It's been a interesting past couple of days of drama but the article fails to mention that twitch employees were accepting large amounts of money from gambling streamers live on stream.
Is that what triggered this action now? It's odd because any category of streamer could be paying employees large sums of money to recommend them. A lot of gamers say that Pool & Hot Tub streams are being recommended despite only watching game streams. Now that's probably because they have high engagement and sub activity, but they or any category could just as well be influencing employees.
>A lot of gamers say that Pool & Hot Tub streams are being recommended despite only watching game streams.
Some hot tub streamers regularly get 10k+ viewers. If that viewer base overlaps with $your_favorite_streamer, then you will get hot tub streamer recommended. That said, I personally don't see problem with hot tub streamers; it seems like incredibly puritanical moral panic for some reason and I don't know why that gets so much attention in 2022.
Some of us like to use twitch to see people playing games (you know, its original intended purpose) and when half of the front page is glorified camgirls, it undermines that. More and more streamers are abandoning games and going for boring IRL garbage instead because that's what Twitch promotes.
>and when half of the front page is glorified camgirls, it undermines that.
Half of the front page has never been glorified camgirls. This is just more moral panic. Amouranth is practically the only streamer who is pulling enough numbers to be in the top 10 of any section. The featured section of twitch has never featured hot tub streams. Of the top 5 hot tub streamers, as of writing, the top one with 800 viewers are otters (like the animal), 1 is a vtuber and another is a man.
The issue is incredibly overblown. Amouranth is the only one doing numbers regularly.
>More and more streamers are abandoning games and going for boring IRL garbage instead because that's what Twitch promotes.
That has nothing to do with hot tub streamers. Kai Cenat and Adin Ross are some of the largest growing streamers in the past year, and they are primary Just Chatting streamers. This really just feels like you are complaining about Eternal September. It sounds like you just don't like that the world is changing. "Old man yells at cloud".
>Some of us like to use twitch to see people playing games
Some of the largest streamers on Twitch don't play games. Expecting twitch to remain some "insider only country club for video games" is ridiculous. No one is forcing you to watch hot tub streams. Getting recommended a titty streamer won't kill you. It really just comes across that you are mad that there are women on the platform doing stuff you don't like. It's arbitrary censorship; I doubt you would accept this kind of censorship on any other platform. And even then, when you look at the hard numbers for these titty streamers it's incredibly hard to take the moral panic seriously. Amouranth is only one doing numbers (and she is literally an outlier, I believe she is like top 10 on onlyfans as well) and the rest have fewer viewers than a Zoo's livestream.
It's definitely the case that streamers focusing on their bodies are not large in aggregate: Twitch streamers are overwhelmingly male, and even among female streamers they're a minority . However, "hot tub streamers" (by this I more broadly mean streamers whose main content is clearly meant as titillation) are significantly overrepresented among the top female streamers. Amouranth is the top female streamer by a long shot, with an audience twice as large as the next largest female creator on the platform.
There's definitely a moral panic component, but there are nonetheless negative aspects to having this content on Twitch. Women on the platform report feeling pressure and an expectation of producing this kind of content, because so many other popular women on the platform do it. There's also the idea that this juxtaposition spreads the message to viewers that men gain attention by exhibiting their skills and women get attention by exhibiting their bodies.
I do support the ability of people to produce this kind of content - or even explicit streams, for that matter - but I'm sympathetic to the idea that twitch should spin it off into something like lifestyle.tv in the same vein that twitch.tv was once a gaming spinoff of justin.tv.
> Women on the platform report feeling pressure and an expectation of producing this kind of content, because so many other popular women on the platform do it.
That's kind of ridiculous. You don't get to tell people they can't voluntarily do an optional thing just because you don't want to do the same optional thing.
Your entire comment is a blatant attempt twist my words into things I never said. Please stop that, thanks.
Twitch was originally 100% games. That's literally why it was created, and why I signed up and started using it. Now that it's no longer focused on gaming content, I am losing interest and finding it harder to watch content I enjoy. It's that simple.
Watching someone playing a game and subsequently being suggested a stream of someone sitting in front of a camera doing literally nothing as thousands in donations come in just feels like twitch telling me "hey, stop watching that entertaining content you like, watch this unrelated garbage instead because it's more profitable for us". And like others have mentioned, these streams being shown off right next to gaming streams pressures the streamers to move over to that type of content to potentially grow their audience and get paid more.
In case you're not aware, Twitch was a spinoff of justin.tv that was created as a place to contain gaming content (which was quickly becoming very popular at the time) while justin.tv continued to host other kinds of streams, but justin.tv was eventually shut down because Twitch completely dwarfed it. Now Twitch is becoming justin.tv again. They should just repeat the process in reverse and revive justin.tv to contain all of this non-gaming content, but they wont because it's easier and cheaper to just shove it all into the same space.
I don't have a horse in this race, but Twitch's "original intended purpose" was not just gaming. It was called justin.tv and over time the gaming category became very active. Later they refocused on gaming.
Twitch's original purpose was splintering off the gaming section of justin.tv (a general streaming site) onto a separate website specifically for gaming content.
They never refocused on gaming as that was the entire focus of the site's creation. During the early days any non-gaming content was strictly prohibited on Twitch.
For a while justin.tv and twitch coexisted, with justin.tv for general content such as "social streams" (equivalent to "Just Chatting" on modern day Twitch) and largely streams of copyrighted content such as tv shows (an obvious liability).
Prior to Amazon purchasing Twitch, justin.tv was shut down and a lot of the general "social" content started becoming allowable on Twitch over time.
I'm out of the loop, what is the difference between a camgirl and a glorified camgirl? is this like a pejorative where you and others don't like camgirls and people are pretending that those streamers are something else?
doesn't twitch let you just go directly to the streamer you want to see?
why are people making excuses about being camgirls or not? and also is this misogyny? or something like people are needing to pretend they aren't paying for some sexually attractive things? I don't really know Twitch's community, I remember teenagers though
Whoa hold on there, Fortnite has an ESRB rating of Teen, which is intended for audiences 13+. Should Twitch be recommending Fortnite content to 10 year olds?
You can, as others have, about any platform that allows salacious content. It's not different than banning trying to ban GTA because 10 year olds have playstations. Why is softcore content the line and not GTA which has a mature (17+) rating? Why is Amouranth a problem and not Grand Theft Auto. Even Fornite has an ESRB rating of 13+. It's straight up moral panic (and IMO, moral panic directed at women who are making money from doing "nothing").
My barometer for this issue is why is this content a problem on Twitch, but not on Instagram which has a much higher penetration amount kids and teens, and is way more brazen about it.
A lot of gaming culture is quite misogynistic so whilst bikini streams make up a tiny percentage of the overall viewership bar a couple of bigger names it annoys them no end. See also the constant bringing up of one girl who had sex on stream and the worship of Andrew Tate.
It’s basically convenient whataboutery that fits their politics.
For this particular category I think there's going to be a lot more contributing variables than for gambling. Not only would it have high engagement and sub activity but:
- a lot of the streamers also game
- even if they don't, there are streamer cliques and social groups which are primarily gaming, of which they're a part
- a lot of viewers who only watch gaming will watch some streamer within the aforementioned clique/social group and be exposed to crossovers
- a lot of the viewers of that category also watch gaming streamers, so this will put those streams in the "people who watch this also watch" algorithmic bucket
None of the above are significantly the case for gambling except maybe the last one, and even then much less so.
My understanding is that this is not the catalyst. The catalyst involves a bunch of drama between various streamers, which led to the revelation that a particular Twitch streamer had fraudulently asked to borrow something like $350,000 from various other streamers and viewers, and had gambled it all away.
Once that happened, a bunch of influential streamers started to suggest that they may do a strike if Twitch didn't address the issue, and that was the final straw.
You are right about this event being the catalyst. The funniest part is that the person who scammed and alledgedly spent it all on gambling did it on sports betting... which is specifically excluded from the ban on gambling by Twitch.
And the very likely reason for the exception is that Twitch has signed a 13 billion deal with a famous sport betting company tied to the NFL. This is peak hypocrisy from Twitch and it seems to get very little media coverage.
> It's odd because any category of streamer could be paying employees large sums of money to recommend them.
No, they couldn't. That is nonsense. I am a former twitch employee, of 4 years, and the recommendation algorithm is a complicated service, managed by whole teams of people.
A random employee couldn't just take a bribe, and get someone recommended.
The closest that someone could maybe do, is submit someone internally, to be hosted on the front page carousel for one specific day, for a few hours.
But even these manual requests are reviewed by a team of people, who especially make sure the front page people are brand safe. So the idea that they would put a "hot tub" streamer, on that manual hosting list is absurd.
The decision happened literally live while Hasan was talking about how terrible it is that gambling content is still allowed on Twitch in front of an enormous audience so I'm inclined to believe this exposure forced their hand on a decision they were already considering making, probably for a while.
>A lot of gamers say that Pool & Hot Tub streams are being recommended despite only watching game streams
In my experience, Twitch recommendations seem to be based heavily on what you watch, so if that's what they're seeing its probably because they watched it at some point.
I've only ever watched MTG tournaments and a handful of replays of factorio & pokemon streams. I too get the hottub streams recommended from time to time. Stopped after I reported it as porn a few times, but that might be a coincidence.
According to what I've seen on /r/livestreamfail (take everything with the finest grain of salt possible), it was only one twitch employee who took money, and they have since passed away.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's against a "Twitch/Amazon code of conduct", but that fact at face value doesn't mean anything nefarious. These could call center employees, qa testers, developers, etc that have no connection to the internal politics of deciding what is allowed on the platform.
If they are in fact the decision makers or able to influence policy, yes that' doesn't seem right.
Yes. IIRC there were two low level Twitch employees who won something in the giveaway, but I believe they were entered because they performed chat moderation (yes, using the same mod tools normal channel moderators use) for the streamer in question (Trainwrecks). It's being made out like this was some form of bribe, but that seems disingenuous given they have (had, one died, one left the company) no influence over Twitch policies, and the decision to accept gifts (or not) is their responsibility as an Amazon employee either way. Perhaps they have colleagues who they could sway who are involved in policy setting, but that feels like reaching to me.
However take this with a pinch of salt too, I wouldn't like to bet on being fully correct! ;)