Twitch seems quite content with being a front for onlyfans. They recently started blurring stream thumbnails, and have never cared about linktree/etc links despite them being used as a "hide it under the carpet" for onlyfans as well. (Direct links bad, a link to a link is okay though?)
They may as well stop pretending and fully allow adult content, because it's pretty obvious that these streamers will keep pushing the limits until they get permabanned or twitch gives in to the "women streamers did nothing wrong" crowd.
“Allowing adult content” is easier said than done for any organisation. This is incredibly common knowledge at this point. For example, orgs dealing with adult content need to work a little bit differently. Some employees may just be personally uncomfortable with being around “big titty goth gfs” all day every day, and their job might change to require it. Internal HR disputes can also become more complicated, as lines of appropriate behaviour can ever so slightly blur. I’m sure there are a hundred other things that I haven’t thought of. The part that’s common knowledge is that payment processing becomes orders of magnitude more precarious and complicated. Anyone who was paying attention to this area remembers what happened to OnlyFans itself recently, where they were running out of ways to make payments work.
This is all ignoring what Twitch would be giving up by embracing this. What’d be the impact of the negative optics when it comes to parents? Do they stop letting their kids on Twitch? How important is that to their bottom line? What about the consoles / platforms that have a Twitch integration? Is that now seen as an endorsement of or gateway to adult content that the platform owners didn’t sign up for?
Even if Twitch were actually able to pull that off, there’s a whole lot on the line, and certainly market segments that they know that they’d be saying goodbye to.
They only need to incorporate a separate entity that deals with the adult content, which then has to deal with the legal side of the problem and reap in the (probably) considerable rewards.
Honestly, why not. That would allow them to get more aggressive with enforcement for untagged streams, allow them to keep the obviously impression generating engine of the "Just Chatting" OnlyFans crowd, and maybe even with the weight of Amazon behind them, force the credit processors to lighten up a bit.
Or it would be nice if they could, anyway. In reality with the age verification laws popping up in more places, they probably want to stay far away from the impending bureaucratic and legal nightmare.
> In reality with the age verification laws popping up in more places, they probably want to stay far away from the impending bureaucratic and legal nightmare.
One could argue they are already there, putting an unblur button on streams is basically the same as an "I'm over 18" button on adult sites. No verification, no auditing, the button does nothing but make it look like they care.
Frankly I don't understand why all the naughty streams don't get moved to a sibling platform, call it Twitch Red that only deals with those. They can share 95% of legal and operational costs, but it has the benefit that it isolates the game streaming platform for any questionable content that might raise the eyebrow of sensitive jurisdictions and advertisers. There must be something obvious I'm missing otherwise this is a very large missed opportunity.
In part, I would guess, because if they did that, there would be a much higher likelihood that payment processors would decide to blacklist the Red version of the service—something they can't really do with just the adult streams on Twitch as it stands.
I would further guess that this would only be one aspect of the broader marginalization of the Red version of the service—they wouldn't be promoting it openly on the main Twitch, because that would antagonize the "think-of-the-children" types, and it would no longer benefit from cross-recommendations and from people watching a Call of Duty stream until 11PM, and then noticing in the sidebar that their favorite adult streamer has come online and switching over to them. They would probably even suffer from the one quasi-legitimate excuse the payment processors have for banning adult sites: much higher rates of chargebacks, as people with overly judgmental and insufficiently communicative significant others try to hide them on their credit card statements (or any of a bunch of other reasons).
It would be great if we could collectively treat sex work as work, just like any other form of selling our bodies and minds to support ourselves—and, indeed, for the time being that is effectively what Twitch is doing, and in doing so benefits both themselves and these streamers, who otherwise would have to use more stigmatized platforms with much less reach.
Not that I use Twitch much anymore, nor am I really bothered by see a random boob or dick every once in a while. What does annoy me is that the OnlyFans "models" see every other platform as means to push their OnlyFans subscriptions. How the hell are the so much money flying around that it can finance that many OnlyFans creators?
We can't funding for ad free search, video stream or software development, but we have millions of men and women doing OnlyFans... I don't get it.
> How the hell are the so much money flying around that it can finance that many OnlyFans creators?
I'm willing to bet that 60% of OF creators, after accounting for the required equipment, are not making money. I'd also bet that at least 20% of those making money are from a country where $150 a month is a whole salary.
And then there's the question of how many of them are being trafficked.
People are hypocritical. There are a lot of religion fanatics, prude morality fighters and others activists fighting against "sins". But in the end of day they all come home and watch porn. And many pay for it directly or indirectly.
And markets with most prude societies are usually ones with highest porn consumption. Humanity.
Because 99.9% of twitch problems, and bad press, from the last few years are focused on people using Twitch as an onlyfan funnel. I would cut them out asap.
The "counsil". A bunch of mOdErAtOrs not doing real work, inserting themselves in a position of almost ultimate power by riding a wave they themselves manufactured.
What is safe and in what way does the Safety Advisory Council improve it? The group that created a very toxic environment around Twitch when it included a political activist identifying as a deer (!) that threatened to silence everyone.
Twitch is losing money. Now it's losing less. (I'm not saying it makes sense or will make a dent or anything else, just putting the fact out there - twitch has limited time to figure out how to make things work)
If twitch cared about money, they could easily stop providing storage and bandwidth for all the South American and Russian channels streaming pirated movies and TV 24/7.
That it doesn't matter that the saving is trivial. I think it's a signal of one of two things: Either they want a popular committee dependent on their income and easy to manipulate. Or we're to see lots of savings at any cost at any opportunity. That's what I meant by "losing less" - not a truism, but a beginning of doing anything and everything to reach breakeven. And lots of it will be stupid and not make a difference apart from making things just a bit worse.
For those who are not aware, the safety council was not the trust and safety team that handles bans.
Instead, this was a small group of livestreamers and community representatives that meet once a month or so, and give their personal opinion on proposed changes that Twitch brings to them.
> The Safety Advisory Council's members include Dr. Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyber Bullying Research Center, and Dr. T.L. Taylor, the co-founder and director of AnyKey, an organization that advocates for inclusion and diversity in video games and esports. There's also Emma Llansó, the director of the Free Expression Project for the Center for Democracy and Technology.
These safety and alignment councils are just positions for losers and leeches. They live on the back of programmers without doing any work at all. They have a different background and they want to live at the expenses of others, just to say that they work in AI.