[autocorr]

> Community and advertiser feedback made clear that we need to offer more ways to control the content that’s recommended as well as where ads appear. So, we’re introducing a new category: Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches. If you have chosen swimwear that is allowed under the “Swim and Beaches” contextual exception to our standard Nudity and Attire policy, you should stream into the Pools, Hot Tubs and Beaches category.

People set up kiddy-pools in their room with a bit of water to get this "contextual exception" for the express purpose of streaming suggestive content. Why not just remove the exception and let people stream sexually suggestive content and make a separate category for that without a ridiculous "beaches and pools" euphemism?

[Traster]

They don't want to be a porn site. The problem they have is that the porn content drives away advertisers and non-porn related contant. So they have to steer away from porn, but wherever they draw the line there are going to be people testing the line, and there's an audience for it. So the compromise they've clearly come up with is they don't allow porn, but if you happen to be sexy wearing practically nothing, that's fine - as long as it's got some pretext of not being porn, because porn is what will kill their non-porn related business.

[chevill]

What's funny is that they insist on pretending that these streamers aren't trying to sexualize themselves. The streamer that caused this blog to be written basically uses her twitch channel as a front to sell her nudes on another site.

If people want to sexualize themselves for money that's their business, the problem is they keep trying to find loopholes in the conduct policy to transform a site about videogames that children frequent into something sexual.

They mention the tools that allow you to filter channels on their website. They make it really easy to block channels that are recommended to you. Why not extend that functionality to the entire site so you can just click 2-3 times and get rid of any channel for any reason forever? The answer is simple: Money.

[derefr]

> The streamer that caused this blog to be written basically uses her twitch channel as a front to sell her nudes on another site.

As long as the content on Twitch isn't sexual, I don't think it matters to Twitch (or advertisers) if it's serving as lead-gen for something that is sexual. Content produced as lead-gen can be valuable for its own sake.

(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)

[chevill]

>As long as the content on Twitch isn't sexual,

It is though and that's why ads were banned and that's why Twitch wrote this blog post. There's no nudity, but the entire point of her stream is for her to show off her body in exchange for money.

>(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)

This is valid thing for people in many professions, but Onlyfans and patreon are used as a kind of a loophole for Twitch's policy on pornography. There are also some former/current adult film actresses that did/do actual hardcore pornography for a living and they aren't allowed to shill pornhub on their channel page because it violates terms of service. Some of them keep their clothes on because they go to twitch to make non-sexual content and don't even want anyone hinting that they are aware of their background in adult film, but some of them are indeed on twitch because its just another outlet for them to sell sexualized content.

Also a reminder that I'm not judging people that want to sell sexualized content of themselves. There are communities for that. If show HN was 90% muscley dudes in g strings writing things about their latest tech project on their inner thighs it would diminish the quality of the community as a whole. There are lots of people that are OK with porn existing that don't want the primary places they hang out on the Internet to become known as places where people go primarily to masturbate.

[busterarm]

This is an extremely comical take because Twitch is notorious for banning creators from their platform for their behavior and content off-platform that runs afoul of Twitch rules.

They just don't do it for sexual comment. If the creator is female.

udysof got a one day ban for his hot tub stream.

[ohhelloxoxo]

Twitch's TOS bans 'solicitation' of sexually explicit content, and from a quick anecdotal sampling of streamers in this category 8/10 of them have direct links to or aggregate link pages to OnlyFans profiles where they do sell explicit content. Guess it depends on your definition of 'solicitation'?

[ttt0]

> As long as the content on Twitch isn't sexual, I don't think it matters to Twitch

They're banning people for off-site behavior.

[Siira]

Has there been any good meta analyses on the effects of suggestive content on children? My prior is that seeing sex was common enough in the ancestral environment, both human and animal sex, and children won’t be much effected from this content floating around.

[idiotsecant]

The difference is that hot tub twitch isn't an actual interaction between two people, its a dopamine feedback loop that warps an un-jaded mind into thinking it's reality.

[belltaco]

Is that also true of VR games, games in general, multiplayer games, concerts,TV, videos, watching a streamer play games, movies, social media etc. etc.?

[idiotsecant]

Yes, I think so, just to a lesser degree. People playing VR half life Alyx don't actually think they are part of a human insurrection fighting alien overlords but an alarmingly large number of people watching these hottub streams think they have some legitimately romantic connection to the streamer, or a chance of it. Young men can be remarkably stupid in this way.

[jimmygrapes]

A little late to the thread, but wanted to add my 2 cents anyway. It's not exposure itself to sexual that is the issue, it is encouragement (implicit or explicit) that the children emulate or partake in the same behaviors. For every ancient civilization that mated in front of their kids, how many also mated with their kids? Don't be too quick to dismiss the long term mental effects on exposure and normalization of sexuality to the sexually immature.

[emsy]

I think you're right with the ancestral environment, however I don't know whether the types of contents you can find on the internet are in the same ballpark and whether or not they have a negative impact on a child's development.

[breakfastduck]

24/7 available video streams available on any internet connected device is not comparable to real life authentic chance encounters.

[bombcar]

People don’t want to dig too much into it as either it will show it’s a problem, or show that advertising is ineffective.

[ixacto]

They want the simp $ but without being a porn site. So twitch will just evolve into girls-gone-wild light.

This is kinda hilarious though some brand managers must really be squirming when they are tying to sell advert spend for furniture or something on the twitch beach boob cam.

[wvenable]

Seems like there's an opportunity to just split the site, create a new brand for adult content, and send that content over to that brand.

[patmcc]

There are already lots of adult content sites; the reason these streamers exist on twitch specifically is because they can reach an audience that isn't on adult sites.

[belval]

There is not enough money in it for Amazon to start ramping up in pornographic material. The chances of brand degradation, possible boycotts due to women looking young/revenge porn is much much too high to be worth it.

[derefr]

Amazon already is in the pornographic-streaming market, just at a remove.

Who do you think the biggest customers of AWS's media-streaming IaaS infrastructure offerings are? People who need to move terabytes per second of live video over the Internet, but for some reason cannot make an Enterprise partnership with one of the public-facing media-hosting services (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, etc.) There's really only one industry matching that description.

I'd even bet that those infrastructure services already share a common backbone with Twitch. So this offering already basically exists. It's just white-labelled, rather than Twitch-branded.

[mrzimmerman]

That’s a gross oversimplification. That’s like saying “every application hosted on a server running Linux is basically the same”. AWS makes money by hosting all kinds of things, it doesn’t mean Amazon the company is a once removed partner of every single company using their infrastructure.

[derefr]

> It doesn’t mean Amazon the company is a once removed partner of every single company using their infrastructure.

I mean, that was my point: that Amazon prefers the optics of not being a partner to these companies, even though, technologically (not financially), there's no difference between what they're doing right now, and what they'd be doing if they ran a "Twitch for porn." Which is why they're just fine with being twice-removed partners to these companies, through vertical integrators.

Amazon are fine with e.g. Heroku and other PaaSes repackaging their IaaS services into convenient vertical-specific packages. Amazon don't want to run Heroku; they just want to eat 90% of Heroku's margins. Which essentially gets them all the upside of running Heroku anyway, without the risks of actually going into the PaaS vertical, marketing to small customers, etc.

The same logic applies with porn production: Amazon would much rather not create "Twitch for porn", but rather allow someone else to use AWS to create a "Twitch for porn", and then have that service pay AWS exorbitant egress-bandwidth fees. All the same benefit of owning such a company themselves, with none of the hard work, and better yet, none of the tarnish.

But also, keep in mind: if 80% of the customers for an infrastructure service are using it for a use-case in the X vertical, then that service is effectively a service-provider in the X vertical, whether it wants to be or not. Even if AWS isn't explicitly running a "Twitch for porn", if 80% of e.g. Kinesis Streams infra is being allocated to transcoding porn, then you'd better believe that the devs for Kinesis Streams, and the ops staff that run it, both know what their service is usually used for — and likely have spent time tuning their service to cope with the particular needs of that workload. To do otherwise would be irresponsible!

[belval]

Well that's pretty much my point, I said Amazon didn't want to make more money, I said that they didn't want to degrade their brand. It's not some moral high-ground, they just did cost analysis and realized that it was not worth it to get directly involved (as in branching out).

[dna_polymerase]

They are talking about moving the existing lewd stuff out onto a new platform, not starting a PornHub alternative. There is obviously enough in it for Amazon, otherwise they would just ban the pools outright.

[cratermoon]

In December 2019, Gfycat started redgifs.com for adult content. Tumblr banned adult content. FOSTA/SESTA creeps up.

[LegitShady]

>existing lewd stuff out onto a new platform, not starting a PornHub alternative

These are the same things.

[jtolmar]

They're suggesting a platform for sexually suggestive content, as opposed to one for sexually explicit content.

Which might actually be a viable niche. There are a lot more explicit websites out there than softcore ones.

[jedimastert]

You say that like there isn't already a massive amount of adult live streaming sites. They led the way!

[mcherm]

Yes, but it is more effective to let someone else own the second site that offers adult content. Then, for advertisers, there is no brand confusion caused by a common owner.

[nickysielicki]

Not an option, Amazon doesn't want to own a porn company.

[cblconfederate]

in old times, TV had late night shows, bordering soft porn, in which advertisements like alcohol and cigarettes seemed popular. It was never without ads (or it wouldn't exist). I wonder how come the online world advertising ecosystem has evolved to be an infantile one

[zeeZ]

In Germany it was mostly ads for phone sex hotlines and ringtone subscription scams that ran at night in my youth.

[TheAdamAndChe]

I saw the same culture policing from advertisers warp the foundation of YouTube too. Why are advertisers like that? Why don't they just go where the people want to go?

[ttt0]

It's just a speculation, but it's probably a bullshit excuse to ban whoever they want honestly. Advertisers can definitely back out from smaller websites, but from Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitch? I doubt it. They're supposed to throw away all that reach because of what, because their ads appeared on a couple of videos that were either sexually suggestive or because someone said the N-word? I run adblock, but if I'm not mistaken there are plenty of ads that are sexually suggestive themselves. On top of that I believe YouTube are about to play ads on all videos, if they aren't already doing that (by the way, they promised that they won't do that, but it was years ago, so no one remembers that). It's just that they'll ban you for whatever arbitrary reason or you just won't get any money if you're lucky.

[oliwarner]

No, they don't want to admit to being a porn site. Tying themselves in knots with silly rules like this means they're just a gateway for people to promote their OnlyFans pages.

If they want to be a game streaming site, why allow player video at all? Pare it back to what it was actually for.

[danso]

They aren’t just a game streaming site. “Just Chatting” is a huge category, as is live music

[throwaway292893]

Both of those categories are where most of these girls are, they are the bulk of those categories.

[ludamad]

They don't want to be whatever the market calls a porn site. Advertising a porn site is a lesser taboo

I love the weird twitch content BTW, so I wouldn't want to pare down for the sake of risque entertainers

[hellotomyrars]

There is clearly value in the experience of being able to see the person playing the game. It might even be inherently important to the gameplay in some circumstances. The whole thing is personality based entertainment for the most part and you get a lot more personality across when you can see the streamer.

I generally don’t enjoy Twitch because of the nakedness (no pun intended)of the business side. Twitch has every aspect of adult cam sites except explicit content and streamers obviously react and are incentives to interact when people toss them dollars but it makes for a poor viewing experience to me. But they are certainly continuing to fumble on where they’re choosing to draw lines on what is or isn’t explicit.

[tolbish]

What happens when advertisers do not care about pornographic content?

[frosted-flakes]

That will happen if society at large does not care about pornographic content. Which is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

[SubiculumCode]

I'd say that is more true of tiktok et al than twitch.

[michaelt]

Imagine a household where the parents run a porn blocker, while a teenager wants to view risqué things.

Twitch wants to keep them both happy: Not so much censorship as to drive the teenager away, but enough prudishness that porn blockers don't censor their entire domain.

[Jetrel]

This pretty much hits a bullseye.

[qsort]

Because many people like softcore pornography but they are too much of a prude to admit they do, in fact, enjoy watching softcore pornography.

Also, advertisers wouldn't like it.

[DaedPsyker]

I doubt the type of people that watch this stuff are really just prudes that can't handle porn.

[crazypyro]

I wouldn't doubt that a large percentage of the viewers are underaged users who actually do not have any experience with adult material.

Twitch is a gaming site. Kids watch youtube videos of people playing games, they get funneled to check out the minecraft/fortnite/etc. category on twitch then they get curious and check out the large streamers on the site. What do you know? There's a streamer who is sitting in a hot tub with 20k viewers (enough to put her in the top streams). It doesn't matter that twitch has a "mature audience warning".

Anyone who has used the site for any amount of time knows Twitch is providing a clear on-ramp to underaged kids accessing nearly-softcore porn.

They can't have their cake (young, gaming advertisers) and eat it too (allow nearly naked young women in kiddie pools) on the same site... Only reason they are even being forced to make a change is because of advertisers. I can only imagine if parents actually knew the extent of the hot tub streams, twitch wouldn't be allowed in a lot of households, but since its a "gaming" site first, its under the radar.

[darkhorse22]

> underaged users who actually do not have any experience with adult material.

A vanishingly small group. Most people aggressively seek that shit out as soon as they hit puberty.

[Unbeliever69]

The Sears Catalog of this generation.

[qsort]

It's a game of numbers, and toeing the line between porn and non-porn is the local optimum.

It's like a TV channel. They'd never show actual porn but they try to get as close as possible while retaining plausible deniability.

[ilaksh]

Yeah, of course _we_ don't know anyone who would watch this stuff, but I just have a _hunch_ that _those people_ watch porn too.

[bombcar]

Isn't it obvious? The advertisers don't want to advertise on a camsite, those are available elsewhere.

Trying to document and define "I'll know it when I see it" is an NP-complete problem, and this won't be the end of it.

[t-writescode]

Automating “I’ll know it when I see it” is closer to the halting problem. It might even be definable in those terms.

[wincy]

Last time I was looking through streams I saw a woman in a bikini in a kiddie pool riding on a giant inflatable hot dog. I think her normal stream is painting herself with body paints? It’s hard to avoid and that plus the super coarse language make it seem insane to me that people let their kids watch Twitch streams. I’m sure there’s good content somewhere but it’s just not for me, if I want that stuff I’ll just go to Pornhub. Feels more honest.

[belltaco]

You're missing the point of Twitch and also its culture. Twitch is closer to cable TV than anything else, even the terminology is the same, with 'channels'. Except that anyone can create a channel and stream it within the rules. The fact that there's some content you don't like on other channels being does not mean you shouldn't watch the streamers that you like.

Just like there's a wide variety in content thats broadcast on TV channels at different times of the day. There is even a Science and Technology channel with some developers streaming their coding. There are some game developers that only code their game while streaming the IDE.

Here's Stephen Wolfram streaming right now. https://www.twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram

Why should a Wolfram viewer care if there is some risque content on other categories? Even if you're looking around after the stream, you can just scroll past it like you do on Netflix.

I personally mostly watch only the few streamers that I have followed. I rarely come across the streamers mentioned in the article except when there's some Twitch drama that I hear about on Reddit or from friends.

[twobitshifter]

Clicked on wolframs channel, on the left side bar of recommended channels is a live indicator for someone named "Amouranth" streaming pools, hottubs, and beaches with 14.9k viewers.

[belltaco]

YouTube recommendations have been historically way worse with not much push back. Not to mention way more sexually explicit content on YouTube.

[corobo]

> Why not just remove the exception and let people stream sexually suggestive content

Because you'll lose your card processor and have to switch to a high risk processor which halves your income. America is super weird when it comes to sex and there's no alternatives.

[acidbaseextract]

Probably the lost ad revenue. No company wants to advertise on those streams. By breaking them out in way where advertisers could opt out of that stream category, suggestive streamers (a huge segment of traffic) would lose money for Twitch.

[belinder]

But isn't that already exactly what they're doing by breaking it into hot tub category and letting advertisers opt out of that category? So the question is if they let advertisers opt out anyway, why this hot tub category instead of an explicit suggestive category.

[frosted-flakes]

Because if Twitch becomes known or associated with explicit content, it will drive advertisers away, even if their ads are only shown over non-explicit content.

[Ekaros]

Payment processors? Not that Amazon don't have opportunity to run their own, but still the whole thing on that side is a mess. So they choose to not try to cross the line...

[corobo]

> No company wants to advertise on those streams

Does anyone know why this is? Is it just a legacy generation thing?

If it was me hell yeah I'd be advertising on 30k viewer streams full of people eager and willing to throw money around (assume market fit, obviously)

[cortesoft]

Many advertisers don’t want their ads on sites that show sexual content, even if their particular ads are not shown on the sexually suggestive section of the site. Twitch must have decided that it wasn’t worth risking those advertisers.

[LegitShady]

Because twitch is a disaster, the openly hypocritical armpit of internet streaming. Less honest than an actual camgirl site, but preachy and idiotic at the same time.

What's the point of protecting their reputation when their reputation is the home of camgirls and hot tub streamers pushing their onlyfans pages already? At least if they were honest about it I could respect that, but they're not.

I hope they fail.

[1MachineElf]

As Traster said, they don't want to be labelled as a porn site in spite of the streaming content they have, and so i.e. they must implement a change that gives them some plausible deniability in the face of advertisers.

[matheusmoreira]

The advertisers won't like it. Anything they don't like gets banned because they're the ones with the money.