Let’s Talk About Hot Tub Streams
blog.twitch.tv
blog.twitch.tv
People set up kiddy-pools in their room with a bit of water to get this "contextual exception" for the express purpose of streaming suggestive content. Why not just remove the exception and let people stream sexually suggestive content and make a separate category for that without a ridiculous "beaches and pools" euphemism?
Just like there's a wide variety in content thats broadcast on TV channels at different times of the day. There is even a Science and Technology channel with some developers streaming their coding. There are some game developers that only code their game while streaming the IDE.
Here's Stephen Wolfram streaming right now. https://www.twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram
Why should a Wolfram viewer care if there is some risque content on other categories? Even if you're looking around after the stream, you can just scroll past it like you do on Netflix.
I personally mostly watch only the few streamers that I have followed. I rarely come across the streamers mentioned in the article except when there's some Twitch drama that I hear about on Reddit or from friends.
Also, advertisers wouldn't like it.
It's like a TV channel. They'd never show actual porn but they try to get as close as possible while retaining plausible deniability.
Twitch is a gaming site. Kids watch youtube videos of people playing games, they get funneled to check out the minecraft/fortnite/etc. category on twitch then they get curious and check out the large streamers on the site. What do you know? There's a streamer who is sitting in a hot tub with 20k viewers (enough to put her in the top streams). It doesn't matter that twitch has a "mature audience warning".
Anyone who has used the site for any amount of time knows Twitch is providing a clear on-ramp to underaged kids accessing nearly-softcore porn.
They can't have their cake (young, gaming advertisers) and eat it too (allow nearly naked young women in kiddie pools) on the same site... Only reason they are even being forced to make a change is because of advertisers. I can only imagine if parents actually knew the extent of the hot tub streams, twitch wouldn't be allowed in a lot of households, but since its a "gaming" site first, its under the radar.
A vanishingly small group. Most people aggressively seek that shit out as soon as they hit puberty.
Does anyone know why this is? Is it just a legacy generation thing?
If it was me hell yeah I'd be advertising on 30k viewer streams full of people eager and willing to throw money around (assume market fit, obviously)
These are the same things.
Which might actually be a viable niche. There are a lot more explicit websites out there than softcore ones.
"They're opening a porn site?"
"No no, its a separate site for softcore...err sexually suggestive material"
It isn't a win either way, and they'd be entering established markets that already have entrenched businesses and wouldn't have the 'walk through' traffic the video games sections of twitch provide.
Who do you think the biggest customers of AWS's media-streaming IaaS infrastructure offerings are? People who need to move terabytes per second of live video over the Internet, but for some reason cannot make an Enterprise partnership with one of the public-facing media-hosting services (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, etc.) There's really only one industry matching that description.
I'd even bet that those infrastructure services already share a common backbone with Twitch. So this offering already basically exists. It's just white-labelled, rather than Twitch-branded.
I mean, that was my point: that Amazon prefers the optics of not being a partner to these companies, even though, technologically (not financially), there's no difference between what they're doing right now, and what they'd be doing if they ran a "Twitch for porn." Which is why they're just fine with being twice-removed partners to these companies, through vertical integrators.
Amazon are fine with e.g. Heroku and other PaaSes repackaging their IaaS services into convenient vertical-specific packages. Amazon don't want to run Heroku; they just want to eat 90% of Heroku's margins. Which essentially gets them all the upside of running Heroku anyway, without the risks of actually going into the PaaS vertical, marketing to small customers, etc.
The same logic applies with porn production: Amazon would much rather not create "Twitch for porn", but rather allow someone else to use AWS to create a "Twitch for porn", and then have that service pay AWS exorbitant egress-bandwidth fees. All the same benefit of owning such a company themselves, with none of the hard work, and better yet, none of the tarnish.
But also, keep in mind: if 80% of the customers for an infrastructure service are using it for a use-case in the X vertical, then that service is effectively a service-provider in the X vertical, whether it wants to be or not. Even if AWS isn't explicitly running a "Twitch for porn", if 80% of e.g. Kinesis Streams infra is being allocated to transcoding porn, then you'd better believe that the devs for Kinesis Streams, and the ops staff that run it, both know what their service is usually used for — and likely have spent time tuning their service to cope with the particular needs of that workload. To do otherwise would be irresponsible!
If they want to be a game streaming site, why allow player video at all? Pare it back to what it was actually for.
I love the weird twitch content BTW, so I wouldn't want to pare down for the sake of risque entertainers
I generally don’t enjoy Twitch because of the nakedness (no pun intended)of the business side. Twitch has every aspect of adult cam sites except explicit content and streamers obviously react and are incentives to interact when people toss them dollars but it makes for a poor viewing experience to me. But they are certainly continuing to fumble on where they’re choosing to draw lines on what is or isn’t explicit.
If people want to sexualize themselves for money that's their business, the problem is they keep trying to find loopholes in the conduct policy to transform a site about videogames that children frequent into something sexual.
They mention the tools that allow you to filter channels on their website. They make it really easy to block channels that are recommended to you. Why not extend that functionality to the entire site so you can just click 2-3 times and get rid of any channel for any reason forever? The answer is simple: Money.
And we were talking about children.
As long as the content on Twitch isn't sexual, I don't think it matters to Twitch (or advertisers) if it's serving as lead-gen for something that is sexual. Content produced as lead-gen can be valuable for its own sake.
(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)
It is though and that's why ads were banned and that's why Twitch wrote this blog post. There's no nudity, but the entire point of her stream is for her to show off her body in exchange for money.
>(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)
This is valid thing for people in many professions, but Onlyfans and patreon are used as a kind of a loophole for Twitch's policy on pornography. There are also some former/current adult film actresses that did/do actual hardcore pornography for a living and they aren't allowed to shill pornhub on their channel page because it violates terms of service. Some of them keep their clothes on because they go to twitch to make non-sexual content and don't even want anyone hinting that they are aware of their background in adult film, but some of them are indeed on twitch because its just another outlet for them to sell sexualized content.
Also a reminder that I'm not judging people that want to sell sexualized content of themselves. There are communities for that. If show HN was 90% muscley dudes in g strings writing things about their latest tech project on their inner thighs it would diminish the quality of the community as a whole. There are lots of people that are OK with porn existing that don't want the primary places they hang out on the Internet to become known as places where people go primarily to masturbate.
They just don't do it for sexual comment. If the creator is female.
udysof got a one day ban for his hot tub stream.
They're banning people for off-site behavior.
This is kinda hilarious though some brand managers must really be squirming when they are tying to sell advert spend for furniture or something on the twitch beach boob cam.
Trying to document and define "I'll know it when I see it" is an NP-complete problem, and this won't be the end of it.
Twitch wants to keep them both happy: Not so much censorship as to drive the teenager away, but enough prudishness that porn blockers don't censor their entire domain.
What's the point of protecting their reputation when their reputation is the home of camgirls and hot tub streamers pushing their onlyfans pages already? At least if they were honest about it I could respect that, but they're not.
I hope they fail.
Because you'll lose your card processor and have to switch to a high risk processor which halves your income. America is super weird when it comes to sex and there's no alternatives.
One day I was watching around 2am Pacific time, and the stream ended. I was looking for another one when I saw someone in the music category with 13,000 viewers (most DJs don't crack 1000). So I went to check it out.
It was a hot tub streamer holding a guitar while she thanked people for their tips and subs. In the 10 minutes I watched, she never once played anything.
I was fascinated by the fact that she had so many people basically just watching her in a hot tub and giving her money. She wasn't doing anything compelling.
To each their own, but I had no idea there were so many people on the internet willing to pay for such a thing.
Wait until you learn about VTubers.
On the other hand, some of these stans are paying a lot of cold hard cash to these streamers, just to get a shout-out, maybe, and that is clearly insane.
I've no idea what to make of the whole situation and perhaps I should just go look at some other corner of the web.
Most importantly, nothing is scripted or predetermined (or it at least feels that way), and they regularly acknowledge that the people making up the audience exist, in real time. "You guys." It's difficult to feel the same empathy when you're just watching a television show.
There are some signals they send to tone down the intimacy of the experience. The model is designed and rigged by artists, who sometimes have their own channels and are frequently welcomed and thanked, to make the experience feel like the product of hard work and creativity instead of stardom and charisma alone. Much of the entertainment value (and the only real reason I continue to care) comes from the interactions between the streamers themselves rather than with their audience, which are highlighted for posterity and endlessly remixed. There have been enough times where five minutes after dropping into an arbitrary stream something interesting would happen as a result of the streamer's behavior or circumstances, and only a few hours later the fanbase would post the highlight. Some of them end up with hundreds of thousands of views after a few weeks.
Additionally, in my mind the thing they did better was to not try to "act" as much, which would make the experience feel fake, much the same as just watching television where nobody is attempting to speak to you directly. It's the supposed sense of "authentic human interaction" packaged in the 2D format which is the major innovation over the static things from decades past like comics, and which was only possible to have with the ease of livestreaming and real-time comment feeds.
For me at least, the most interesting parts are actually when the streamers are "doing nothing" - sitting around talking about things, playing video games together - in just the same way as someone in real life might do with their friends every Friday evening, except the friends are guaranteed to be attractive and interesting to listen to. It is designed to be close enough to the "basically nothing" you'd expect from interacting with actual friends to de-stress (unless you set your friends to that high a standard), or being invited to a party where all you have to do is listen to other, more interesting people's anecdotes and laughter to feel as if you're a part of something.
I'd been to several of those parties and gatherings many times in my adolescence, where I felt something by just surrounding myself with people having a good time and feeling no pressure to be a part of it. I sometimes wished those moments would never have to end and the people that made them up didn't have class to go to at 8 in the morning the next day or other obligations that would prevent them from getting back together in a room any time soon.
This is the commercialization of those after-school hangouts, seven days a week.
At times it feels like the genre has obsoleted large swathes of content if done properly. People who watch television shows with a predetermined outcome no longer have to make up their own idea of attraction when someone playing a 2D character can actually respond in real-time to real (but faceless) people. I'd given up a few things I used to follow in the past which I'd realized were just trying to fill the same void that the streamers did, and the streamers filled the void that much better. No, this isn't the most healthy thing to admit.
But I make it very clear to myself that none of these people will ever know or care about who I am as an individual. The streamers essentially carry the weight of tens of thousands of people they will never know in an attempt to satisfy them all for the company's benefit. They're entertainers. But there are many people for whom that is not the case and the attachment becomes (a higher level of) parasocial. None of us can deny that the temptation is a lucrative one for the agencies that succeed.
Also, there is not an insignificant subset of people outside of YouTube who find the idea of paying money for call-outs to be "cringe", and I completely agree, but nobody on the business side has any incentive to stop them. Many people want to send money thinking all of it will go to their favorite streamer (which is decidedly not the case, given it goes through both the agency and YouTube). Also, the official chat feeds are militantly patrolled to prevent defamatory remarks from showing up on-stream (or even comments about unrelated streamers), so there will always be a subset of opinions that will never be discussed there.
:D
I am hyped about increasing use of virtual mascots by corporations.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/venmo-tiktok-money-fro...
I preferred cornering the thorium market on the weekends.
I just can't understand what they're hoping to get out of handing away so much money. Do they believe theirs will be reacted to differently? But why them? It's just so irrational!
Consider your experience except with the change that porn is banned in your household/country.
On the other hand, I do think the juxtaposition of this content with the rest of Twitch content is problematic. I think putting this content in the same category as gaming content unintentionally conveys the message, "Men garner popularity by exhibiting their skills, women garner popularity by exhibiting their bodies." I suspect this juxtaposition of the most popular male streamers' content with that of some of the most popular women's content on the platform and exposing this young people ends up fostering non-productive attitudes among boys and young men. Other women on the platform have complained about their audiences pressuring them into producing similar content. I've also heard from women and girls that it's off-putting to see the prevalence of women in bikinis, not playing any games, on a platform that ostensibly about gaming. I think Twitch is in the right to see this as a problem.
But what's the solution here? On the one hand, I think it's giving these streamers the short end of the stick to have ambiguous policies and issue unexpected demonetizations or bans. Maybe a more effective approach would be to have stronger separation between "just chatting" content and gaming content, to retain this content but mitigate the problem of that juxtaposition. I suspect this is what the "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" category will probably be, but maybe it'd be better to spin this off into sister platform that isn't explicitly tied into gaming.
The "pools, hot tubs, beaches" exception was a (stupid) loophole and they should just close it (I suspect that this is the end result moving forward, eventually). The hard part for Twitch is figuring how to do this with out appearing sexist.
I'm not at all in touch with twitch stuff, so I'm just reading about this now. That's horrible. Would making stricter bans help?
This situation has been ongoing for awhile with individuals pushing the boundary of sexual content, but this response from Twitch only occurred after a partner who creates this type of content pissed off Twitch's advertisers.
Like facebook or twitter they just need to have CONSISTENT AND CONSISTENTLY APPLIED rules. I can make a judgement on your platform when those two things are happening.
In what way does this foster non-productive attitudes in boys and young men?
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with doing suggestive cosplay or things like that. I also doubt that the average person is going to watch Amouranth, and then immediately assume that all the women interested in gaming are curating the same kind of appeal - this kind of influence is more subtle than that. But I do believe that the juxtaposition of male streamers' content, and many of the most popular women's content likely fosters these stereotypes.
Also, Amouranth does actual pornography for a living, her own interest is absolutely more aligned towards getting new OnlyFans subs than some platonic ideal of enjoying gaming for its own sake.
How do you create a general content site, without spending money on human review and curation of all uploads, while segregating erotic and non-erotic content, without having your entire site banned/blocked/gated around the world for hosting erotic content?
This has affected Amazon, Blogspot, Facebook, Google, Imgur, Patreon, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitch, Youtube. Every general content site has this problem. Most try to solve it with "user flags", which are promptly weaponized and abused to silence others. Problems constantly recur around statues, breastfeeding, swimsuits. Advertisers want content to be segmented with certainty, but site operators don't want to pay human beings to do that. Standards of "erotic" vary wildly per city, country, religion. The list goes on.
What if human curation is the only valid solution? We haven't found any other solution that works yet, and AI is barely able to recognize human beings, much less discern whether content is intended to be categorized as erotic, non-erotic, or both.
I wonder if a patron-driven community that sets its own moderation policy wouldn't have this problem, because when a topic gets too large it will inevitably splinter into smaller communities where the preferred moderation style of each subset can be catered to.
AI moderators are terrible at enforcing a complex set of practices and rules.
Human moderators are excellent at enforcing a complex set of practices and rules.
Both are subject to the whims of those defining the practices and rules, and their enforcement will always fall within scope of those definitions. If Twitch’s moderators are given full empowerment to set the rules they moderate by, then it is appropriate to blame them for what is perceived as faulty moderation decisions. Chances are, they do not have any such authority, and at best can “recommend” or “advise” while being compelled to silence by their overlords.
You are absolutely right that humans make biased decisions, no matter how much we work to correct for it; judge sentencing becomes more strict when they’re hungry or their local sports team lost, and referees are less likely to penalize the home team when in the home stadium with home fans yelling at them. But these biases can be documented, studied, and gradually accounted for in training and post-decision reviews. It’s not perfect, but it’s still great.
With AI moderation, we bake the biases into the dataset and training models, and then we throw complex rule making decisions at a nascent ML network that can’t discern the simplest of decisions that any human moderators could: “Is this erotic or non-erotic content?”. Setting aside the biases of any possible training set versus Rule 34, it is dead simple to outwit any AI in this regard, in ways that most human moderators would detect instantly. It’s not perfect, and in fact it’s pretty awful.
I agree that the rulemaking decisions of modern sites are often terrible, biased, and exclusionary of entire categories of human beings and behaviors. However, the errors made by human moderators trying to service the complexity assigned to them do not somehow excuse the staggering naivety and incompetence of AI moderators. The heavyweights in this Ml moderation industry — Google, Amazon, Facebook — have failed to deliver effective ML moderation after billions of dollars and cumulative decades of investment, and paper over their failure by using user flags and human review teams to disguise the sharp edges of their solutions.
The whole point seems to be about separating 'child safe' content. This cannot be done automatically, they would have to hire moderators to manually curate channels and then block access by age.
This is not happening here. Twitch is not a pure Gaming-site anymore, for several years now. And those hot tub-streams are not listed in gaming-categories, they are in non-gaming-categories like "Just Chatting", "Music", even "Travel & Outdoors" (because there are also legit beach-streams which play the hot tub-routine).
Twitch started as Gaming-Only, and the majority of content is still gaming. But people should realize that Non-Gaming is already big on twitch too, and it grows. Twitch is bringing sports and fashing-events to the platform. Music has grown string the last year because of COVID. And some people have found their niche in tame porn-content. Which technically is kind of a joke, because the biggest Hot Tub-Streamer has sexualized content on Twitch for years. But in the past she used the Just Dance-Game to create sexualixed content, or did some fitness-stuff. She is literally infamouse on the platform for this, and Hot tub is just the latest trend in a series of long running content-attempts. Just because it now is now missing the gaming-part, should make it worse? I don't think so.
You don't have to be a prude to have a problem with this. It's not a matter of stigmatizing sex work or being anti-women, it's about profiting by serving porn-lite on the same site where children are likely to be.
I don't personally care, but I'm floored that a company like Twitch/Amazon, with hundreds of people in HR and PR, would not play it safe and just ban it.
First they group them into a particular category. Then they restrict that category behind a login. And then they restrict it further, and finally ban it entirely.
It's so obviously soft core pornography and way away from the sensible "appropriate behaviour and clothing rules" that it's absurd.
Now there is the debate about sexuality and sex work. This is not applicable here. Amazon's Twitch is saying it's not sex work. One sure fire thought experiment is that, if it's not porn, would you be okay with a 13 yr old (the age limit on twitch) doing it?
To give credit to Amazon's Twitch they are dammned whatever they do.
They know it’s basically soft core porn. They’re definitely not going to call it that. But they’ll separate it out from the rest of their content and let users and advertisers opt out of it.
PCgamer is at this moment streaming Geralt taking a bath in the Hot Tubs category.
Lol.
That's about the age people discover porn, so the test doesn't work.
"X is being done and filmed by an adult, and kids have access to this platform, would you be comfortable with a teenager doing the same?"
I can also think of a number of potentially dangerous activities, unrelated to sexual stuff, that would be appropriate for an adult to stream but not a kid.
Some are, some not. There are Hot Tub-Streams in Gardes, Pools, beachs. And the whole thing did not even start with Hot Tubs. In the beginning it was just people on their bed.
But there's also one big streamer, famous with the CoD audience, that lately has been playing video poker on one of those bitcoin casino sites. He has swings of up to $100k in a single night. His audience slants young and there's typically about 40k people watching him. That... makes me a bit uncomfortable. I'm far from someone that wants a nanny state, but I'm squeamish about the idea of say a 20 year old kid watching this behavior as a role model, trying to emulate it, and losing a non trivial amount of money at a point in their life where that would have a huge lasting impact. This streamer can only do this because he's insanely rich so even $100k is just play money.
Replace "actual money" with "fake money" in this casino example. Is the streamer playing poker entertaining, or are people watching because of the high-stakes gambling?
Replace "woman" for "man" in these tub streams. Are people watching for the games or the streamer's personality, or for their body?
I'd go so far as to say you should be able to replace within any protected class with minimal effect on viewership. If that's not true, there's some bias being expressed.
The whole rule started because people were monetizing feet content which obviously leans lewd, but the poor rule targeting has ended up with all kinds of weird consequences.
Sweet Anita has had some great discussions on this. She has Tourettes, including ticks that violate the ToS, but has successfully negotiated things with twitch to make that ok. So Twitch isn't straight up incapable of nuance here, they're just being inconsistent and incompetent.
...do you honestly think it's unintentional? The issue is twitch are open hypocrites. They take a cut of money people 'donate' to these sexually suggestive streamers. They don't need the advertisers on those streams because the money is already coming in from the viewers.
The issue is that they're full of it.
They ought to just enable explicit content and put in decent parental controls rather than this B.S. Advertisers might actually prefer having a clearly defined explicit content tag, rather than risking their ads running next to soft-explicit streams.
Long, long ago, I dabbled in content hosting, and still sometimes daydream about doing business along those lines. When it comes to the thought of my hypothetical service hosting purely sexual content it's not due to any puritanism that I'd prefer that my platform have rules against it.
Sexual content (ie. porn) brings with it regulatory burdens, potential public scrutiny, a large revenue stream that might end up incentivizing product development detrimental to the service's original purpose, and from a marketing perspective it might cause the public to associate your service with certain kinds of content (see: Tumblr) which limits your growth options.
It seems to me that Twitch so far isn't seeing the drawbacks I just listed when it comes to hot tub streams, hence their response.
It seems they've had trouble in the past trying to draw lines around sexual activity. It's a safe bet that if hot tub streams got banned, all the involved streamers would still keep toeing the line as far as they can. Drawing a broad line & cordoning it off seems reasonable.
Though I wonder if there remains an incentive for pushing boundaries in 'just chatting'.
I don't know about pushing boundaries but there will still certainly be lots of intentionally sexualized content in the just chatting category, it will just be milder than the new category on average.
Probably the most interesting and persuasive case they have. What if a human being dressed like League's Evelynn, a succubus? Would they be banned from Twitch? No, of course not. Would it be sexually suggestive? They've illuminated how disingenuous of a question that is, because Evelynn is a character in a game people stream.
Lots of these streamers have an Onlyfans link in their Twitter bio, though, and they make it pretty obvious that you should join “to see the good stuff.” https://twitter.com/amouranth/status/1395192511958851585?s=2...
Someone put it like “she’s doing the equivalent of holding a finger in front of your face and saying ‘not touching you! Not touching you!’ for a no-touching policy.”
In what universe is this an acceptable outcome for a TOS violation?
in the universe where it's unlikely for small streamers to successfully sue twitch for stealing revenue. It's an egregious abuse but its one that has to be first arbitrated and then sued over and its unlikely to succeed so no one has really done it.
> “she’s doing the equivalent of holding a finger in front of your face and saying ‘not touching you! Not touching you!’ for a no-touching policy.”
In other words, she's in compliance with the policy?
But apparently when she streams, she doesn’t earn advertising revenue. That’s not really a ToS issue; twitch’s advertising partners get the final say there.
(It seems nuts that they still run ads on her channel at all, though. If they’re showing ads, it makes no sense that she doesn’t get a cut.)
She basically admitted to poking a bear.
This is the real sticking point. If they came down hard against titty streamers they would be destroying a large portion of their own viewer base.
Not to mention how bad it would look from a "Twitch is being sexist" viewpoint. Top male streamers would continue to do extremely well, male streamers would be unaffected almost entirely ( I bet some stream shirtless or whatever sometimes and might get in trouble from that )
But lets be real, such a crackdown would basically only effect women.
But that's in the mind reading area - they just can't do it reliably.
My theory is there a couple of key problems that lead to this crummy moderation, but it essentially all stems from the fact these platforms are too huge to moderate effectively.
First, because they are so huge, they have limited customer support. It's very hard to get ahold of a human being at any of these companies, because users are not the customers.
Second, to offset the challenge of moderating at scale, they have a lot of automation. This leads to people getting moderated without nuance. We don't notice the false negatives or when it's working right, but there are many false positives (because the platform is huge) and news about them spreads rapidly. Then because there is no real avenue for customer support, people can't get it fixed.
Third, because there are no real repercussions, moderators play favourites. There is no real customer service channel so complaints against bad moderating go largely unheard. When you heard about a channel being unbanned almost immediately when larger channels stay banned and it never seems to be fixed, that's likely a human who has a bias towards one over another. People who have an in with the moderation team can get preferential treatment for sure.
This is all just a theory. These companies don't really have any incentive to investigate their moderation teams for this sort of behavior so they probably don't. And if they did investigate it, they certainly wouldn't tell anyone if they found evidence of it.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the massive user generated content sites have hand-curated Do Not Ban lists to protect their top VIP users from the whims of the algorithms. Would a top-100 app ever get automation-banned from the Apple Store? Would a popular celebrity get automation-banned from Twitter? I bet, for the select list of "favorites," any ban action goes through multiple levels of human judgment. For the rest of us schmucks, it's a roll of the algorithm dice.
I don't think they'd bother trying to tell them apart. The issue Twitch wants to police here isn't the willingness or coercion, it's the suggestiveness behaviour entirely.
Honest question, not judging just curious what sets her apart in your mind? I think there's a chance she has good content to go along with her obvious attempts to use her sexuality to get clicks, but to me it looks like she's being suggestive explicitly for money in addition to whatever else she might do.
And there are lots of people that use their sexuality for money and also have some kind of actual content to go along with it IMO. There's a spectrum of behavior in streaming/youtubing.
This is just in general why I have an issue with prudeness in our society. I have no idea where prudeness comes from, is it innate to some people? Is it a taught trait? But it seems to cause so much discord and disagreement yet is inherently safe and peaceful.
That doesn't mean people would die or that some arbitrary percentage of the population would cross some arbitrary level of unhappiness if it were your way. The world isn't so black and white.
You presumably have different preferences. But you don't get to impose yours on the world just because you think they are better or more free or meet whatever ideals you have. We all kinda get to weigh in, and some sort of compromise is reached.
I am not buying this Catholic Church idea that "if there is gonna be too much sexual expression, suddenly violence will skyrocket"
You know what could happen? It might reduce suicides, and they are 3 times more common than murder and nobody cares.
This Vsauce video is one of my favorites. It's titled "Why Do We Wear Clothes?" and Michael explains why cultures may encourage modesty.
My brain reacts to sexual stimuli, as it evolved to. I don't want that reaction when I'm riding the metro, or in a work meeting, or having a family dinner. So it's helpful to have a set of social norms about when and where to expect and accept sexual content and when not to.
> I have no idea where prudeness comes from, is it innate to some people? Is it a taught trait?
It's cultural. Norms change, sometimes rapidly. In video games, sexy characters who used to be contentious have been commonplace for a while now, and this hot tub streams thing is just over the line. Maybe in a decade, softcore streamers will be normal but streaming hardcore sex will just over the line.
> But it seems to cause so much discord and disagreement yet is inherently safe and peaceful.
Is the "it" here prudery or provocation?
Prudery is at one end of the spectrum with provocativeness on the other. There's almost no way you aren't prudish in some way. Prudery is usually about control but it's only bad when it can't be relaxed in private or when that control becomes a means of oppression.
They have always been both.
People put on a show. Others are drawn to watch. It's such a reliable mechanism that it can be monetized.
But advertising on a website that is oriented towards Let's Play and educational lectures and video games? Of course!
Twitch just needs to make the sexual content deniable and findable at the same time... which they have just done.
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Pools%2C%20Hot%20Tubs%2...
So in one word - Softporn.
What do others here think about Twitch’s behavior here? Should there be SLAs for actions taken on an account and notification of the account holder of said action?
Phew! Glad I'll still be able to host my twitch stream!
I can't believe that this has to be spelled out.
Not that Youtube isn't also "interesting" in some content moderation. Outright nudity is possible with thin veil of "educational" content.
I wish the platforms just applied rules equally and had clear rules. And not punish past content with new rules. But maybe that is too much to ask these days...
Making it a distinct category also means that both advertisers and viewers can AVOID the content easily.
These are the types of conversations people are having around the data showing a steady decrease in women’s subjective well being over the last many decades: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp09-11bk.pdf
The revenue model of hot tub streamers is herding simps and sending them to their onlyfans via one level of indirection like twitter.
- William T. Riker
We care about your idiotic double standards and banning of streamers.
What is the joy of watching a girl in a bathing costume sitting on a inflatable horse in a kiddy pool showing off her behind every now and again ???.
Most of the chat are about as dumb as bricks so you can't be there for the conversation.
sex sells.
people like looking at other people half-nude and becoming aroused; it's about as simple a marketing tactic that exists.
> I really don't get it. What is the joy
You're asking why one specific instance of Rule 34 exists. It's because all instances of Rule 34 exist, and this one just happens to have become popular on Twitch. Rule 34, while distressing, is unfortunately a very real aspect of the human race at scale; it essentially says that if you can imagine something, it will be found erotic by someone, no matter how much it is or isn't erotic to you. I think it was first invented in the time of Usenet, when people would create ever-more-specific newsgroup hierarchies, but I'm honestly not sure.
When we democratized content creation, we made it possible for niche fetishes to be discoverable, to form communities, and to financially support content creators. For example, "1800s-era bathing costumes" is absolutely a niche that some subset of humanity will pay money to see more of. There are much more specific, weird, and uncomfortable niches. (We're lucky that this one is so boring and dull, relatively speaking, because it's possible to discuss it without squick.)
It's not about "getting" why it's erotic to some and not others. That's between you and your own erotic desires or lack thereof for any given content. It's about the greater question of how and when society will come to terms with erotic content appearing in "general content" pools on platforms that co-mingle all user-created content without human curation. In this case, Twitch openly admits that they haven't solved that problem:
> This is not intended to be our long-term solution to improve brand targeting capabilities and increase personalization in our recommendations. It does, however, solve a few issues for all audiences in the near term.
But they do clearly understand that, even within the bounds of "no nudity or sex", it's still very possible for content to be erotic to some and uninteresting/offensive to others. I am very curious to see what their next steps will be after this temporary patch, because there's no way to categorize or exclude all Rule 34 content on any content platform where users can upload content without human review and classification, and I don't think that Twitch's short-term compromise today will be a viable long-term solution.
HN doesn't really do memes, but I made this because it seems relevant: https://imgflip.com/i/5ah3b7
Their rule is that it can't be "overtly or explicitly sexually suggestive", and they acknowledge that it lies on a spectrum. They have to draw the line somewhere. To some people, for instance the Amish or fundamentalism Muslims, the line is very different from that of typical Westerners.
I again ask, is wearing a bikini, facing away from a camera and touching your toes for $5 not a sexual service?
Surely you recognize that these things lie on a spectrum. Is charging admission for beach volleyball a sexual service? No matter your level of prudishness, you will be able to find something that is right in the gray area.
This question actually perfectly articulates the difference. When you pay $5 to watch a beach volleyball tournament, you're paying for volleyball, and may as a side effect experience content that _some_ may find sexual. By Twitch's ToS, this should totally be allowed.
As for my example, is there a nonsexual reason to pay a woman 5 dollars to bend over in front of you? What is it?
What you are missing is that whatever rule you make, people are going to try to push the limits, because it gets them viewers. If twitch says that someone bending over in a bikini has no non-sexual purpose and therefore is against the rules, the creators could change the stream very slightly.... just enough so they can claim to be about exercise, yoga, modeling fashion, or dance. They'd still have the same audience, with the exact same reason for watching, but now it sneaks by the rule.
Pole dancing is an art and takes athletic skill, sure, but most people (at least in the US) consider it is purely viewed for sexual gratification. But creators could claim its "main" purpose is to enjoy the dancing for its artistic and athletic merit.
Sports Illustrated has a swim suit issue, and it's not about swimming so how is that sports? It's just an excuse.
The majority of art channels on twitch are people drawing sexy (often anime-style) girls and women. You can learn to draw from them, but the sexier they make them, the more viewers they get.
So... I really don't get what you are trying to say. You seem to not understand that there is gray area.
People have been sometimes streaming from hot tubs for years, and it's always been the exact grey area you're describing. Only very recently has it turned into a hypersexualized scenario, which is why Twitch is putting out more content condoning it.
> You seem to not understand that there is gray area.
I do. You don't seem to understand that the vast majority of the streams this change will encapsulate are not grey at all.
>Prohibiting every form of content that could be interpreted as suggestive would also result in far more restrictions on the video games and premium content that we currently allow, especially considering the ways that female characters are sometimes objectified or presented in a sexualized manner.
This rule actually seems reasonable:
> Nudity or sexually explicit content (which we define as pornography, sex acts, and sexual services) are not allowed on Twitch.
I don't see what the huge issue with showing off your own sexiness is. Sheesh!
If you're asserting that thinking hot tub streams break ToS, and Twitch's selective enforcement of that ToS causes problems very frequently on their platform, makes me an "outraged prude", well I'm sorry friend. Gaslighting an entire community doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
> Nudity or sexually explicit content (which we define as pornography, sex acts, and sexual services) are not allowed on Twitch.
Is wearing a bikini, facing away from a camera and touching your toes for $5 not sexually explicit?
> I don't see what the huge issue with showing off your own sexiness is. Sheesh!
The issue is inconsistency. I think they should update the ToS to support these streamers - they're some of the biggest streamers on the platform. To suggest that those streamers are not being sexually suggestive is, again, an absolute joke. Twitch themselves made the determination that sexually suggestive content is not welcome on their platform, not me.
These women have every right to do as they please, and most likely will continue to push the boundaries of twitch’s tolerance. I suspect we will have car washing streams or sauna streams next to get around the rule.
But I don’t want to see it.
The issue is that Twitch is not supposed to be for this type of content.
When you think of Twitch, do you think of hot tub streamers and cam girls? No, you think of things like gaming and IRL.
They are lucky that hot tub streamers haven't gotten mainstream news attention yet, I can't imagine the outrage of parents when they see some of the stuff thats allowed....
It makes a lot of money but I find it terribly sad.
What do you want Twitch to do? Ban women from wearing anything than a Burqa? Or ban Twitch streamers from going to the beach?
What is that middle ground? Do you codify and say women can't write things on their chest? What about in a video game? Should streaming Cyberpunk 2077 be banned - it clearly has sexual content? I'm not making a straw man - I'm trying to point out your essentially saying "they should ban content I don't like", which means Twitch will apply the rules in anyway you fit - another complaint you have brought up.
Again, are you saying streamers shouldn't be allowed to go to the beach? Or are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to wear bikinis? And if another streamer watches a YouTube video that has a woman at the beach should they be banned?
You should consider reading my post.