Twitch U-turns on 'artistic nudity' policy | Hacker News Reader

Twitch U-turns on 'artistic nudity' policy

bbc.co.uk

33 pointsedward75 comments

I don't know what Twitch's goals are here, but if they want to get rid of the right-up-against-the-line content, then maybe clear, consistently-enforced rules are actually detrimental, because it just invites rules lawyering like we see here. If Twitch staff just went around arbitrarily banning anything they don't like, the affected streamers would hate it (because they wouldn't know what they can get away with), which, if you want to drive them off the platform, is a good thing.

Users get really bothered by arbitrary banning, irrationally so I think. I've been on sites with moderators who could basically just enforce the rules as they liked and it's so much better. No "well technically I'm not rule breaking" - a human makes a judgment and bans them.

For some reason these "professional" Websites (ie: the modern web of company-run forums) seem to resist this idea, and unfortunately it's hard to do it later in the game because the userbases can be very easily riled up.

So you think if you get banned without notice you should be unable to appeal and this is what fosters a healthy community?

Absolutely. Those in power make mistakes all the time.

So strange, none of the words you said appear in my post.

> I've been on sites with moderators who could basically just enforce the rules as they liked and it's so much better. No "well technically I'm not rule breaking" - a human makes a judgment and bans them.

I'm not sure how else to interpret what you typed.

I said nothing about lack of appeals or lack of notice. I said that mods would make judgment calls.

Is there ever a situation where mods don't make judgment calls? Or are you just saying moderated is better than unmoderated?

Also you specifically pointed out that arguing over the ban is bad, which is implies appealing the ban is bad.

There are - when they go by the letter of the rules.

You realize a moderator has to make a judgment on whether or not they're breaking the rules though, right? That's a human decision.

Anyway, this is a circular conversation. Cheers.

I don't think it's circular, you just put words in my mouth and now you're not understanding what it means to follow the rules to the letter versus interpreting their intent.

Rules have ambiguity. If there's a rule like "no jokes allowed" how do you decide that mechanically without human judgment? Do you seriously believe everything is binary without nuance?

This entire argument is over whether or not I'm understanding your words correctly, and you're simultaneously arguing that words are not ambiguous and have a clearly defined meaning. I feel like you're missing the irony here.

Again with another straw man. Not continuing this. Everyone else gets what I'm saying.

Your initial comment is downvoted and you assume everyone understands you? My point isn't a straw man - it's a counterexample that disproves your statement. If you're going to make absolute rules with no ambiguity then you need to know how to handle all cases - otherwise the rules are ambiguous and require human judgment. This isn't even subjective it's an objectively true statement.

I agree that this tends to be the best kind of moderation for individual communities, but I don't think it scales particularly well to platforms hosting many communities, and anyone earning an income from the platform really won't like arbitrary, human-judgement bans.

I ran a small community (thousands of members) that way and I think it was the best (or rather, least bad) approach.

There are a few reasons why it worked IMO, but the practices seem extremely difficult to scale.

- I spent a lot of time building good will in the community: personally interacting with members, calling out great community participation, etc. My positive interactions outweighed negative probably 5:1 or 10:1.

- I used the ban hammer exceedingly rarely. Like, probably about twice per year over the course of ten years.

- This was a pay-gated community, which cut down on troublemakers

- Moderators enforced policy, but I was the only one who could actually ban

And now we have this instead

NSFW https://old.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/18lvnez/new...

The whole thing is just embarrassing. OF girls and pornstars using the site as a softcore promo. Amazon of course won’t do anything (like spinning up a proper porn site) casue literally this grey area is the best market. No content filter (kids can watch it) and advertisers don’t leave (it’s not porn)

> New meta

I'm sorry, what? The old meta is only ~3 days old, isn't it?

The OG twitch was justin.tv, a live streaming service. It began with literally streaming every aspect of your personal life. It eventually transitioned into game streaming, but it was originally for anyone who wanted to stream.

I don't really understand why anyone cares what is streamed there. I believe in the idea that anything should be possible, and allow the commons/people to dictate whether they like it or not. If people want to see a naked chick sitting in a gaming chair giggling why stop them? Who cares?

I care, because I don't want to see it when I'm looking to watch a video game stream--there are places for porn. And "well we'll just have opt-in categories" sounds great, except that these categories are thin and (on Twitch especially) not composable; as the purveyors are looking for more clicks, it means trying to rules-lawyer the categories to get in front of eyeballs who are not looking for mature content, because maybe they'll catch more who are.

If their categorization was perfect--sure, go nuts. It's not and it won't be, so it makes for a worse site for me.

Yeah so it could be handled like virtually every other site on the earth (ie, google, reddit) where you can check a box in your account to show/hide NSFW content. Easy peasy.

They sure could, except Reddit has self-interested, decentralized moderation that contributes to preventing containment breaks. Twitch is bad at moderation and giving them more ways to screw up is bad for my enjoyment of the site.

>I don't really understand why anyone cares what is streamed there.

>Who cares?

Just like why people _do care_ what's posted on HN?

Why do we have guidelines and rules?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe we should post some porn here too, I don't really understand why anyone cares what posted here am I rite?

Terrible stuff gets posted here all the time and the community flags/moderates it.

Twitch doesn't have a way for the community to moderate what's on the website except for reporting it. Having humans deal with reports is pretty much impossible at Twitch scale, they average 7 million streamers per month. Not viewers. 7 million streamers.

Advertisers care, and large conglomerates care about PR backlash, because invariably if you let 18/19yo stream their boobs (legal and extremely popular) then 17.9yo will also do it and suddenly you’re trafficking in child pornography and a threat to the very fabric of society (as well as subject to nontrivial criminal liability).

Advertisers want eyeballs. You're not trafficking child porn if an underage kid happens to see your ad alongside a stream of a naked woman. Give me a break.

It's more that credit card providers care, for some weird reason, and therefor everyone cares.

Do you really believe that advertisers don't have an interest in this?

Advertisers only care when the rest of the world cares. If people/consumers are not worried, then advertisers are not worried. If twitch managed to foster a strong community of half naked live streamers getting tons of traffic, advertisers would throw money at the platform.

>I believe in the idea that anything should be possible, and allow the commons/people to dictate whether they like it or not.

What about illegal or highly distasteful/immoral content?

distasteful/immoral is in the eye of the beholder.

>why anyone cares what is streamed there

brand? Twitch goes from live streaming persona life to gamer to soft cam girls?

i would think Amazon cares about the Twitch brand.

Why can't it be both? What's wrong with cam girls? I am a libertarian capitalist. If a woman wants to sell her body, 100% more power to her. We should be moving towards freedom of expression, not away from it. If you don't want to look at it, that is also fine and I respect that, but don't put these bizarre tightrope-walky restrictions on what can and cannot be seen. The twitch announcement is absurd.

Not everyone shares your views. Most people probably don't, and Twitch wants to keep the majority happy, not just you.

But more importantly, advertising. Once you're known as a website with lots of pornography, expect your cost per ad to drop to about 10%. And with potentially unmoderated adult content you risk having all major payment providers refusing to do business with you. See what happened to Pornhub about non-verified user uploaded content a year or so ago. Requiring things like uploading ID in order to stream will harm the non-adult segments of Twitch. So unless they want to go full-on porn site, mixing adult and non-adult just harms the rest of the business.

Not even an exclusive libertarian viewpoint. Libertarians should only care if force is used as a response to freedom of expression, but it says nothing about it being inherently good or that it shouldn't be shamed out of decent society. Places that overly promote nudity for the masses tend to be dump cities, none of which are very friendly to libertarian ideas.

> don't put these bizarre tightrope-walky restrictions on what can and cannot be seen

you seem fragile.

I just pointed out branding might be an issue.

let's be honest. Amazon u-turns the nude policy because of ads. how many brands will pull ads when they found out Twitch is a porno site.

> I am a libertarian capitalist.

So presumably you agree that a corporation is perfectly entitled to set completely arbitrary rules about how their platform is used? Even if it causes some of their potential customers to abandon them?

After all, if there's sufficient demand then a competitor will spring up that relaxes some of those arbitrary rules and eats their lunch.

You explained it yourself fine. Justin was for all content. Twitch is for gaming. Clear cut and simple. There are TONS of live streaming services to choose from, this one is meant to be for gaming.

>There are TONS of live streaming services to choose from, this one is meant to be for gaming.

Those ones have more competition, or less potential viewership, or a worse feature base than Twitch does. It's like saying "Yeah totally don't worry, just move from YouTube to Rumble! It's the exact same!"

Happened the instant male streamers/subjects were involved. Typical double standard.

The article says the main issue had nothing to do with any prurient concerns, it was more about art communities getting spammed due to allowing "drawings" of nudity which were indistinguishable from photos:

> Digital depictions of nudity present a unique challenge - artificial intelligence can be used to create realistic images, and it can be hard to distinguish between digital art and photography

> The decision came after an outpouring of concern online from Twitch's art community about the volume of AI-generated nudes which began to bombard Twitch's art category since the policy change.

The person you're responding to has an element of fairness in the point they're making, though.

Straight from Twitch:

> Much content that was previously prohibited is now allowed with proper Content Classification labels: Content that ‘deliberately highlighted breasts, buttocks or pelvic region,’ even when fully clothed, fictionalized (drawn, animated, or sculpted) fully exposed female-presenting breasts and/or genitals or buttocks regardless of gender, body writing on female-presenting breasts and/or buttocks regardless of gender and erotic dances that involve disrobing or disrobing gestures, such as strip teases.

"female-presenting breasts and/or genitals" were acceptable forms of artistic nudity, but male-presenting genitals were not.

It was poorly written, and had to reread it, but I eventually parsed that as they meant:

(fully exposed female-presenting breasts) and/or (genitals or buttocks regardless of gender)

Which would make sense, because I don't think there ever was a restriction on male breasts to need to allow them, was there?

That's fair, I'm probably misinterpreting.

I think they've always allowed male-presenting persons to be shirtless as long as it wasn't sexualized. You also must be shirtless when the stream starts - you can't take your shirt off on stream.

You've misunderstood it, and the exact reverse is what happened.

An exposed male chest was not considered sexual and thus subject to no restrictions, while the same was not true for female breasts. The change then allowed female breasts, or genitals of any gender to be shown in "fictionalized contexts".

Yeah, you're right.

Why don’t they just add a filter that is off by default and requires opting in and age verification? Is it purely legal liability and brand perception here, because the technical hurdles are fairly trivial.

Credit card processing is split between normal and high risk merchant accounts.

Major CC companies tend to be significantly less interested in dealing with high risk accounts.

If Twitch introduces content segregation then they're making it explicitly clear that they consider an aspect of their business higher risk. They don't want that.

Normally this is handled by using separate processors for adult content, but that isn't quite so simple because of the existence of bits.

That's just moving the problem somewhere else.

NSFW content creators have a strong financial incentive to find ways to use SFW content as marketing for their NSFW content.

> Mr Clancy said the issue had proven more complex than initially envisaged.

> "Digital depictions of nudity present a unique challenge - artificial intelligence can be used to create realistic images, and it can be hard to distinguish between digital art and photography."

I don't buy it. You're telling me with all the brains and tech talent you couldn't see this coming? I think they want to sell pornography to children.

They really didn't think that through! "Artistic nudity?" They thought defining and enforcing rules around what constitutes "art" in the context of nudity was a good plan? Even without AI (which seems to be the in vogue thing to blame for everything that doesn't go well) this was a horrible idea.

What's always been strange to me is that these kinds of streamers are not judged as harshly as real sex workers. On the status hierarchy, they seem to be close to the top.

Twitch has already been morphing into Chaturbate and the change last week doubled down there. I don’t think a website with a large audience of children should have been brushing up against pornography. I don’t even know what was going on with the AI art stuff, but there were numerous streams where females appeared topless, stopping just short of visible nipples.

Meh if you're old enough to be online by yourself you're old enough to see some titties.

The puritan approach to sex in America is ridiculous.

Or maybe not every site should be about porn?

Why don't we post here on HN then too?

> Why don't we post here on HN then too?

Twitch's audience wants it and HN's audience doesn't. Perhaps more accurately, HN specifically doesn't want that.

HN isn't an image or video sharing site?

>HN isn't an image or video sharing site?

Not with that attitude

Puts on my robe and wizard hat

Well, hello.

‹looks up base64 rickroll encodings›

*λ

^_^)

data:image/gif;base64,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

That blew some dust off some brain cells. ^_^

And somehow, seeing Palestineans' parts of bodies on the front page of CNN is fine.

It's the puritanical idiocracy of "woman body bad, death and dismemberment good".

(I don't mind seeing topless people. Indifferent really. But seeing people blown up is akin to a snuff film. And this world needs less violence.)

I mean, I dunno, the Puritans were upset at tolerance. It’s not really puritanical if Amazon doesn’t want to run an internet brothel. Besides, any time you let new content on a social site you risk getting flooded and people leaving.

The default (not logged-in) reddit front page includes r/combatfootage, where we get to watch "orks" getting killed.

Old enough to see titties perhaps, but not to parasocially live-chat about them, or send cash tips.

Children shouldn't be sending cash tips to streamers regardless of the content of said streams.

And yet they do.

Are there a lot of kids on there? My oldest never watched it once and my youngest only knows it as the place we can feed cats treats with channel points while old people talk about old video games.

I've never really spent time on Twitch but I guess I've always assumed it's for teens. Maybe that's just bias though, I assume teens are also the primary target of video games.

As far as I can tell it's a "pinky promise you're over 18" site, so twitch has a "see no evil" approach to counting that demographic. The public number is 22% 18-25, 50% 25-34. My experience is young adults are much more common than teens, but that probably shifts when you look at bigger streamers and lurkers instead of chatters.

Twitch allows a minimum age of 13. It is a pinky-promise thing, but it's fairly common to see a chatter admit they're under 13 and the streamer is like "Well now that you said that publicly in my chat, I have to ban and report you."

As far as I could tell, the policy allowing artistic nudity never existed in practice and Twitch doesn't seem to have been serious about it. Even though it was supposedly allowed, basically everyone who drew art with genitals or female nipples got their account suspended aside from one or two exceptions that seem to have slipped through the cracks. This wasn't just limited to AI art or anything even vaguely photorealistic either, and it included Twitch partners whose bans are supposedly are handled in house. Also, whilst the Twitch CEO did say that some people had been accidentally banned who were following the rules, Twitch conspicously didn't unban any of them until comfortably after the U-turn. There was also nothing stopping the full, uncensored thumbnails showing up on the Art category page, including for users whose accounts were marked as under-18 - which meant that it was full of naked anime titties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com