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.
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What you describe on twitch is the reason decentralized streaming platforms will take over.
I am looking forward to what 3speak has planned.
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That's the deal... and that is precisely why those centralized platforms will eventually go the way of the dodo (hopefully). I'm being hypocritical in saying that because I'm still lingering in a few spots, but I plan on cutting the cord (one of many) entirely. Soon!
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In the end, of course, it depends on the streamer and his intentions. We have a group of smaller streamers in which probably only a few have serious ambitions to make a living from streaming.
What you say regarding the decision makers behind bans etc. is true. However, on Hive it is up to the witnesses and there you are again directly dependent on the decision of a single entity (worst-case). Saying that there is no censorship on Hive is not true in the end either and is relatively "easy" to do with regard to the current user base. In the end, however, you also have people behind the nodes here, and in case of doubt, it goes to them. These people will then, at least in my naive opinion, secure themselves accordingly and enforce censorship in case of doubt. An example of this would be the account: https://peakd.com/@thedarkoverlord
Feel free to correct me here if I'm wrong about the node operator's liability.
Sure, you can argue about how to deal with something like that - but it is censorship. But back to the streamers:
I can not confirm from my perspective at the current state. With a view to a growing user base even less. I think the basic idea is valid, but the reality shows a different picture. In my opinion, it is not an option at the moment to start here on Hive, especially for people who want to build a long-term base for their digital presence. My impression is that you do get votes here, but the actual interaction is worth less and is also very limited. After all, you mainly meet people who meet you on the level of a "real" creator - in the actual social media that's not the case at all. There, the actual consumer predominates. And creators are ultimately interested in these consumers, in retaining them for the long term if possible, and in expanding their following. Especially for smaller streamers, this is the most important target at the beginning, where the revenues are completely irrelevant. In my opinion, this possibility is not available on Hive. My colleagues see this similarly. From our perspective, it makes no sense at all to switch to this platform, especially if you are already in the process of building a community.
I would even go so far as to say that being on Hive can currently be detrimental to your own presence. Sure, for people who want to make money directly in the crypto space, wonderful. For people who really come from the content creator track, not an option. Why? Too few users, hardly any real consumers, complicated onboarding process and:
One's presence on other platforms is censored. Before I deleted my Facebook account, I was active in 1-2 groups. In these groups I posted regularly and also participated in the discussion. Then I registered here and thought it would be interesting to know if any of these people know Hive and have an opinion about it. But I never got an answer to my question. Why? My question has never seen the light of any other screen except mine. Shadowban friends. So if I want to build my following and not degenerate into my highly personal echo chamber, I stay away from this decentralized alternative. Sounds harsh, but that's the way it is. I do have hope that this will change and decentralized options will take over in the long run - but that will probably take some time. All in all, I wouldn't be able to say that as a streamer you'll find a suitable alternative to Twitch, YT and CO. on Hive and its DApps.
Your base seems to be around switching to Hive exclusively, that wasn't my point even though I didn't mention it, I did make a point about Twitch not allowing you to stream on other places at the same time though, on Hive you can cross-post, etc, no one's stopping you although some people like it more if your content is original and Hive first, not everyone cares about that. I don't understand what you mean with personal echo chamber, you have other people here who value decentralization and may think alike, whether they get "censored" the way you described above or not, if DMCA's become a real problem you only need a random user somewhere where he doesn't give a fuck about USA to shoot up a node and a front-end that doesn't comply with DMCA to still view those texts. I wouldn't call it censorship if at the core it's always there, hell hiveblocks is also just a website, but even without one you could use one of those oldschool wallets to read them.
I watch twitch a lot its the platform of choice. I don't want any streamers on Youtube not sure why lol.
Twitch has had a bad history and continues to in the form of just being a bunch of pig a holes and randomly banning people while allowing others to do the exact same thing.
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Yep, they're known to choose favorites and those with a smaller voice get way harsher punishments.
I'm currently building Alive, a decentralized live streaming protocol on Hive, using IPFS and Skynet as the backend storage, using GunDB as short-term off-chain caching. It will be something that any Hive video Dapps can use in place of the current centralized streaming systems.
I estimate that it is around ~60% complete, will be posting an update once I get some documentation complete which I'm working on now.
Interesting, although I would've prefered @threespeak would've improved their livestreaming, the more the merrier I guess and will check it out once it's ready!
Well there is @vimm which I stream on as an alternative along side twitch.
It's built on hive, though it's not fully decentralized in that the servers you stream too are just like twitchs. Still they focus on community building at it's core and have made it extremely clear that they only ban or takedown streams if legally required to.
Sadly, decentralised streaming is a bit of a dud right now. Dlive famously built quite a solid decentralised live streaming platform, they even landed PewDiePie with an exclusive deal. One year on, PewDiePie has signed a contract with YouTube instead.
Besides allowing racists and people promoting alternative health conspiracies proclaiming vaccines are bad and will depopulate the human race, I can't see how decentralisation will offer anything new. If anything, issues like swatting will be even worse on decentralised streaming platforms if they offer the same anonymity that Hive and other chains provide.
At least if someone swats a streamer on Twitch, you have a dataset of viewers and donations you can trace to determine who might be responsible. Anonymous crypto tips and donations will just allow these cowards to hide even more.
The reality is, most people don't care about decentralisation and never will.
Wut? How was dlive decentralized in any way shape or form?
Swatting has nothing with the platform to do, someone without an account on a vpn or a public library could make a phone call anonymously to swat someone.
Point is even with all the shit that may come with decentralization and the freedom that brings to bad actors, we'd rather deal with that than companies taking people out one at a time at their discretion without even justifying the reasons properly.
Dlive incorporated tech from Theta Network for the decentralisation aspect. I don't think it was 100% decentralised in all aspects, but that part for the peer to peer component was.
Thats true. Swatting can still happen and be anonymous, but, if you have the IP addresses of anyone viewing a specific stream, it's possible you could do some form of contact tracing. It's not a scientific approach and admittedly, I doubt that would happen in most instances (except maybe where someone was shot/killed). Also, not a guaranteed approach when someone could use a VPN, etc.
The ToS situation is definitely a problem. Furthermore, the DMCA situation about music and threatening streamers using h copyrighted music with suspensions and bans, that was pretty shitty as well. They gave streamers no specifics and gave them a couple of days to download, edit or delete their videos.
I think Dlive proved that decentralised or not, even signing up the biggest name in online content to an exclusive streaming deal that competing with Twitch is impossible. Only Google and YouTube can compete, even so, it won't be easy. Microsoft attempted the same thing with Mixer and even Mixer failed,despite being a better streaming platform (in my opinion).
Dlive is the same as most other streaming platforms, maybe less cuts involved but in the end it's all about consumers being the one dishing out the money. Mixer is the same too and I think it's hard for new platforms no matter if they're better in some way or take less of a cut of consumers and streamers to catch up to Twitch cause it's miles ahead and keeps improving/coming up with new things to leave the consumers wanting more.
So I guess my point is we need a complete overhaul, streamers and consumers to feel more like they're in this together, they both gaining something monetarily is also a bonus and them all being in charge of what they allow to be monetized on the platform and what should be shunned instead of a central authority doing the decisions.
You reminded me I completely forgot to bring up DMCA's, ugh this world is turning to a selfish pile of shit.
!ENGAGE 50
ENGAGEtokens.Hmm.. In a way, the disadvantage regarding Hive has been best sorted out with the downvote system in order not to promote unhealthy comments.
Presently building your life and connection on Web 2.0 is just like building a mansion on a land that it is not yours. One day, the owner of the land would come and say remove your mansion and go then it would be too late your customers who already knows the location of your mansion to find where you have moved to therefore you lose customers. That exactly sounds like web 2.0 to me.
About twitter, truly they are a multi billionaire company. I don't think they have much interest in decentralisation because if they do, something would have come in place by now. Or maybe Jack is just too picky and doesn't really know what he wants.
I knew Twitch was bad because of how Youtubers would discuss how bad it was. But because it's lucrative for talented streamers and has a lot of traffic, it remains a strong competitive platform. Even Youtube is heading to Twitch direction with the changes on their ToS monetizing content where an ordinary user has no control of or gain from. These giants have no strong decentralized competition yet and I'm waiting for a platform that can provide the traffic and monetary incentive to have some of the streamers from the centralized platforms have options.
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so i need to figure out how to let people just open open a stream with no middle man -
i'll put that on my todo list ;)
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Despite of all these, we have not been able to attract a lot of people here, I do not disagree that, we will beat the path - but the sooner the better. I hope we will see some brilliant results after @theycallmedan starts his marketing poc. Hopefully, it will bring some solid results which is coming inline with threespeak tokenization.
In my oppinion, most people don't care about decentralisation
Yes that's been a re-occurring opinion lately but maybe ask the ones that are straight out getting banned on a daily basis if they would've preferred another solution.
After reading all a streamer endures. I don't want to be a streamer lol
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At some points we have Smart contracts, which can show up brave ads in an easy way as the first solution to get higher demand and better rewards.
At this hive can beat classic web 2.0 video platforms with ours :) also written content :D