defined as "psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator") are particularly extraordinary interpretations of a few short comments on HN but if you really think these kinds of things I think it's probably best to report such things to the mod team and disengage completely as it's both extremely troubling if the claim as true or extremely troubling if you're interpreting comments as being that way but it wasn't true. Unlike the other things I'm not really sure how to gain new perspective when one of the parties is honestly suspicious they are being psychologically manipulated.

Regardless I appreciate your time so far, you've certainly opened me to the concept there are many more "wholesome" communities out there than one would expect from just looking at the top numbers. I also think you've helped me better see how wide interpretations of the same plain text statements can be taken and it will help to have that in mind in the future.

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Thanks for the walkthrough on the statement, I think I see a bit of what you were thinking when you read the statement. At the same time let's walk through what it says and try to see :

> Twitch has a "Gift 100 subs $499" button right in the gift UI. If you haven't noticed that with the several hundred live streamers you've consulted with then it seems by definition the streamers you interact with do not have the Super Fans being discussed yet such fans are common enough for Twitch to make UI for it.

What I intended to communicate: Twitch has far more than a $25 subscription option but the vast majority of partnered channels (there are ~50k active) don't know things like "Gift 100 subs" is a preset option because $499 is a whole number percentage of their lifetime Twitch revenue not something they regularly get from a single user action. And genuinely on the condition the hundreds of live streamers you've consulted aren't exactly the top couple hundred overall you would then by, by your own answer to the question, not talking about the same types of fans when referring to the "Super Fans" that dump life savings or such into these actions. On the other half of the if, i.e. those are the streamers, then we've short-circuited to these high cost options existing and went back to discussion on exploitation/marketing that was perhaps accidentally (or for some other reason) initially dismissed as not even being possible on the site.

What you interpreted I communicated: I found a few nits as an excuse to say you're ignorant and couldn't possibly work with streamers of that level.

This is the kind of split I had in mind when talking about "often on the internet plain text can be interpreted many different ways". If you go into the comment assuming it has good intent it's just a genuine comment asking if you're referring to the same group that sees these extremely high cost actions or not since the type of fan being talked about necessarily is one doing far more than a tier 3 sub worth $25 via Twitch. If you go into the comment assuming my only intent is to nit and demean, discussion be damned, then it's a reductive comment made purely to be inflammatory. When you start with either of those points of view going in though it can be extremely hard to see how the other person could see it so differently but talking through it like this really helps, for me at least :).

> All of those things (and some that I left out) are disparaging, and the entire premise of your commentary has been that your perspective as a viewer can be applied to the entirety of the content creation industry as an absolute and indisputable fact, but that my perspective as a viewer, streamer and consultant strictly applies to a unique subset of streamers whom I've personally worked with -- because apparently I exclusively find the extremely rare streamers and whales who aren't part of "the vast majority" involved in an "exploitative" industrial complex, even though that would be a statistical impossibility. So, when you say "nothing I've talked to is about my personal experience vs your professional experience," that's patently untrue. It's the basis for everything you've said.

Going off the above if we start making the conversation about how I view your experience or how you view my experience we'll both get nowhere as we'll be divining things from our interpretations of the other person's anecdotes, neither of which is solid on their own so doubly less so together. That's why I've tried to avoid talking about my experiences vs your experiences and instead try to bring back each talking point to a hard publicly verifiable item like what actions Twitch makes purchasable, how they are advertised, the Twitch data leak and how there can't be 1000 counterexamples because there aren't 1000 accounts with the payout level to have had fans like the mentioned. I'm not bringing these points in because I'm trying to find nits to take a shit on your consultancy business (which sounds pretty successful, congrats consulting can be hard to grow) but because they necessitate that there was a misinterpretation in who GP was referring to and they can't possibly have been referring to all of the people you went to the strong defense of. Now that doesn't mean I think you'll agree with GP's original statements but the reason I bring them up is I think it steers towards a much more interesting conversation on why you disagree with GP with the people they were really referring to not the larger group you feel the need to defend.

> In reality, there are magnitudes more large donors who contribute to be supportive and out of appreciation for the streamers time and talents. Some fans will spend 100+ hours per month watching a particular streamer, so if they can afford to donate $1,000, that works out to paying $10/hr for entertainment, which is less than many hobbies. Yet, I don't see you making claims that people who spend lots of money on other forms of entertainment are exploited -- just this particular industry, and for reasons you haven't actually articulated.

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