[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.

[Washuu]

During this past Christmas Twitch "meta" I could not even link clips to friends because it would bring up "related" popular clips of what was basically soft core porn. It goes beyond what we want to watch. It affects how I can use and interact with the service to other people.

[echelon]

Twitch should de-boost such content. That's the easiest method. Super easy to implement and moderate, no waffling on the rules, users are kept happy.

[philwelch]

Much easier said than done. A million camgirls all trying to boost their engagement are going to find ways to game your algorithm faster than you are going to find ways to de-boost them. It’s the same fundamental reason Google is overrun with SEO spam and content farms that they can’t simply “de-boost”.

[corobo]

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

Aye. Payment providers.

Porn is "high risk" and the fees for processing payments for it are way higher.

[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.