So Your Kid Wants to Be a Twitch Streamer | Hacker News Reader

So Your Kid Wants to Be a Twitch Streamer

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17 pointsgmays21 comments

A child wanting to be a streamer is no different from wanting to be a professional actor or a soccer player. This story as cute as its folksy wisdom was didn't mention scalability or the long tail of jobs.

Some jobs scale, some do not. Brad Pitt, Cristiano Ronaldo, Rihanna and PewDiePie all have the benefit of being in the 1% (0.1%?) of their respective professions. They reap all the rewards. But there are millions and millions of people who aren't quite at the top and they get nothing. Dentists or plumbers on the other hand provide a service to a specific number of people. Their jobs do not scale. As such they are safer from the global Internet-wide competition and automation.

Most people who try to make a living playing soccer don't pay the bills, but the top 1% of players make a lot of money. There are a lot of people who play soccer casually at the weekend and don't make money too.

Most people who try to make a living programming computers pay the bills, and the top 1% of programmers make a lot of money. There are a lot of people 'kind of' learning a bit of python at the weekend sometimes who will never be professional programmers.

Which of these is streaming like? You only need 1000 subscribers paying £10 a month to make £100K, and that is hard but not impossible to achieve. If you are reasonably smart, learn a bit about the industry, and work at it full time - it should be possible to get that many subscribers over a year or two. Right?

So are youtubers more like programmers than soccer players?

I’d hazard a guess that in order to bring in $100k on Twitch you’re probably in the top 1000 of all streamers. In order to make that in programming you don’t even need to be among the top few million.

You have no idea what you're talking about, if you think streaming is more like programming than being a soccer proffesional. As of February, there are over 7 million active twitch streamers. 25 percent of the top 10,000 (ie the top 0.1%) highest paid Twitch streamers don’t even make minimum wage.

Almost nobody makes any significant money as a streamer, let alone a living.

I'd be extremely disappointed if I had kids and their dream was to become a YouTuber, Twitch-er, TikTok-er, or any other kind of "influencer." Luckily, I don't plan to.

It doesn't seem to be much different than a child wanting to be an actor.

I disagree. Being an actor is intensely social, physical and plays perfectly into what is traditionally, and correctly, considered a well lived life.

That's a good point, you may be right.

As an actor, I love performing on stage! I don't imagine that I will ever be famous though.

Being an influencer isn’t intensely social?

I imagine influencers are far more parasocial than social.

Acting involves attunement with fellow actors and being part of a larger creative process and work. It's a lot of showing up in person and figuring out how to work with others.

Influencers need only stay at home, work a camera, and manage parasocial fan conversations. There's no inherent in-person physicality of relationships and all the socializing that entails, nor even the need for peer relationships or any connection to a larger work that the influencer is a part of. At its core it's only a streamer and some people they probably don't know watching.

Depends on the kind of influencer. I see plenty of influencers travelling the world and mingling with plenty of people on corporate dime.

I think it's important to make the distinction between people who stream video games versus professional influencers.

Disclaimer: I don't rate either.

It does depend on the influencer, but the vast majority of twitch and TikTok influencers are pretty home bound.

> I'd be extremely disappointed if I had kids and their dream was to become a YouTuber, Twitch-er, TikTok-er, or any other kind of "influencer." Luckily, I don't plan to.

"I don't plan to have my kid dream to become a influencer"

Yeah man control your kids dreams that'll work.

I read the GP's post as "I don't plan to have kids," since obviously dreams can't be controlled.

I would be more than happy to offer my services as a behavioral therapist for theoretical children in hypothetical situations.

Of course it works. It always works unless you have have a segment of society actively telling your kids they don’t have to listen to their parents and to be hyper individualistic. How do you think most of Asia, South America, Africa, and the vast majority of rural America function? Following your dreams may work out in a small sliver of cases but for the vast majority advice from well meaning and reasonable parents helps guide them towards fulfilling, high percentage of success lives.

A modest youtuber can do more good than a thousand "well-adjusted" office workers. For example, this youtuber could travel the world and film on his phone the rapid changes of the climate: drying up seas, growing mountains of trash, poisoned rivers and so on.

Do good by making people feel good?

Not only. There are a ton of influencer who have done large scale charity events. Mr Beasts Team trees, CdawgVAs cyclothon and Z event are some examples.

The two things are not the same.

If those 1,000 office workers actually provide benefit for humanity, it's a no-brainer that they do more "good" than a YouTuber.

Not every YouTuber does what you describe. A good chunk of them are just talking heads, doing unboxings, reviews, streaming games, and just generally not doing anything that tangibly benefits humanity.

Same goes for office workers. Exceptions in every demographic though, right?

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