As someone who used to stream back in the day, honestly mostly just to promote steem Hive on Twitch, I used to roam around the platform and see what's going on. Some times I found some channels I enjoyed watching either cause it was related to the games I was playing at the time and I found the competitive nature of the esport to be really exciting such as CS:GO (yes, boomers, some esports can be just as exciting as watching football which I'm also a fan of), other times I'd watch something that would be a lot more like reality shows minus the whole scripted nature of it cause streamers would stream in real time in a section called IRL.
In this post I wanted to talk a little about how I see this place has evolved over time and some of the issues that it faces today and how the content creators are the main ones that get the short straw constantly.
You see, most of these platforms have terms of service, and that's normal, some things shouldn't be said that may cause violence, hate speech, really controversial things, politics and all kind of stuff you as a company would not want to tolerate your "partners" to get involved in. Twitch uses the term "partner" for streamers with a certain amount of viewerbase, this basically just means once you're big enough you're going to get less of a cut taken from you by the platform, anything under that and most things are 50/50 except for adrevenue, not sure how exactly that is cut. I've talked about this in a post before, but here's a tl;dr:
Twitch has a inhouse currency called "bits", streamers were annoyed in the past when viewers would donate to them and Twitch would take a cut of donations, naturally it felt wrong for a company to take "donations", especially in countries that are used to tipping being a revenue source in the service industry. Twitch's solution to this was to create their own currency where streamers would not get a cut taken from them but receive the full amount of the bits they would get, the catch here of course was that the viewers that wanted to donate bits had to buy them for a 30-40% higher cost than they were worth. Different but in the end the same shit. When viewers subscribed to streamers so they could get a notification when they go online or be able to use certain emoji's in their chat or have a certain color/tag when they chatted to set them aside from non-subscribers Twitch would take half of that revenue, unless you became a "partner" which has some benefits and less subscriber cuts and possible some more benefits such as advertisement, them choosing you more often to promote you on their front-page, etc.
As someone here on Hive I'm sure you'd find it utter ridiculous that viewers had to pay such a high difference just to support their favorite streamers. Imagine if you wanted to tip a user the DAO would take 40%, so you start to understand that the viewers were the consumers so they paid for most of the cost. Don't think that the streamers had it that well, though, even if some of that make a killing there's a lot more behind it than it might seem at first glance. Let me tell you about some things that streamers go through on a daily basis.
Twitch had first mover advantage, were later bought up by Amazon and continued their reign. They could afford to take such high cuts cause where else were streamers and content creators gonna go? Youtube started this much later and they were hit hard by adrevenue decimation so in the end it was mostly just streamers that had gotten banned from Twitch for one reason or another. Some new platforms popped up but the only truly decentralized one I'm eyeing these days is Theta and that one I'm still unsure how they're going to deal with controversial content on their website.
Some of the problems that affect streamers on Twitch is unwanted content out of their control, crazy viewers/fans that would do crazy things to put the streamers either in danger of their life or of their accounts (although this one is a bit toned down now during covid and IRL streaming not being as popular for obvious reasons), emotions and human decisions.
Let me go through some of these points.
As a streamer on Twitch you have to be very careful with what you air on stream. Something that was once popular was to have a TTS bot (text to speech) read up donation messages. Viewers would send donations from $2 to any amount and could include a message to say something, some viewers would of course use this as a way for a full chat to get their attention and they'd prioritize answering those messages before reading chat if they had too many viewers. This of course became a gold mine for streamers, even though they knew that Twitch was taking a large cut it was still $ amounts flying into their wallets at a constant rate. This of course went bad quick when viewers would send in messages you wouldn't want being read out loud on your stream due to Twitch's ToS. Racist slurs, threats, anything you can think of would be sent. Why would people who want the streamer banned send them money? Well you know how the world is these days, schadenfreude is popular and worth the cost.
This of course wouldn't end with just TTS donations, they'd try to get the streamer in any way they could to either get harmed in one way or another or banned. A popular IRL Twitch streamer named Ice Poseidon used to get Swatted pretty often by some of his viewers. Imagine you're streaming going on and about your day, someone who wants you harm notices where exactly you are, anonymously calls in a bomb threat or alerts police you're planning on doing this or that and you get Swatted. I think I don't need to say much more about the implications of having cops arrive at your location with guns pulled in this day and age. Here's some footage of when he was swatted boarding a plane once.
He literally has a compilation of himself getting swatted at random times and places, odds of something bad happening during those times is not minimal.
Other than that they'd always try and get streamers to open up links to sites they shouldn't show on screen such as porn, nudity, anything against Twitch's ToS basically just to get them banned. This happens a lot, though. Twitch usually starts out with a day's ban depending on how bad it was, second ban goes a bit longer and by the 3rd ban the account may be locked permanently. There's a literal Twitter bot that announces when Twitch streamers get banned and boy is it active: https://twitter.com/streamerbans?lang=en
Let's take a moment to think about this. Although it can't really be compared to Hive content creators in the same way, cause I'd like to think it is way easier to earn rewards here for your contributions, get some autovotes over time if you consistently create good content and get bigger votes and of course now and then you might say the wrong thing or get some random accounts to start spam downvoting you and demonetized, if you have stake you can still earn in other ways than just from posting content if in worst case no one feels the downvotes are unfair to counter them for you.
On Twitch you have to work a lot harder to get anywhere, not only do only a very small fraction of streamers make a living off of it, cause again they mostly just rely on adrevenue and subscriptions + donations that have a high cut and cost, but the grind is real. You some times see people crying from joy by just getting that average 25 viewer milestone to even monetize your account. So being able to get anywhere to a consistent 1k viewer base where the money would start to roll in enough so you could consider it a job is not an easy feat and 99%+ of streamers never make it.
Let's say though, you do, you beat the odds, you're entertaining enough to grow on users, grow your community and you start relying on that income. Only for something to go wrong once, not even under your control, not even something you said you can blame yourself for, not even something you could've avoided such as getting swatted (also in Twitch's ToS, btw, don't get swatted or you get banned, pretty cool, right?), it all may come to a quick halt.
Let's not even discuss that it's people behind Twitch who make these decisions, people who judge each case differently, people who have opinions and prejudices or just having a bad day or good day and deciding each ban differently. This has caused many to believe that Twitch staff either take favorites, only ban those they don't feel are bringing in enough income to Twitch or just feel like setting examples here and there at random due to the power they have in their hands. The power to just nullify all of your efforts to get somewhere on their platform.
Imagine here on Hive if one day a witness would just randomly decide that you can't access your account anymore or withdraw your funds (oh right, Steem witnesses did this) and the other witnesses would just go along with that witness decision cause they can't be bothered to look into it and decide either cause that would require work. That's what I imagine happens on Twitch. You're not even able to log in and tell your viewers who might be waiting for you to come check you out on Youtube instead, unless you have a Twitter account and can contact them there but obviously you'd lose so many viewers that have not been following you there.
On top of it all Twitch also doesn't allow people to cross-stream, meaning you can't be streaming on Twitch and another platform at the same time.
I think I don't just speak for myself when I say we need other solutions to this. I know Twitch isn't going to change or even want to, Twitter keeps saying they want to dig into decentralized solutions but there hasn't been much happening on that front either considering they're a billion dollar company that could shit out a hive fork or connect their dapp to it in a matter of hours.
I realize decentralized solutions will welcome any content, you may see streamers who are racist, use hate speech, incite violence, etc, but it's on the rest of us to either demonetize them because of that with downvotes or judge the people that continue giving those streamers/content creators the attention they're craving so they'll also face some consequences.
Freedom comes with some baggage, but it'll always beat the path we're going down now.
