Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is resigning
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
"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"
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.
Not all "think of the kids arguments" are "think of the kids" arguments. A platform ostensibly for game streaming serving softcore is certainly surprising, so for parents too. It's strange to me that tech companies have convinced so many that _obviously_ one should suspect people gaming the system everywhere and the onus is on the user. Curation and basic levels of QA are just no longer expected by huge cohorts I guess? Well, I still do. I guess tech should be avoided then.
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.
* but says her abusive boyfriend made her do it for money
We have onlyfans for the other stuff, do they need to mix it?
not even a joke. a lot of OF performers use their twitch as a marketting arm.
Isn't that the entire value proposition of twitch?
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).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And PurpleTV is a modified Android Twitch app that is just like Youtube (Re)Vanced. Obviously use with caution, with an account you don't have any personal info linked to, because unlike YouTube you are forced to log in to the Twitch App. Pretty sure the Gitlab "twitchmod/orange-tv" repo is the official source.
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...
- 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.
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.
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.
Twitch Turbo is supposed to benefit the creator the same way an ad would support them. Meaning it would count the ad as shown, but not show it to the viewer. Though, payment for ads are scammingly low for the creators. A sub will in most cases give more support.
> All I'm saying is that ads have gotten a lot worse lately and it is extremely noticeable.
Rumors goes, Amazon demands more money.
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.
Definitely not the case with Youtube.
I've never seen software porn on Twitch, I have probably watched more Twitch than most people. Their internal model of me must have given up.
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
It can't skip ads completely, but it will prevent showing them.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
One of the really interesting projects I've been tracking for a while is Destiny.gg (D.gg for short): https://github.com/destinygg
Destiny is a streamer, a very controversial one, that often finds himself on the wrong side of rules, and due to his stances, rarely sees clemency from administrators and moderators. Despite this, he has managed to be a professional streamer for over a decade.
Crucial to his ability to survive the bans and de-platforming is that early on he hired someone to build his own pseudo-platform. The big things were: a page that embedded a stream (e.g. Twitch or Youtube), a chat service, a subscription tied into that chat service, and a web site to tie it all together.
This meant that while Twitch could ban him, he would just move over to Youtube and his core community - which chatted on D.gg, not Twitch - would barely notice. Subscribers would be unaffected and his income would be safe.
The elegant details are that the project synchronizes subscriber tiers from the other chats into the main Destiny.gg chat, so even if you subscribed on Twitch or Youtube, you were not only rewarded in D.gg chat, but incentivized to go there because that's where the core community posts.
Socially, it's been interesting to watch because it ended up with two chat-based communities around this streamer and they actually dislike each other. The chat on Youtube leans one way, but the chat on the D.gg leans the opposite way. It's unlike anything I've seen in other streamers.
Live version of the core functionality: https://www.destiny.gg/bigscreen
The whole thing is available for licensing, although no longer publicly maintained. I'm not entirely sure where things are between the developer and Destiny, but it's such an interesting project and I'm surprised it isn't the de-facto standard for most streamers.
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.
But the point is still, Wordpress charges people. YouTube and Twitch do not.
They have a weird broadcast television model going. But broadcast television curates their content and charges advertisers decent rates not dependent on "engagement".
I'm not saying video hosting isn't expensive. I'm saying that YouTube and Twitch should be charging for it. If that makes it infeasible for some people to stream. I'm ok with that outcome.
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.
I don't know of any creators that are leveraging wordpress.com.
Using the software is like using Windows (or Linux, if you want a comparison in open source), but I don't think anyone argues that Linux takes good care of creators in the way they expect it from Twitch or Youtube, primarily because Linux doesn't pay creators, it's not a middle-man, it's a tool. Like wordpress.
It's just that 'influencers' like nothing more than to complain.
Admittedly, Twitch is a clusterfuck though.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
While I have not spent enough time on Kick to confirm this, that seems 100% on brand. Again, it's not a legitimate business and likely never will be.
Kick uses a different technology stack, different frameworks and libraries... so I wonder how much really can be stolen? I wouldn't doubt boilerplate legaleese getting copied from Twitch though.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Couldn't be happier for the guy!
I’ll never be a billionaire, but I’m feeling on excellent terms with myself and with the universe.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.pcgamer.com/twitch-addresses-hot-tub-streaming-c...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
and that too, during the most interesting few years twitch has had. people have already listed out the bad parts, but simultaneously the site has broken several (albeit self-set) records.
it is crazy how so many people from mainstream media have interacted in the site, yet it is riddled with a lot of fundamental issues.
good luck to whomever takes over.
Granted, I treat Twitch as a CDN that occasionally cuts me a cheque.
Sorry, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. You have to make some hard decisions as a CEO.