Centralized platforms abusing their power

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(Edited)

A somewhat pretty famous Streamer and Youtuber finally broke down and felt the need to say something about Twitch and their "rules and guidelines" or lack thereof. Honestly it's a bit "meh" that these videos only come out when it happens to them personally, but it goes to show that everyone just keeps their mouth shut cause they are literally scared of criticizing the platform where they're making a living of on. He does mention in the video though that this stuff happens constantly, the few examples he has in his video are only from this past week and when smaller users speak out they don't get the attention from Reddit or other mainstream media about what happened to them, in his case though he did as his video was top on r/videos.

Anyway, before you watch this video I just want you to keep in mind that not only are these platforms super greedy to their streamers and consumers, for instance, buying their onsite tokens to donate to your streamers will cost you 30% extra so that the streamer doesn't have to pay the cut, paypal donations of course have their price as well but at the same time subscribing to these streamers means Twitch takes 50% of that instantly - unless you are partnered with them which only the top % get to be. Aside from that, many would say there's nothing wrong with that, they are a big company, they've worked hard to retain the huge amount of viewers and content creators they have, as long as it works for the content creators and they get the most out of it why not take that amount of cut. Welp, the thing is that this could all be done way less harshly on new platforms that don't solely rely on ad revenue and at the same time with blockchain tech that's constantly evolving, it would allow for way more solutions and powers than what the giants are currently grasping. Not to mention that it would work much better scaling it up for both the platform owners and the users on it.

Here's a quick example. Say Steem would be a very big social media platform which would have hundreds of thousands of content creators and many livestreaming dapps were existing here. If one of those dapps were to be found to abuse their power, say they'd practice favoritism towards certain streamers and ban them even though it was not against the guidelines or something else and you'd start to think, hmm, maybe they really are doing this because they just don't like the streamer or don't like what he said - well guess what, that streamer would just have to switch the dapp he'd stream on. He would not lose all his followers, he would not lose all his revenue over night (until the other dapps' ad revenue would start coming in on top of the rewardpool), but most importantly the first dapp would already know about this, hence they wouldn't have the power and couldn't afford playing these games that Twitch has been playing for years. Whether it's incompetence or favoritism at this point, it doesn't matter cause so many keep suffering from it and it's not equal, not fair and worst of all we don't even hear about this most of the time because when it happens to smaller content creators they don't have the voice to speak out like PayMoneyWubby in the video below does.

I've made a few posts on this before where I think Twitch has gone beside their guidelines to just ban people they just don't agree with or they are small enough for them not to care of the consequences and loss of traffic. Although many have been leaving Twitch lately for their competitor Mixer, one of the biggest streamer Ninja left them a couple months ago and recently also Shroud, it's just a matter of time until Mixer - if they were to surpass Twitch in viewerbase, that they'd be under the same position that Twitch are in now where they have complete control over their streamers and without implying would have them live in fear of what they say and most importantly what they say about the streaming platform itself. It's power based on fear of them removing what you've worked hard for to get, a following and a constant stream of revenue and making a living off of it but knowing that it can be taken away from the snap of a finger of some random employee who may not give a shit to take a second look into your matter before deciding to ban or not to ban you.

Anyway, check the video, it was pretty entertaining at the same time. Here's the Reddit thread if you want to read some of the comments as well.



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7 comments
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I have a friend or two who have found themselves in Wubby's situation, and there's been a couple of times when I've been a bit worried myself after a chaotic multiplayer stream when emotions might run high in your team. As Wubby says, when it happens to small streamers, they usually just let it go. Because, well, wtf can I do, it's Twitch...

I think I'm going to start alternating platforms between streams and see where that takes me.

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I'd really recommend recaster or that other app that let's you stream on multiple sites at the same time. I'm sure you've heard of it but yeah, I'm planning on getting around to doing that again once I know I'll have the time to stream more.

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(Edited)

restream.io I think you mean? I have an account there and I was looking into it only last week. Also, Streamlabs OBS now has multistream integrated in the most recent update. I haven't checked it out yet, but looks promising.

Biggest problem is that Twitch affiliate contract... Many ignore it and just do it anyway, but I wonder how long it takes for Twitch to start banning small streamers for that too.

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Worst they'll do is revoke your affiliate account. They'll ignore you even when you ask to turn off your affiliate account.

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Twitch is the biggest mafia I have ever seen , first paypal then twitch all those commissions are nuts.

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I joined the @vimm dev team partly because of my distaste for Twitch's opaque ToS and the way they treat their streamers who aren't partnered. Vimm currently takes a 10% beneficiary cut from streamers, which we use to fund our servers. We're researching a means of selling Vimm Gems, our own token, via our own online merchant. We will take our share, but our goal is to be as transparent as possible with what we take and why we do it.

Sure, we're not perfect, but dammit, we try! If we can get more people to drop in, stream with us, help us grow, we could rival Twitch.

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I stopped using twich in 2017 and have been tempted to go back, but I really just don't want to deal with their exclusivity and grasps at power. Plus, it's owned by AMAZON yuck

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