[raz32dust]

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry insider could shed some light on what's wrong with this business.

[1] https://backlinko.com/twitch-users

[bitmasher9]

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally.

2. The core product is pretty mature.

3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.

4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators.

5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to make his mark.

[covercash]

Twitch just announced a partnership with Nvidia at CES to allow streamers to encode multiple versions of their stream on their own PC and push them to Twitch. Previously, only partner/affiliate streams had transcoded streams at various levels of quality. That might cut back on the amount of transcoding Twitch has to do server side…

They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce bandwidth costs. They currently only support h264.

[belthesar]

This is interesting, as I had an idea to do this when I was working on a competitor service during lockdown. Our idea was to use this to cut the cost on transcoded renditions, and for streamers that didn't have the ability to generate multiple renditions but still wanted them, we would offer it as a service in exchange for a higher cut of their revenue. That said, if anyone gets a benefit from lower quality renditions being distributed, it's Twitch.

If you think about it, the less bandwidth that Twitch consumes through their CDN network, the less money a stream costs per minute. A viewer still watches ads with the same CPM, a viewer still subscribes for the same amount per month per broadcaster, a viewer optionally pays the same for ad-free viewing (Turbo), and a viewer pays the same premium for bits, regardless of what quality they're watching at. So, interestingly enough, the economics of limiting transcoding are more about limited capacity and ensuring a positive cost per streamer. If a streamer does not become an affiliate or partnered broadcaster on the platform, the only revenue Twitch gets from the streamer is the ad money from its viewers. By virtue, they want as many casters on the platform as possible to become affiliates, as being able to get commissions from bit sales and subscriptions gives Twitch more revenue streams for the same content.

So, to your point, they definitely want to be able to support more efficient codecs that are not as patent encumbered as h.265 (which IIRC did have limited support in SE Asian markets), because at the end of the day, if streamers are generating the renditions for the ABR ladder, and ultimately, folks are using lower bitrates, then overall, this cuts costs for the same operational cost.

[Tmpod]

> They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon

You mean HEVC (x265)? I believe NVENC is just nvidia's hardware accelerated implementations of existing codecs.

Anyways, that sounds really interesting for both streamers who want more control over their streams' encoding, but obviously for Twitch, as it saves them compute power (though upping their intake bandwith?).

I wonder how feasible it would be for most streamers. Pushing one stream vs 3 or so is quite the difference.

[bombcar]

I've always been entirely annoyed that there's no way for me to "encode what Google wants" for YouTube so it can be available directly, at least at highest bitrate.

[VirusNewbie]

>3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.

Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost.

They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

[philwelch]

The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff, and I wouldn’t agree they’ve had “a lot” of downtime. Most of the drop in ad revenue is a consequence of content management decisions that seem to be a matter of principle for the company’s new owner.

It’s strange to see hiring as an indication that a company is doing poorly; regardless, obviously Twitter is in a position where they’ve needed to eliminate much of their headcount and replace much of the rest.

[_jal]

> The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff

Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic.

It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base.

And now there's the bots:

https://www.threads.net/search?q=Twitter&serp_type=tags&tag_...

[philwelch]

> Firing the Trust and Safety team

Yes, technically, adopting a principled stance favoring freedom of expression implies laying off people whose job is to infringe upon freedom of expression, but it’s disingenuous to cast that as a staffing issue rather than a change in policy.

And I’m sure advertisers also really hate the fact that even the ads on the timeline can get community notes. But, well, I’ve seen what other platforms turn into under the foul influence of advertisers and I’m frankly not interested. If that means it has to be subsidized by an eccentric billionaire out of principle, so what? Other billionaires subsidize much more toxic outlets, the Washington Post for instance.

[pests]

I'm not seeing his principled stance. In fact, it seems business as usual. He still bans content he doesn't agree with and doesn't follow through with anything he says.

[rpmisms]

I actually love the community notes on ads. Really good stuff.

[93po]

> they've had a lot of downtime

Twitter is possibly the website most well known for downtime, and has been since literally the beginning. There's no real measure for whether it's true it's down more than usual lately, and sensationalist journalism and anecdotal reports from people with an axe to grind aren't really reliable.

The closest thing I can think of is looking at Google trends, which shows that "twitter down" is pretty consistent over the years:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...

There's a spike in Nov 2022 when the layoffs happened, but again that's not indicative that it's especially bad - just that people were especially whiny about it or anticipating it would be bad

[ProxCoques]

This is what I find ... interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right? Was there a large part of the engineering function at Twitter that was just existing on some mythology, and was in fact just not needed? If so, are the FAANG companies (and others) the same? Legions of engineering roles just bullshit wastes of $200K salaries plus share options and free pizza?

I utterly hate Musk, so firmly hope he was wrong. Just wish Xitter went down more.

[VirusNewbie]

> interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right?

Yes and no. Twitter was started before so much of the common “web scale” Open Source projects existed. Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, etc didn’t exist yet.

So versions of the aforementioned and then some were completely done from scratch at twitter, who has continued to maintain those projects despite them not being the premier open source offering in each of those categories. They also never achieved the scale of some of the largest tech companies where it makes economic sense to have say, a custom database or queue system.

Finally, Twitter has been using GCP for some of their new projects in the last few years, but they still had old legacy systems and teams to maintain that software, so they couldn’t fully reap the rewards of the cloud.

So, if you rebuilt twitter today you could likely do it for a fraction of the engineers they had at peak, by leveraging either cloud or popular existing OSS solutions. But that’s from scratch, not porting millions of lines of legacy code.

What Musk should have done was migrate various systems, then wind down teams. That probably would have worked, but been expensive in the short term.

So I think they cut too much, and I also think they honestly thought more engineers would be up for “hardcore twitter”, instead of quitting.

Musk forgot that all his very loyal Tesla employees may have also factored in their 10x RSU appreciation. It’s a lot easier to put up with insane working hours when your next years stock grant is 500k or million or something. Doesn’t apply at twitter.

Tl;DR: not a Musk hater at all, but he fucked up at Twitter.

[ekianjo]

> don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.

Usually you dont hire if your business is not working or expected to grow

[pests]

Why fire then rehire so soon then?

[autoexecbat]

How does that work for equity? It must be difficult for them to explain this to new people, as where is the exit-condition for liquidity

[stefan_]

The infrastructure is bought from Amazon, who in turn own them. Makes you wonder if it’s actually unprofitable, on the whole.

[genman]

I think this is a fair question.

[JoeOfTexas]

If its anything like my corp, Twitch only gets a small discount, if any at all. It's expensive regardless. Network bandwidth alone is probably in the $20+ million a month range.

[stefan_]

Well, that's sort of the problem here right; yes at AWS retail you are paying $20 million a month for traffic, but the cost to AWS isn't anywhere near that, in fact how AWS charges for traffic doesn't match to how it incurs costs at all. And in general having desirable services like Twitch and of course being ginormously huge means people want to peer with you and you have more leverage in those peerings, making them cheaper.

[runevault]

One note on line item 1: Only Partners and sometimes affiliates get transcoding. Everyone else is just whatever they stream at.

[itsTyrion]

> think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think.

exactly. most people with good enough internet stream at 6 mbps CBR. A streamer with 1k viewers costs them several terabytes! egress for a quick 2 hour stream.

[londons_explore]

> Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.

Every member of staff fired now has a beef with the company, and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence. Some may set up competitors or just badmouth you and your product.

Elon discovered this the hard way.

[jjulius]

>... and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence.

Genuinely curious to hear why you think this is the case. It's my anecdotal experience that the average social media company employee is just an average person like you and I, with an average number of followers.

[dboreham]

Amazon already had a long reputation as the Hunger Games of s/w so their rep can't go down much.

[dangus]

This is an “inside a bubble” take.

The idea that software engineers at Twitter are influential on the platform is laughable.

How many of these accounts are software engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

[vineyardmike]

There’s more employees than just SWEs. And you don’t need to be generally famous, you need influence in key niches.

Twitter has historically hired people with large Twitter followings into roles that are more external. Some of them have been interviewed by the news media (eg The Verge). I’d be surprised if it didn’t have an impact on advertisers.

[asdfasdflkj211]

You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.

[londons_explore]

Not many people realise this. Engineers build stuff. When your product is feature complete, you can get rid of most of them.

Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.

[hibikir]

No growing company has a feature-complete product, as just load increases can make a product go from fine to inoperable. Sometimes it's not even more users, but more historical data: Something that used ot parse through 3 months of history is probably going to be unhappy with 5 years.

In big tech, having services without anyone having a semblance of maintenance responsibilities tends to lead to relatively quick failures. Even in boring enterprise companies, handing out maintenance to a 3rd party is still going to cost you, and is likely going to lower quality. I've seen way too many companies that ended up rewriting things after leaving a system mostly unmaintained for 5 years made it sop being fit to purpose.

If there's a lesson of software from the last decade is that undermaintained services become zombified software, and can eat your company's brains. That's why a place like google often would rather shut something down than claim it's finished.

[raz32dust]

No software product that has actual paying users can afford to stop development like that. It needs to constantly keep evolving with the environment, or someone else will fill their niche quickly or it will just atrophy. That may require fewer engineers though, so I agree with you partially.

With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.

[dogprez]

It's not a complete waste, every engineer you employ is one you don't have to compete with, which matters for big tech companies. Also, employed engineers can be mobilized to react to threats/emergencies. It's just a matter of time before they will be needed. If you are running a ghost ship, will you be able to scale up a response when needed? If the company is just being fleeced, then the answer is "who cares?" I guess.

[anonylizard]

Most tech products are not well engineered, they are riddled with tech debt as per typical advice. So when a product does succeed, it is usually limping along racing to add features and handle great load while being knee deep in (already) legacy code.

This is all fine and expected, you sacrifice engineering quality for development speed in the early days. Just expect to pay it back by keeping a large engineering team for many years to come, or see your entire tech explode in flames.

Those 'years' are finite however, Twitch has been mature for like a decade already. So finally the tech debt is all paid off, and given failure to develop major successful features, time to cut the staff.

[VirusNewbie]

When you're at scale, a .5% increase in performance or decrease in utilization pays for a team of engineers. Being able to have one less SaaS product bill as well. Maybe Twitch isn't at that scale, but some companies certainly are.

[edgyquant]

Or, rather, they are paying what they think are some of the best people in the world not to go out and start the competition.

[blasphemers]

No company actually does this, they are just bloated because they have so much money and managers rank/value is determined by how many people they manage.

[johnnyanmac]

They explicitly did this in the 00's. Some circles of top companies over a decade ago were convicted for having anti-poaching agreements amongst each other.

May be a bit different now (as others said, free money is gone, so competition cropping up is much harder to do and much less a concern), but the tech boom of the 2000's very much worried about becoming the next MySpace to some startup's Facebook. That's why tech salaries became so high to begin with.

[blasphemers]

The anti-poaching thing was something completely different. That was preventing other companies from hiring people away from them because they were useful employees, not hiring people to prevent them from competing. Also, anti-poaching agreement kept salaries lower, it didn't inflate them.

[kevinventullo]

Competition is less of a concern when VC’s are tight with their money.

[verdverm]

I found it to be rather buggy personally, it constantly freezes and needs to be refreshed

[mbrumlow]

You might need to reapply your thermal paste and reseat your cup hat sink.

[verdverm]

It's consistently bad across multiple devices

They need to upgrade their encoding / codec

I actually did replace my liquid cooler and thermal paste on the beast machine, makes no difference

[nitwit005]

The mobile app certainly has problems, but you don't need hundreds of engineers to squash the remaining bugs.

[nine_zeros]

Sounds silly. Who's going to save the company during the inevitable outages?

[bradleyishungry]

They have more competition than ever with youtube streaming actually somewhat catching on and tiktok streams becoming more popular. It seems weird to cut so many engineers when it’s probably most important now to innovate. Its not even just R&D that’s important, either. Their product is worse in some aspects than their competitors and a lot of the reason why they’re still dominant in their space is just the community of users on the website.

[Brybry]

I think viewership peaked in 2021 and has been flat or down since then. [1][2][3]

I know some of my friends watch Twitch less because the ad policy became toxic.

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics

[2] https://sullygnome.com/longtermstats

[3] https://streamscharts.com/overview#:~:text=Twitch%20growth%2...

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Basing ‘peak’ of a streaming service on a time when people were forced to be indoor seems like a bad metric. They (probably/hopefully) won’t see that rate of growth organically, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the peak.

[Brybry]

I was responding to the OP statement (and source with 2021 as the last data point) that "Viewership growth seems good".

Lockdowns were in 2020, not 2021.

Yes, April 2020 gave a huge bump to Twitch and the pandemic obviously had a large impact on the following years. Twitch had really good growth.

But look at the sources I linked. Looks to me like viewership has been down every year since 2021.

[ProfessorLayton]

I personally switched to youtube* for the streams I watch, since twitch's ads can be really disruptive. Not to mention they used to be ad-free for prime members, while at the same time the ad rolls became longer and longer.

*I pay for youtube premium

[coffeebeqn]

Every streaming platform seems to be converting to adding ads on top to cover the costs. Disney+ just did it for my paid membership - which I cancelled

[andirk]

People need to stop paying for a service and then also paying with their time via ads. Desperate moves like this make me wonder if these companies are regular greedy/shitty or if they're reading from the playbooks of cable TV early 1990s.

[joegibbs]

What happened to the ad policy?

[gurchik]

Twitch will run preroll ads on your stream unless you elect to run at least 3 minutes of ads per hour. These preroll ads have a huge effect on viewership because new viewers who tune in to an immediate ad will typically just leave. So, these "elective" ads are not very optional. But, this is a lose-lose situation, because these elective ads are very disruptive to viewers too. They are often implemented as a 90 second ad every 30 minutes. If this doesn't sound bad, remember that this is live content. If you're watching an ad, you're missing out on content, and when the ad is over, there's no way to wind it back to see what you missed.

Besides the ad policies, the Twitch revenue split for subscriptions has been changing over time. Historically it defaulted to 50/50 and most streamers of any decent size audience would have a contract to be granted 70/30 split. However, the 70/30 split has been phased out and today nearly no streamer on the platform has it anymore. This is a huge difference for streamers. The CEO of Twitch was handing out 70/30 split "coupons" as a prize in a live event[1], it's a big deal.

Besides subscription revenue, Twitch is constantly battling to reduce other sources of income, like branded sponsorships. Last year they announced significant restrictions on streamers displaying branded content with sponsors.[2] While these rules were soon reverted, it suggests Twitch is in a fight for its life. All indications point that this is going to continue to be a problem in the future. In short, streamers need to deal with the ads because their revenue from other sources is constantly at threat.

1: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/twitch-ceo-surprises-s...

2: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752437/twitch-new-ad-rul...

[prox]

The 70/30 is back again from early this year though in the form of “Partner Plus” , you need 300 subpoints for 3 months to be eligible for it.

[dangus]

And here’s the other thing: why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience?

I’m not a heavy Twitch user so maybe I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos.

At least with YouTube I can watch ad-free with a Premium plan.

[gurchik]

> why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience?

First of all, an Amazon Prime subscription soon won't even remove ads from Amazon Video, so why would it be any different for Twitch?

Second of all, a channel subscription (through Amazon Prime or otherwise) removes ads from that channel. If you want an ad free experience across the whole site, Twitch Turbo is $11.99 USD.

[SleepilyLimping]

Prime USED to remove ads site-wide, but that was shuttered. Turbo will probably go away sometime in the future as well, as it's mostly there to offer a product for developing markets where Prime doesn't exist yet.

I don't subscribe to any channels because Turbo exists; they probably don't like that.

[thomasfortes]

> I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos.

Discoverability, content creators and community.

Live streaming is a second class citizen on youtube, and as such it is hidden under dropdowns, the live streams aren't always on the top of your followers, live recommendations are worse than useless and the big creators that move to youtube do like Ninja with Mixer, with a big fat paycheck to justify the loss of viewership and community.

[bombcar]

wait do the ads roll based on time since viewer connected?

Back in the day the streamer would take a break and roll some ads, so you knew you didn't miss anything ...

[echelon]

You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis.

Is it exploitative? Empowering? Toxic? Who knows! Everyone argues about everything.

Twitch is ban happy with anything even remotely controversial. Things that can be suggestive or comments that can be interpreted as offensive will garner a ban. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related.

Honestly, this stuff needs to move P2P. Platforms are indecisive and fickle. Just a month ago, they flip-flopped on their policy in just two days [1]. And it happens time and time again.

I don't blame the ad networks (after all Twitter had all of the world government and news orgs plus sex and nudity). I blame the Twitch leadership.

If you follow Twitch, the entire leadership is embroiled in the kind of drama you'd expect in a middle or high school.

The community is moving to mostly Kick [2] and somewhat to YouTube Gaming.

[1] https://decrypt.co/209998/twitch-walks-back-changes-after-su...

[2] https://kick.com/

[philwelch]

> You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis…. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related.

It seems incomplete to complain about this without also noting that Twitch (along with almost every other social media platform) has increasingly turned into a lead generation platform for OnlyFans. The rules keep changing because the OnlyFans streamers will find whatever line is drawn and absolutely spam the platform with whatever drives traffic to OF.

[ta8645]

Which suggests that a less prudish content policy at Twitch might have kept OnlyFans from ever being created in the first place. They literally drove those consumers away to other platforms, squandering their early and dominant position in the market.

[hacketthfk]

There is a reason porn sites are a separate category and not a section of mainstream sites.

I don't want to see porn when I watch news or video games.

If I want to see porn, I know where to find it.

[philwelch]

Camgirl sites already existed before Twitch, let alone OF. It’s hard to see how turning Twitch into another camgirl site would have been a better strategy than creating a streaming platform for watching people play video games, which was an entirely new niche. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to complain when platforms that were never meant for porn get relentlessly spammed by camgirls.

[Spivak]

I think this kind of thing is far far overblown, for the vast majority of streamers these kinds of "internet discourse" dramas don't affect them in any meaningful way. Internet drama is just fuel for the blogspam.

It's all money anything else is rage baiting, kick's pull is the revenue split they'll never be able to maintain if they reach critical mass and the policies that get streamers to leave are the ad/revenue split changes.

[bart_spoon]

Hate anything remotely sex-related? Are we talking about Twitch? They have changed their policy a billion times because they seem hell-bent on avoiding censoring sexual content as much as the possibly can. It’s the users that inevitably find a way to push the boundaries so far that they are forced do something, that is usually so half-assed that it doesn’t change much. At this point Twitch is getting closer to a cam site that funnels people to OnlyFans than it is to its gaming roots.

[pclmulqdq]

Kick allows sexual content and gambling content. Both of those are worth quite a bit for the content creators, the first of which is monetized by driving people to OnlyFans, and the second of which is monetized through incentives and partnerships with gambling sites.

[boneitis]

(I misread parent a bit.)

Not to say that you are off, but what people here seem to be glossing over if not wholly overlooking is that Kick is entirely backed by founders of an online casino (quick searching will turn up very quickly who).

"partnerships" and "intertwined" that I'm seeing on this submission feel like they are understating it: Kick is owned by a casino.

A Harris Heller clip of a pretty thoughtful take, IMO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKMnBZ0LlP4&t=423s

[octacat]

It is more tricky to do p2p because not all viewers use stationary PCs nowadays. There are mobiles or wifi users, who cannot be the rebroadcaster nodes. Bittorenty style delivery maybe will work, just with higher delays.

Youtube is probably good enough for steamers.

[apexalpha]

Most of their cost will be infrastructure. Encoding and serving multiple streams per channel to different devices with a low buffer must be expensive.

On the other hand: they host everything on AWS. Which Amazon owns. So while Twitch might make a loss the parent company might be perfectly happy making up the difference in AWS profits.

[insane_dreamer]

Did they have a hiring spree during the pandemic like all the other tech companies and now returning to the mean?

[coffeebeqn]

And record numbers of people looking for unhealthy para social content when stuck at home

[refulgentis]

It's happening at every tech company, over and over again, quietly and loudly.

Unfortunately tech is probably the ur-contrarian and ur-isolated field, and from the reactions I see to this, I worry there will never be a systemic response by employees.

[bjclark]

When twitch was acquired by Amazon the rumor was that they were the single biggest AWS customer and they were going to go out of business because they didn’t have the cash to pay the bills. It would have been bad for AWS and Amazon was investing in games. If you read between the lines that’s basically said in this article from that time. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/26/6067085/amazon-twitch-tv-video...

[firstSpeaker]

> single biggest AWS

I think that has always been Amazon.com since it runs on AWS.

[snotrockets]

Amazon doesn't run on AWS. There's separation between Amazon resources and AWS ones, even if much of the tech stack is shared.

[londons_explore]

> they take a large cut from subscribers

I'm surprised they don't have a 'choose your own revshare' setting, allowing the creator choose how much to pay twitch.

Obviously twitch will recommend more profitable creators, so you get a kind of 'race to the top', with creators offering twitch a larger and larger revshare, knowing that unless they do, their audience size will dwindle.

It also encourages creators to come in from other platforms - if you already have an audience and just want to extract money from them, then you don't need to be in twitches recommendations and can choose a low revshare to milk the subscribers.

[joebob42]

I think subscribers are sticky enough that this would pretty quickly drive revshare down.

Especially when I imagine a sizable portion of revenue comes from the very biggest streamers, who may not need discovery from twitch at all and would then default to the lowest value. Like, this model has sort of flipped setup from what I'd think you want; the more successful you are the lower twitches cut.

I suppose they could just make the minimum value 50% (iiuc this is the current value). But I'm still not sure how much it would help.

[nicce]

More profits. Simple as that.

[minimaxir]

Even in late-stage capitalism, you do a 5-10% staff cut at most to trim the fat so-to-speak.

A 35% cut indicates something with the business is fundamentally wrong.

EDIT: I apologize for the completely unintentional derail.

[paulryanrogers]

Maybe they're unwinding some over hiring from when interest rates were low.

[hot_gril]

I can see 35% of the workforce at a company with a mature product like Twitch doing nothing, or working on random extra features that no longer make sense when interest rates go up. Idk if you'd call it fundamentally wrong, it made sense at a different time.

[niceice]

What's "late-stage capitalism"?

[dexwiz]

Its modern jargon that refers to multinational, corporate focused, globalized markets. Its gone through a few definitions over the last century, but most recently its been used by the anti-work movement to deride a culture that has all but abandoned individual people in favor of the ultra wealthy. A culture where greed and money are the only virtues and all choices are driven by the bottom line.

Jokes on them, that's how its always been.

[throwboatyface]

Farmers protested the enclosure of the commons, Luddites protested the industrial revolution, trade unionists protested for a 40 hour work week.

It's not foolish to imagine the world could be better.

[CamperBob2]

You'd have to be brainwashed to think the world would be better without the industrial revolution. That's Unabomber territory. Ignorance alone wouldn't suffice... would it?

[no_wizard]

This isn't really correct.

While yes, so called "anti-work"[0] movement (or if you're from the early 2000s, the occupy wall street movement would be of similar philosphical values, for example) uses this term rather often, it derives from the work of the Ernest Mandel[1][2] based on his work in which he used the term to describe the latter stages of capitalism post WWII as he saw it, and how it inevitably would end up in deep inequality and power concentration, to paraphrase the thesis.

As far as "its always been that way" goes, I can't speak for all of the past, but there are clear models in the present that show it doesn't have to be that way. Norway & Sweden come to mind, for example.

[0]: Orewellian term at its best. The movement isn't actually anti work, much like luddites weren't anti technology. This label is attached by and large to people who are centered around ideas related to equitable wealth distribution in society & more worker rights, namely. They don't actually profess to be against work, as far as the movement goes. Individuals may vary. Never the less, its clear doublespeak.

[1]: Notably, a socialist. Wrote the book Late Capitalism (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/931838)

[2]: The term was then popularized by Fredic Jameson, another socialist, though his critique was centered around the culture of post modernism and capitalism intersections: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/ernest-mandel-marixism-late-capi...

[dexwiz]

The anti work subreddit was founded by people who were truly anti work. It was then co-opted by people in low and middle wage jobs venting about poor working conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. Its a great example of how moderates sanewash extremist ideas to something a bit more palatable, similar to defund the police. While most people probably want a demilitarization of police forces, some people truly want a policefree state.

[nateglims]

Originally, it's the idea that capitalism will have a terminal crisis (i.e. die off) and we are in this final crisis because it will hit a state where productivity cannot be increased and so profit will be too difficult to increase.

In practice, technology and some major events have prevented this from happening. The modern left-wing view is that we have run out of new frontiers to exploit, so the capital class will (has) return to reducing labor costs with more extreme measures among other tactics.

With recent events like a major labor shortage (or future one due to declining population) in the developed world, climate change, a stagnation in productivity per person, gig economy emergence, and widespread privatization being viewed as very destructive; this idea has gotten more popular. Part of this is driven by some companies, especially in tech, having manic levels of optimism about frivolous things.

Personally, it kind of sounds like Malthus. But it is hard to deny that we are in a slump of sorts and that startups that sound like scams appeared to be more common for a while.

[mullingitover]

You'll get a lot of answers, but I think The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall[1] is key.

Capitalism means competition. Competitors mean reduced profits. As we get into the later stages of the game, that pesky competition aspect comes into play and firms do whatever they can to worm their way out of its consequences.

As profits inevitably fall, firms flail around doing whatever they can to maintain them and cause all sorts of misery for employees, customers, and the world at large. Increasingly brutal exploitation of workers, rotting product quality, all sorts of shenanigans with regulatory capture and rent-seeking as firms try to avoid competition and the need to sell a quality product at a competitive price.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

[hnuser123456]

An implication that capitalism is a fatal disease rather than a way to efficiently exchange value.

[otikik]

It can be both.

[OkayPhysicist]

Basically, it's the theory that capitalist economies demand continually increasing growth, even increasing rates of growth, in order to remain stable enough to stay hegemonic. The industrial revolution, through most of the 20th century, exhibited this growth, driving capitalism to be the dominant (eventually only) economic system on earth.

Unfortunately, growth is hard, and it slows down. Over time, providing meaningful improvements to the lives of the participants in the economic system fails to keep up with the demands of growth, and you start to see the system going full ouroboros, consuming all the positive impact its created in the lives of its participants in a downward spiral of exploitation and value extraction until there's nothing left. The period of time after the inversion from "making people's lives better" to "making people's lives worse" is "late-stage capitalism", equivocating it to cancer or other terminal diseases.

Personally, I'm more of a "threshold events" theorist, and that enshittification is just reversion to the mean, but that's the pitch.

[glenngillen]

I’ve never been the target audience for this, so sharing anecdata with a sample size of 1 (well, 2 kids). But as I type this my kids are watching some streamer play minecraft on our TV. They’re watching it via YouTube though. I don’t know the last time they used Twitch, and I suspect the youngest doesn’t even know how to get there.

[summerlight]

I guess Twitch is probably not in an area of profitable business given the infrastructure cost of video streaming services, especially in that it cannot enjoy all the cost optimization like Netflix/YouTube due to its nature of live streaming.

[paxys]

It's just a brutal space to operate in. Even YouTube barely manages to break even.