Up all night with a Twitch millionaire
washingtonpost.com
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Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives at 26, and plenty decide to completely change their lives at ages far older than that. Tyler seems like an admirable rags-to-riches success story -- he didn't get his foot in the door by being in the right location or knowing the right people, just hard work and a ton of talent. The company that runs the game he plays banned him for life, and he persevered anyway. In many ways, his success is more rare and more difficult than starting a startup. I'm not saying the lifestyle is necessarily worth celebrating, but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
Interesting. I did not read it like that at all. Do you have an example quotation of what makes you think that?
The impression I got is both Tyler and Micayla are well aware of how negatively streaming affects their lives. They both explicitly said they don't want to be doing this forever and want to retire, didn't they?
If they had instead wrote the article about a drug dealer making $500k a year, explaining the downsides of that line of work, would you also think the journalist was just jealous?
The point of the article is that this seems like a lifestyle destined to cause issues later in life.
Not all "issues" are equal; a job that requires regularly committing felonies has much more severe potential "issues later in life" than working a few too many hours a week.
"Pity" might be too judgemental, but I personally don't envy that lifestyle. It's just like respecting boxers' and NFL players' success, while not wanting to be in their shoes and risk getting killed in the ring or CTE.
Sounds like the live of very many self-employed people.
Like even if you just have a small shop going with 10h a day 6 days a week without vacation for many years isn't that rare of a story to hear.
Through most people who are earning money through twitch and similar don't earn that much either.
But also e.g. startup entrepreneurs.
Or people with a small one-person shop.
or even the movie industry, everyone from the industry I have spoken with agreed on the lifestyle many involved peoples is so bad that many end up needing drugs to goo on sooner or later.
But I tend to linger on twitch and there are many streamers which might just earn comparable to a slightly better employee job, but which have a much more healthy life style. Like streaming with a (somewhat) stable schedule, <=5 days a week. Taking holidays and not streaming too long. Through platforms like Twitch, YouTube and especially TickTock make taking holidays REALLY hard. And it's really not easy to get right.
I mean take a look at the movie artist, musician field and see how many people there have problems running their live.
Having the skills to run your live, is a separate skill set. And the more stress and irregularities you job entails the harder it is. Hence why e.g. successful actors often have people helping them managing their lives.
> but it's deserving of a lot more respect than it gets here.
yes, it's a hard job. For each successful case there are thousands which fail.
one doesn't live a live, they live a life.
This is more or less what many streamers are saying about it too. And most streamers are eager to get out of this self-destructive lifestyle with age. Streaming is a though gamble, and most are losing it. Educating about the harsh price of this is good and necessary, and the article is pretty fair there IMHO.
Games like League of Legends require complete focus and attention yet he somehow manages to regularly stream for 10 hours and sometimes reaches peaks of over 30 hours(!!!)[1]. Can you imagine solving leetcode problems (even easy ones) for 30 hours?
In 2020 he paused streaming so he could focus solely on going from Diamond (mid-to-high tier) to Challenger (highest tier). If I recall correctly, he said he would sleep on the couch by his computer, wake up, play and go back to sleep on the couch after ~17 hours.
I don't follow League of Legends (I prefer Dota) but tyler1 has always stood out to me as a person with an incomparable focus and dedication. I haven't seen anything similar in the Dota community and the only programmers that jump to mind would be geohotz or maybe Nick Winter[2].
[1] https://dotesports.com/news/tyler1-marathon-stream-top-lane-...
[2] https://blog.nickwinter.net/posts/the-120-hour-workweek-epic...
The game is literally designed to hook you in and make you play one more and one more. You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Don't get me wrong, the guy has a lot of dedication for sure. But playing League all day is really not like coding all day, I don't want anyone to get that impression.
I have a distinct memory of finishing a game of Dota 2 and realizing that it felt as though I'd just finished a 3 hour exam. I didn't feel happy that we'd won, just relieved. I don't think this will convince you, but perhaps consider being open to the possibility that it genuinely is as difficult as solving most programming problems that we face in our day-to-day work. In my mind, it's at least as difficult as "easy" leetcode problems.
By the way, I've just read in the article that Tyler's been on Adderall since first grade, I guess that will help him stay focused.
Not to take anything away from Tyler1, because he really goes above and beyond, but it really doesn't take much mental focus or anything really to play it. Programming? It takes focus, you really have to think sometimes. But League? When I'm tired the game plays itself. It just feels like muscle memory.
It might take a bit more effort to play at a consistently high level. But I'm pretty sure it's mostly muscle memory for him too. There's very little actual thinking other than the big picture of what objectives to take and I'm sure when he's playing for 20+ hours he's just on autopilot for the majority of the time.
To put it into comparison with how little mental power it personally takes me, I like to watch a lot of Anime, that's Japanese animation with English subtitles. I can't watch Anime if I'm tired because keeping track of subtitles and what's on screen actually takes a substantial amount of mental power. But I can bash out 5 games of LoL back to back when I'm equally as tired.
Your argument doesn't make any sense in the scenario I described.
Would you watch anime and shoot your gun with 'muscle memory' while fighting 5 ruthless, intelligent opponents?
A fight requires constant reevaluation of the situation and planning to win the game. If you play by "muscle memory" and win, you are playing against weak unthinking opponents or getting carried by your team.
If you played against good players, trust me you won't win thinking about anime and chilling. And it's very stressful because you're constantly on guard.
Easy. At some point some actions are so engraved that you respond without even thinking. Example: blinking out on a slight enemy sight.
> A fight requires constant reevaluation of the situation and planning to win the game. If you play by "muscle memory" and win, you are playing against weak unthinking opponents or getting carried by your team.
> If you played against good players, trust me you won't win thinking about anime and chilling. And it's very stressful because you're constantly on guard.
You can use all those big words, but reality is completely different. I've watched amateur/pro Dota 2 since it's inception in 2011 and some pro Dota 1 before that. It is a team game, it is more about team cooperation and heroes you pick. Sure small things can overturn the game, but most of the time it is about bigger game than small actions.
> Would you watch anime and shoot your gun with 'muscle memory' while fighting 5 ruthless, intelligent opponents?
No, I wouldn't, because those people can actually kill me. In comparison, losing in LoL causes me no direct bodily harm whatsover.
Also, if you're playing for that long you end up making a lot of mistakes even if you're a top player. I don't think it's comparable to programming.
I have 3k hours in Dota 2. I know exactly what it is and how it works. It's really not. Not even close.
When I code, I'm mostly just thinking hard and not very happy. The best part is the "aha" moment, and the huge dopamine kick of solving the programming/debugging problem. It is also NOT addicting.
These are two completely different things. I'm not sure why you're so determined to compare the two. They are insanely different.
You're not matched against people less skilled than you where you can just "relax" and walk it in. When you reach your skill ceiling, you have to work hard just to remain there.
Top players hit the ceiling of the MMR system before they hit their skill ceiling.
When you get to the very top of a ladder, matchmaking stops working correctly. Partly because the top few players are insanely good compared to everyone else and partly because there are literally not enough people online at any one time for an equal match to be made.
> where he has to try and win losing games with a team that's not good enough to help him do it
This doesn't mean he can't autopilot. Attempting to solo carry a team of 5 is difficult even if you're completely dialed in.
is still exhausting if you want to play it with full focus for a few hours.
Of course there's difference between playing ARAMs for fun and tryharding on "relatively competent" ELO where you try to do not commit mistakes as hard as you can and games are not "fiestas" (lack of strategy, just fighting)
>You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win.
Significant part of day2day programming can be pretty brainless/trivial too - yet another gluing json over http. Don't get me wrong, there are insanely exhausting projects too.
During programming you can take break whenever you want, go to kitchen, watch memes, hn, read news, blabla, meanwhile when you're in game, then you can't*.
I feel like it's like speed chess and not normal chess. You have no time to think till after the game, you just have to do and trust your gut.
The slow brain is what exhausts you.
e.g after recalling/killing enemies/dying you have like 30sec to look around map and think what you as team want to do / achieve and how to do that
It depends on the stage of the game, but generally when enemies are around, then you may don't have time to think.
I've never played competitively, though I did get to about top 3000 in North America. Thanks for sharing!
Matches where e.g we lose early game and have to come back somehow by avoiding commiting mistakes hard and somehow catching off somebody from enemy team could be exhausting cuz you're basically balacing on the edge for 30min :P
30 seconds is infinite in games like that.
You don't encounter a lot of autopiloting at the highest level of competition. The people you compete against are trying as hard as they possibly can to beat you, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and ingenuity to outplay them and win. You gloss over the details of that monumental task with reductive phrasing - but I think you're overlooking a lot.
I was at a party once, talking to a stranger about why I loved programming so much. They said: "Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's _just_ programming, right?". That's how this comment reads to me - "At the end of the day, it's just playing a game, right?"
There's a reason that some people compete at the highest level and some are in the fat part of the bell curve.
If I wanted to respond in the same tone, I could say: "The guy is not a pro player, he doesn't compete at the highest level, he just grinds solo queue for 10 hours per day on Adderall. He got this way because he had a mixture of talent and addiction susceptibility. He got addicted to the dopamine hits that the free to play game was meticulously designed to deliver in a pattern that makes the player unable to stop even if he hates it and feels miserable."
But I will say this: I think you're misinterpreting my comment as scorn when in reality it's my perspective based on my experiences with coding and playing this game. I know both, so I believe that my opinion is valuable and I decided to share it.
It's the same as with any activity.
Time * dedication * (1 + natural talent)
> This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level.
I've done both, I'm not disregarding amount of skill and dedication it takes. But it is completely different from programming.
Competetive gaming is akin to real sports, more about situation, luck and reaction rather than natural wits. All games are following patterns which you can learn just by spending time in game which adheres to limited set of rules defined by game logic.
I can take easy breaks. Run some tests and so on.
When playing a game you have to be totally focused for longer periods and not just focus but also execute and handle the concept of being activity opposed. Its like if you were programming and the compiler was activity being evil.
Why do you think demonstrating focus on an addictive video game is the same as solving open-ended computer science problems?
Firstly, I probably wouldn't classify the work most of us do as "solving open-ended computer science problems" so I'm not trying to make a comparison to that work.
Secondly, I guess it stands out to me because I watch other people play the same addictive game and are unable to play at a high level for the same lengths of time. If it were just an addictive property of the game, we should expect to see thousands of tyler1's as we see thousands of heroin addicts. Since we do not, it makes me think that there's something special with him.
1: That number seems small today, but I got the sense that bug-discovery by customers at least was limited by the low number of customers that a b2b startup had in the 80s.
It's the doing it day after day on a regular schedule that makes me feel like I never really recover from programming, and just want to zone out and stare at the wall until bed time, having very little energy left for anything either fun or productive, after 4-5 hours, most days.
I'll even do that with video games. Get the family out of the house and give me a weekend, I'll play vidja games for like 16 hours. Then wake up the second day and not want to touch a game for at least a week, and instead start doing home improvement projects or whatever. Or sit outside and read a book all day. Not because I feel like I should, but because it's the thing I most want to be doing, and I have zero desire to look at a screen for a good long while.
The regularity of work is what makes it so damn draining, for me. I'm sure it'd ruin gaming for me in short order, too, though I'd have fared a lot better at it back when I was in my teens or early 20s than I would now, for sure. I can't do 30 waking hours of anything now. 24 just about ruins me. I could get to about 36-38 before hitting a wall and passing out for like 12 hours, back then. 30 wasn't that big a deal, and I hit that mark pretty often (usually, yeah, playing video games for a good chunk of it).
“Focus” aside, his overall contribution to the sport is tainted with his abhorrent behavior.
But I have worked (programmed) two 9h days without sleeping in-between before and it worked somehow well???
Through normally I often have problems working 8h a day without taking a fairly long lunch brake.
But then sometimes I just went 10h with close to no brakes (some ad-hock food) without even realizing it.
It's still puzzles me what makes the difference.
I could also play MMORPGs and Dota 2 for 10 hours straight without any break, I can barely sit one hour solving LC/learning something. And before you account this to age, even now I could spend whole day playing some addictive game like a robot.
Also, I'm speculating here, but I think he is on Testosterone Replacement Therapy, which also has insane energy, mood and cognitive enhancements.
Lastly he takes a ton of stimulants.
I don't for a moment think he's working purely off "natural" energy.
It just shows that many people do not understand what is going one at all.
Sure it's a form of "entertainer" job, but actress, synchron speaker or comedian are also real jobs.
And no one would go and say "oh say just need to say some lines on stage so it's not a real job". It's not at all as simple as "just playing games in front of camera".
Sure some people do just that as a hobby, but then people also program as a hobby and programming is still a real job.
And sure many just barely make enough to cover living expanses, but that's true for many jobs which still are "real jobs".
No idea why people feel to denounce people which act as entertainers while also often managing a merch job and a community as "not having a real job"? Is it be of envy that some people have and at their job and where able to turn their hobby into a job?
Either-way it's not just a real job it's like many jobs from the entertainment business not an easy job to get successful with, without a "clear" path to success, requiring often both hard work, talent and luck and with often not-so rosy long term aspects and just a few managing to get rich or wealthy, while many other are sooner or later forced to change their job. You know like in many other jobs in the entertainment industries, e.g. musician/singer.
-some old fucks. probably
I suppose I was misinformed in that I thought that cars of all value ranges were pretty disastrous assets to hold - but it sounds like holding on to them for value appreciation still isn't a particularly good tactic.
Professional video game streaming is relatively new. It's a valid question.
Eventually though they will have to quit their sport due to wear and tear and no longer being at a peak level. And most will probably never really progress to a level where they can make some quick millions from a contract and then retire early.
So what then?
I'm a proponent of the idea that your athletic scholarship at a Division I-A school should be for "sports degree" and that it should entitle you to come back prepaid for an "academic" 4 year degree when that track runs out.
That would stop a lot of the idiocy we see around "student athletes".
In e-sports there's millions of people practicing every day and the built in ranking system can filter that down to the current top 0.1%. At this point branching out into actual competitions is not nearly as difficult as getting noticed by a NBA, NFL, etc. recruiter.
It does depend on the Game. CSGO players play a very limited number of maps so pure reaction time and hand-eye coordination is often the deciding factor. Strategy games like LoL and softer FPS games like Fortnite are less dependent on physical talent.
I doubt the boredom thing is that different for sports vs eSports. At least with eSports the game is changing due to patches. With sports, the game itself hardly changes.
For citation: see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... you can see reaction time starts to drop off rapidly starting at age 25
eSports players spend a lot more time playing than normal athletes. You can only be physically active for a few hours per day. eSports players can do a lot more, like tyler1 who consistently streams for 10+ hours 5 days a week.
Normal athletes arguably also get more variation. Football players don't play back to back football matches all day every day, they practice and improve in a lot of other ways. They also get more variation due to traveling around to play away games.
In CS:GO there were players around their 30s and were successful
https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro
e.g
>2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000
There is also societal stigma from playing video games seriously past early 20s(well atleast 5-10+ years ago, but with Twitch and things it is now way more accceptable).
"Reaction times in traditional sports are not as important" is laughable.
2. The athletes who do play "past their prime" are usually making up for reduced physical acuity with other skills (e.g. you don't see very many baseball players hit triples after 30).
3. Players with long careers invest a huge amount of time in conditioning, and to a hard-to-measure degree, PEDs.
4. I don't really follow eSports; If someone played Starcraft competitively 20 years ago, are they still playing SC, or do they switch to something else like LoL? What's the typical competitive "lifetime" of a game? If you picked up game-specific skills, it might be harder to apply #2 when the game du-jour changes.
5. As a slight nitpick to the whole conversation, my understanding is that "reaction time" is perhaps a misnomer; the drop in reaction time with age for performing a simple activity appears to be relatively minor, but more complex activities (including habitual ones like driving), which suggests that the performance decline is in selecting and/or executing the proper response to a stimuli rather than what we think of as pure "reaction time"
The only ones that I know of are Quake and Street Fighter. In Quake currently only 1 or 2 of the best mechanically gifted players in the world are under 30. In Street Fighter, there's a wide range of ages including younger players as well as players as old as 40+. The "god of execution" Sakonoko is 42 years old and is still winning major tournaments every once in a while.
In Formula 1, Lewis Hamilton is likely on his way to yet another world championship at 36, edging it out over his 10 years younger contender.
https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/Virtus.pro
e.g
>2016-07-30 1st S-Tier Offline ELEAGUE ELEAGUE Season 1 2 : 0 Fnatic $400,000
On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to sell the skill of building a large following to employers, and plenty of companies looking for people who are experts in social media/streaming platforms.
Ask a few military vets, many legitimately just start at the bottom at the totem some place novel into their mid 30s.
Maybe I'm jaundiced because I just had to fill out my annual review self-assessment and skipped the "5-year plan" because I simply couldn't be bothered to lie about it.
1. https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/T90Official/Broadcasts
I occasionally stream my desktop to show friends something - doesn't mean you should count me for that same list.
- Continue
- Retire
- Start coaching
- Start casting
- Management (Organizing/growing content creators/groups)
- Switch careers entirely
Any of the giants should hopefully have been saving there money and have quite a bunch tucked away. Any of the smaller ones should have been doing something on the side, or at least have a plan B ready.
Also, not sure why we're assuming no college degree here.
This is just like any other endeavor. Many try, most fail, some succeed wildly. We don't need to feel bad for the people that try and fail. That is part of life and progressing as a person.
If you have 250 viewers a few times a week, you're not quitting your day job for it. If you are, you should probably reconsider.
i was pleasantly surprised one day to find I was working side-by-side with someone who was once a minor music celebrity
they had pivoted in their 20-somethings after a decent payout, used it to finance their education, and are now just 'one of us' haha
His girlfriend (now wife) describes the experience of being with someone who was once somewhat famous in this article [0] -- There were moments of extreme cognitive dissonance when I saw him up there. He’s a wild and expert showman on stage. As I’d watch him do things like play the keyboard by smashing it with his forehead, spit water all over the audience or writhe convulsively on the ground, I would think, “I can’t believe this is the same man who likes to go to bed at 10 o’clock and sweetly brings me coffee in bed every morning.”
[0] - https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/travis-morrison-and...
Doing anything at a high level tends to cultivate skills that translate to other areas. General skills like focus and discipline come to mind.
We likely all understand that one of the toxic forces in our culture today is the compulsive need to turn every story and news article into a clear moral narrative with a pure protagonist and a villainous antagonist. Reality isn't like that at all, and when journalists force reality into that framework, it distorts our perception of the world in unhealthy ways.
But when an article comes out that doesn't do that, that just says "here are some people and what their experience is like", it seems many of us are unprepared to handle it. In the comments here, I see this rorschach-like phenomenon where each reader imagines a morality play, superimposes it on the article, and then gets surprised when others saw something different.
This isn't an acticle about good guys and bad guys, winning and losing, the good or evil of capitalism. It's just a window into one person's life. It's a useful article because this is a kind of person whose life affects many of us—a lot of people here watch popular streamers—but where we have little insight into the whole picture of how that impacts their life.
We should relish journalism like this. There is no need to jump to any moral conclusion. Just witness and understand a bit more about the variety of lives people live today.
As readers we can draw our own conclusions here, but to call the author biased into making the life/platform/phenomenon of twitch streamers bad? That's just a really narrow view of a fairly compelling article.
If some of you wonder why viewers give us money, from my experience, the stream is a comfortable place for them. But how a 26k people chat could be comfortable? You instantly loose the special link with the streamer by being flooded into the chat. On the streamer side, I can't imagine loosing the special link I have with the community. With 240 messages per minute, it's impossible to meet anyone. I'm lucky to have made friendships and even working relationship through the stream.
For anyone curious about how twitch and HN can meet, go to the Twitch "software and development" category.
Kids.
Adults without kids.
What an ignorant thing to say. Apparently having no kids==nothing to do except for consume full day long content.
I don't think it is for everyone but I prefer it to TV/Netflix/whatever. I didn't even play games when I started watching (I do now, but only once or twice a week). Some people prefer amateur porn to Brazzers.
Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since this is a zero sum game). I'm sure having zillions of dollars doesn't make you happy, but there's so much unwarranted hate here on HN for new ventures and disruptive industries, it's kind of odd. It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing. "If it's popular, it must be bad" is a pretty myopic view.
Some commenters here even said that it's all good now but that it won't work in his thirties or something as if there aren't a ton of jobs out there that feed on young blood that won't be able to keep up later in life.
I completely agree with you, this kind of "this is not a real job" attitude really comes off as people upset that they can't be millionaires at their job.
EDIT: A lot of the comments point out that most people on Twitch/YouTube/OnlyFans don't make money and would be better off getting a "real job". I am not trying to argue against that or say that Twitch is a good job prospect. My point is that if they do succeed in that niche, trying to segment money-making endeavour between "real jobs" and "just a kid playing video games" seems very vain to me. Tyler is making millions providing entertainment, to me that is very much a real job.
What I am saying that what Tyler has very much is a real job and successful business. You wouldn't say Taylor Swift is jobless because very few people make it in the pop music world.
You'd be lying though, and your kid would probably grow up to resent it. There are ways to educate kids about the relative risks of careers in good faith.
If they wanted to be a famous personality, I would insist they start building a profile on every platform.
For some people never means usually not, and for some never means never :)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/22807858/tiktok-influencer-microsof...
So we are still talking about an absurd low number of people.
Of course it's always possible that someone is far more successful outside of twitch. Like an established celeb who streams without monetization. But I don't think it makes sense to discuss those special cases here.
How are you going to know what the stream is earning the musician keeping contact with his fan base?
Over the age of 6: 5.16 million
High school: 1 million
College: 70k
Pro: 1,700
Also a power law distribution.
But no, it's not a 'career' I'd recommend to anyone. The net expected value of becoming a local theatre actor is significantly better than Twitch...
I know this because recently I ran into a few Instagram influencers with a low 6-figure followers, who get paid $1000+ per ad post. The ones I know have day jobs, Instagram is mostly extra income for them. I also know a blogger who is doing it fulltime and making upper middle class income from it.
The point is power law seems absurd because it is easy to start these things but very few people actually treat it like a job or a business. To me it seems those who treat it like a business have pretty high chance of making, at least, living wages from it.
Hard to get accurate numbers for a lot of online hustle industries. There’s a lot of grandstanding, exaggerating, or laying really low about finances. Like say affiliate marketers or SEO people.
> I await the Harvard Business Review case study of it with baited breath.
Haha!
This is going to sound glib, but I honestly think it's because Pinterest hasn't been able to create a comparable (or even marginally similar) business model for its users to capitalize on. Seriously, why isn't Pinterest a big shopping destination? The answer to that will tell us a lot about attitudes toward influencers and e-stars.
No one cares about a shopping list of pictures, people want engagement with a Real Human™ if they're going to spend their cash on a recommendation
So Pinterest would have to pivot to a niche video site, which is not exactly an easy thing to sustain
That guy is in esports, so he is generally very risk-friendly, so chances are high that he is also investing and wasting his money on risky investments and potentially losing it.
Finance tends to be the opposite - limited information, long time horizons, optimal risk/rewards by going into poorly understood niches, and permanent failure making loose attachment and adaptability preferable to optimizing. While you can make the competitive gaming mindset work, it's an "attack dog" way of running your life.
And you can see a contrast between session based online gaming - which is what gets most of the Twitch viewers as alluded earlier - and MMOs, in the types of playstyle that "make it" competitively. While MMOs often reward persistent grinds, they can also reward creative ways of redefining the game's goals and mechanics to develop the game in a pro-social direction. You want to be in an MMO with other people who know how to make the game lively, not 1000 angry sweatlords chasing after the same leaderboard stat. So there are typically more ways to measure oneself, and more opportunities to do things like item trading arbitrage, which is directly financial in nature.
I've known plenty of smart people who were terrible with money, and plenty of average people who were very good at managing it. There's a huge gap between intellectual understanding and practical skill. And I've known some brilliant people whose brilliance made them confident the money would keep coming or that the usual dynamics didn't apply to them. Note, for example, that intelligent people are more likely to become addicts: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/intelligent-people-drugs/
I’d think you childhood/background and your current environment would be the biggest factors.
Some mainstream athletes may feel the need to flex. So they may spend extra money. There’s also generally certain rituals or going with the crowd that means spending more money.
It feels elitist to call these gamers and celebs both smarter than mainstream athletes and label the latter as lotto winners. Unless you were talking about lotto winners as a separate group. Though that too appears problematic as you’re more closely associating them with mainstream athletes in a negative sense.
Lotto winners also have societal, environmental, and cultural issues many other wealthy people like streamers don’t. No one thinks the lotto winner deserves their money. People have far easier time coming out of the woodwork and hassling lotto winners. Asking for money and more.
Though I disagree with the posters theory that twitch gamers are less susceptible to blowing their fortune than athletes, the fact that their job doesn't come with a high risk of head trauma is a reason they may be smarter.
Also, just my personal opinion. I’d rather make $10M over my 20s with some head trauma than have to slave away as a random cog employee. I know people can delude themselves into believing they aren’t. Some believe their work matters a lot. I doubt many would do the same work id they had millions in savings though.
This doesn’t make streamers any smarter to me. This posits that streamers would not be streamers if streaming entailed the same risk of head trauma as the NFL and hockey. I personally believe people would want the game and money so they’d still do it.
My understanding is that though most of those sports have a lower rate of head trauma than football or hockey, they still have a far higher rate of head trauma than the general public. To the point where I doubt many professional soccer or basketball players haven't had at least one concussion like event from the sport.
If I were guaranteed $10m for a concussion I'd take that deal in a second. Having a high chance of a concussion for a very low chance of $10m is a different matter.
I only see streamers as smarter as their low chance of millions doesn't have the associated risk of head trauma, though I agree that it's unlikely anybody is picking their long shot based on the potential injury.
edit read your other reply and can sum up or difference in opinions easily.
>I don’t think either selects for higher intelligence
Neither do I, but I think the process for athletes has more of a negative effect on intelligence than streaming does. Purely due to injuries.
What do you think about the possibility of athletes are not sitting at a desk in front of their computer screen 10 hours a day like streamers? I’m generalizing with the numbers :). Instead they are exercising? That has to count for something, no? Maybe a few streamers are doing treadmill desks but I’d think that will always remain incredibly rare. Standing desks may be used a little more but I don’t know.
I understand streamers can exercise in their own time. It is debatable if exercising for an isolated one hour a day is any where close to the same as regular fitness.
And as a related aside, I think many of the actual esports teams have realized the importance of health for competitions and devote a fair amount of time to it.
Celebrity is already pushing it. In the scale of fame, someone doing all the work themselves likely is pretty down the list in terms of celebrity.
Many celebs without managers don’t need to do much marketing and PR for their brand. There’s countless YouTube or IG etc accounts with millions of subscribers that don’t have a concerted marketing and especially not PR campaign going on.
Many, possibly most, sports players do not have managers. Most have agents only.
—-
For cash flow. Leagues like the NBA and NFL have become more serious with helping out and making sure the players manage money better. Still a long way to go.
Overall, I don’t see any reason why streamers and online celebs would have higher intelligence. The reasons people are giving appear to be biased toward giving credence to tech white collar work.
Look at the number of online influencers peddling all sorts of scummy NFT and crypto stuff. If their PR was so important, these online celebs would have had to do major damage control. They largely haven’t. If at all. This makes it seem like there’s much less serious pressure and real stakes at play for online celebs. There’s other various things online celebs have done and continue to do that just is not done by the vast vast majority of athletes. The ones that do behave like divas are ostracized. This isn’t the case with online celebs.
I don’t think either selects for higher intelligence.
At that scale of wealth you don't just have to not handle money wisely, you have to be downright foolish to make it all disappear.
To support your point, acting, singing and writing are in a similar state, as are most media works. Creative media seems in particular its the area where the gulf between the successful and the well, not, is massive.
I did some user interviews with streamers for a project. None were this successful; the people talked to ranged from making a decent living to having a day job and then doing streaming as a full-time second job.
Even the ones like Tyler were feeling the same strain he is. But the ones who seemed worst off were the ones who were putting in the same level of effort but making peanuts or were net negative on a cash basis. I remember one guy I talked to who said that he never talked to his old friends; everybody he spent time with now was a streamer because he didn't have time for anything else.
In contrast the actors I used to know seemed to have a much healthier relationship to their art. They were working hard and trying to make it, but I don't recall the same sense of ruthless grind I got from the streamers. Ditto the writers I know these days.
Nobody is forcing you to be live 12 hours a day. Most of the super effort no reward streamers would benefit by cutting the live hours and working more on marketing anyway. Twitch in particular is terrible for organic growth
Not to imply any negativity in this comment if it reads that way, just shite at words. I've dabbled in streaming and realised I need to build up the audience first otherwise it's a massive timesink
Might be in part because the search function is so bad. I tried to use twitch to discover DJ slash electronic music streams, and had a really hard time finding what I wanted, though I could sometimes find them using other keywords.
If you're big, you get bigger. If you're small, you'll never (rarely) be seen by someone browsing
They'll sprinkle some AI on it eventually
The actors I knew mainly focused on craft and collaboration with teams. If they dealt with the audience at all, it was in very controlled bursts in the minutes after a performance. So it seems to me that streaming is much more socially demanding.
There are more people in acting than the audience
POV: you're a streamer interacting with the audience https://cdn.imgy.org/j6km.jpg (chat unrelated, I just picked the one in my follows that would fill the screen quickest)
idk it just doesn't feel social to me at all, never mind socially demanding
You make my point with that screenshot. The chat isn't unrelated. The chat is primary. The streamers I talked to and the streaming I've watched is a performance for an audience. It's way more interactive than most live theater, even the stuff with audience participation. And it's leaps and bounds more socially demanding than film work.
As an example, watch this video from a streamer with 120k followers on Twitch:
https://twitter.com/negaoryx/status/1354147400160403457
While playing the game she is deeply involved a conversation with the people watching. As streamers explained it to me, that's key to the economics of being a successful streamer, in that significant audience segments are buying a feeling of being in the in-group, and that feeling has to be supported with actual interaction with the streamer.
I agree that's not the same thing as being on the same stage with people. But it's still very social. Similarly, remote work is still social. I've never met any of my colleagues, for example, but they're still people to me.
Given the two options I'm a non-streamer giving my general take.
These technologies are allowing people to display their talents and allowing them to make money off of them. Back in the day being good at video games was a fun thing to do when you had free time. Now there is a small chance you can make a living off it.
I can't remember the quote but Warren Buffett once said that the only reason he is a billionaire is that he was born at the right time, with the right gender (back when women weren't allowed to do much), and with the right talents.
Valuing a wider range of talents allows more people to participate in the economy. Crypto for example allows developers to inject little bits of economy into apps. Perhaps in the future someone can make a living creating really good cat memes instead of a deadend job that is basically useless anyways.
If that last sentence offended you I'd suggest you checkout the book "Bullshit Jobs".
People have been making money from e-sports for a long time, at least two decades. it's not a new thing. The new platforms however allow gamers to reach large audiences without having to join a major gaming league.
I disagree. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok didn't create a new kind of millionaire. They're simply celebrities. The only thing that arguably changed is that content production is so cheap and saturated now that consumers get a lot more choice in terms of who they want to watch, without being constrained by TV schedules and other distribution/logistics limitations.
There is no "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella, and even the monetization mechanisms are the same old ones (ads, sponsorships, merchandising). By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate.
Arguably the only noteworthy thing here is that technology changes and companies that embrace innovation will eat the lunches of those that fail to keep up (e.g. Blockbuster). "Everyone wants to work for FAANG" because a good chunk of the entertainment industry money is flowing there.
Through it's still the entertainment industry as in: It requires a mixture of skill, hard work and luck to even just get to the point of earning more then just your basic-living expanses with it.
Through we also have seen such a disruption in the music industries where with modern music services people can reach some degree of success without any deals with any large publishers (through it's not easy).
> By "lauding celebrities", all we're accomplishing is consolidate consumer attention into fewer content production channels, solidifying the position of the platforms where these celebrities operate.
I think you're on point about the platforms, but not about the channels per se. In the past, you basically got to watch what 60-year old guys in the executive suite thought was appropriate, whereas now you can watch a lot more types of stuff. And I think people are wising up to the power platforms had. I think when OnlyFans said they were banning porn, people quite rapidly found new platforms to move to. Building these platforms has also become cheaper and easier, especially in the last 2-5 years IMO.
As for platform power and user choice, I think people have a misconception about how much "power" they have, considering that search results and recommendations are entirely at the mercy of the companies that provide them and they're very much aggregated by user profiles, much like cable had "hundreds of options" that are in actuality largely curated to target audiences.
There are a variety of niche old videos that I can no longer find on youtube. The long tail does disappear for no rhyme or reason (actually, if you understand the logistics of live/cold storage and the scale at which youtube operates at, it totally makes sense). It certainly isn't like the napster days where you could in fact find that one ultra rare file that only one person in the world was seeding.
As for content creator mobility, I don't consider twoset's presence on tiktok any more novel than hollywood getting into home video. Content creators and distributors interests' don't always align and there has never been an actual monopoly on distribution channels, even despite the existence of large media conglomerates. It's just the individual players that are different, IMHO.
Yes and no. They are celebs, but definitely a new style of celebs. They are your average Joe, with barely any special skill. They could be your neighbor or the dude next to you in a supermarket, and you wouldn't know. Furthermore, they are millionaire working from home, growing from home, with average equipment and average products. This is something which never happened before, not at this scale.
Though, to be fair, there are also some actual skilled people growing into this space and celebs from other areas are breaking in too.
> There is no "new industries", it all still falls under the entertainment industry umbrella,
Yes, obviously. But the type and quality is completely different to established entertainment. It started with people with the bare minimum of entertaining-skill who established this. People who wouldn't have been able to succeed in the classical entertainment-industry. And this absolutely is a change. For the industry itself, it also is a change, because those people are cheaper and have a different angle to play at. This is more on the quality-level of a tupperware-party that somehow went up to a global scale.
Their skill is usually something like live broadcasting and/or interviewing depending on the streamer as well as brand marketing.
It's essentially the further democratization of talk shows, right?
Absolutely, provably false.
It takes a lot of skill to constantly produce content at the rate that millionaire twitch streamers do. Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
It also takes a high level of creativity in order to come up with new ideas for streams, keep the audience engaged while playing the same game for hundreds of hours on end. This means doing giveaways, interacting with the audience without offending them, planning contests, negotiating advertising deals with game-makers for promo-streams, etc. etc.
It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job. Most people would burn-out at their rate, and a lot actually do.
Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends. This the skill ceiling for "barely any special skill" people. If they stream a game that just came out, they may break 10 viewers once in a while. That's about it.
Well, that's disputable. Most content-sources are delivered externally, in form of games and stuff they can react too. It's not like they sit there and think up something fresh by themselves for 8 hours a day. Though, yes, they have some naturally skill in socializing which they hone over time. But still I would not say it goes beyond the skill of any other natural socializer which exists in any community.
> Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.
Which is most of the time not done by them. Usually they pay people for this. And to be fair, Videos of streamers are usually not really masterpieces either. They are optimized versions of their streaming-content. A good youtube-creator has significant more skill there. They occasionally also create far higher quality of content than most streamers.
> It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job.
How many streamers do you actually know? Well scheduled is not really what I would call most streams I've seen.
> Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.
If you are a fulltime-streamer, earning money, then they pretty much all get help to some degree.
> Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends.
Not really. They are many dedicated hardworking people with similar skill-levels even on the lowest levels. Success in streaming depends far more on luck than skill. Though, luck is also a skill in some way, so hard to say...
But the skills I was talking about are not the ones you are getting naturally but being alive or just doing stuff long enough to acquire them. Obviously if you stream long enough you get a bunch of skills and knowledge automatically, which any non-streamer is missing yet. But that is nothing special.
Special is stuff not everyone has or can acquire on it's own. Like a professional who went through a long professional training, reaching a level of quality a normal selfmade-streamer never can reach. Or someone which a career outside of streaming. There are more and more people like that hitting the platforms. Many entertainers with decade-long careers came in the pandemia to twitch and youtube, searching for new playgrounds and displaying skills which leaves any big established streamer in the dust.
I think you're blurring some lines. I don't imagine Ben Levin (a friend of the much more famous Adam Neely) is a millionaire, and I certainly don't imagine either of them are anywhere on the same level as someone like MrBeast, who actually employs a crew much like a TV show might.
It certainly is as easy as ever to get started, but I think this idea that anyone can just pick up an iphone camera and become a millionaire is a bit disingenuous. As the article alludes, it does take effort, sacrifice and probably a healthy dose of luck to get somewhere in the industry, especially with how crowded it has become.
> but I think this idea that anyone can just pick up an iphone camera and become a millionaire is a bit disingenuous.
Obviously not everyone can do that, but this is how almost everyone from the new industry started. I would say, it's simply the difference in culture, between old industry professionals trained schools and such, and the self learners of the new industry. Though, old industry is now moving in this space too, so it will change with time.
You've clearly never been to a restaurant in LA or NY. These are chock full of "average Joes" working as bartenders and waitresses just waiting to "make it" in movies, tvs, commercials.
Many of the top twitch streamers have legitimate "skill", it's just not the skill you might be referring to in classic entertainment. For example "360 no scope sniper kills" might be the equivalent of "funny one liner quips".
What's your evidence for this? I don't watch a ton of streaming, but to me it looks hard to do well. If they're truly average people, how do you explain the big differences in popularity?
This is not true. It is no more true for streaming then for acting, hosting tv show or entertaining in bar via magic tricks or playing music. The ability to produce entertaining streams is a separate skill. Not just in game skill.
> This is something which never happened before, not at this scale.
At the time when live music was a thing, there were definitely few thousands musicians able to live from it. Which is as large scale as successful streamers seem to be.
> growing from home, with average equipment and average products
Really, no more true then about musical instruments of the past.
You provide no explanation as to why we should be lauding them. Or are you implying that because someone is a millionaire then we should automatically laud them? Is that what late stage capitalism looks like?
That's why they should be lauded (IMO).
It's a bit disheartening. It makes me wonder how the HN of today would react to someone like Aaron Swartz.
You didn't have a situation like FAANG and its cohorts in the past, paying what they do and hiring like they do, in as attainable of a way.
Banking $270k comp. as an L4 for a few years would allow me to "do my own thing" more than anything.
If you mean people like Gates, Zuckerberg etc., they had giant safety nets to fall back on.
Its glorious to see people who are truly brilliant at what they do getting a shot at the audience and owning everything they do. Its not just Twitch Streamers and 20 something influencers. There is a deep world of niche experts opening up all sorts of interesting topics to everyone and the best get to stand front and center.
My recent fav is Benn Jordan who breaks down a lot of the challenges of being an independent musician in a world of streaming. He recently did an incredible piece on how a NY Times reporter used his credentials to scam hundreds of musicians.
But either-way, it's not really that legacy media has a lot of gatekeepers which are a mixture of "stuck in the past", "focused on questionable qualifications" and/or "not-impartial/corrupt".
I guess it's not surprising that such which benefit from being (with modern tech) unnecessary middle man and/or benefit from corruption are not happy about losing power and potentially becoming obsolete.
Not saying that we should despise them all by default, but one should be very aware of the mechanism and plays of those people and not blindly accept everything. It's an entertaining space, but also a dangerous one. And that too many young people fuel this industry is a problem IMHO.
The content is easier to produce due to technology, and this is personal opinion but its way better than what was made by television studios etc.
There's envy involved but I do think a large contributing factor is also the fact that what streamers and influencers and the like do, and what their "influencees" do, tends to very much lean towards being very mindless. It's like celebrity worship, except there's this "they're just like you and me!" aspect to it that feels incredibly disingenuous.
Instead of going out and doing things, you have people sitting on their butts watching someone else sit on their butts and do that stuff. Instead of people bettering themselves and going out and getting a girlfriend, you have people paying to pretend those lewd photos of some random girl who mentioned your username on a stream once because you tipped her which means she totally knows you exist and is basically your girlfriend, were taken just for you.
On top of that one of the main goals for these people is to get you to buy products from their sponsors. They're like the used car salesmen who try to buddy up to you and flatter you so you'll buy one of their cars. Except people know used car salesmen are bullshitting them. And people know celebrities aren't like you and me. People connect to streamers and influencers and spend more time worshiping them on a different level that feels unhealthy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think they provide some benefits to society. You can say that these sort of people help others feel like part of a family or whatever, and helps those who have a hard time getting a girlfriend feel better. On the other hand, you could also just point to, for example, the suicide rates which have been trending upward pretty steadily, especially starting with the prevalence of smartphones and such. Or the fact that antidepressant usage has essentially doubled in the past two decades.
Overall, to me, it all just feels like a trend in the wrong direction.
Yes, that's literally it. This is the proper use of the term hater.
> It feels HN has become way more corporatist in the past few years -- everyone wants to work for FAANG, no one wants to do their own thing
Also agree. I liked HN better years ago. When I was younger.
But there are other substantial areas of interest and overlap: the creatives / makers, the one person businesses, the SMBs (both owner/operators and employees), the start-ups (founders, co-workers), the people pushing some agenda or other (those can be quite annoying) and finally the trolls and even some griefers, though the latter two groups usually find their accounts very short lived (with some regrettable exceptions).
HN has gotten large enough that it is no longer a niche player, but still small enough that it hasn't reached the 'everybody's on it' stage.
But I don't see that 'unwarranted hate for new ventures and disruptive industries'. What you do get is a crowd that isn't going to roll over right away at the first sign of a 'new thing'. In that sense we are probably becoming a bit jaded, having seen 25 years of one new thing after another.
Please don’t lump content creators in with crypto and dot bombs. The folks creating content on streaming platforms are providing entertainment and putting in real time doing a job. Equating them to what were/are more or less Ponzi schemes isn’t fair to them at all.
It's important not to overgeneralize from a few datapoints that one dislikes - this routinely leads people to false conclusions:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You may have gotten bitten by a variant of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) in which initial comments are shallow dismissals and then more substantive comments appear over time. The initial comments don't characterize the community. They just appear first because they're reflexive reactions (the fastest kind of reaction to have) and they're shallow (the fastest kind of comment to write).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That’s funny. He has earned more in a year than many in a decade. Million a year and it’s unstable. What makes you think the job of a software engineer is stable! He is skilled in entertainment. He will find a way.
And what do they mean he doesn't have a retirement fund? He has plenty of income to invest in a retirement fund.
Maybe something like an engineering management role where all you do is share performance reviews?
So I think it is like a lot of entertainment: the job can be intense, there is often little separation between personal and private but the pay is generally pretty good. Even on Twitch which really struggles with promoting smaller streamers, there are people far down the chain earning $50k/year with relatively small communities. Is that better than a startup? No. But not everyone can move to SF or go to college either.
I don't think being swatted or harassed is that common either. If you are a big streamer and you leak where you live, then maybe...but it doesn't happen as much as it used to (xQc got swatted repeatedly this year, and someone broke into his house...it does still happen).
Also, Twitch chat is toxic but most of the negative comments are not serious. I understand why normies wouldn't understand that but part of the fun for (some) streamers is battling with chat. It isn't a very serious place.
It’s dumb, yes life is hard and will grind you down. If your lucky you make enough money to step away while your still healthy and relatively young.
> His latest Twitch deal includes a performance quota; he streams 200 hours a month.
50 hours a week of on-stream time! And any other business/branding/merchandizing must happen on top of those 50 hours where he already has to be 100% on. It does sound exhausting.
However it's a bit sad to me that this is the successful end state of the streamer economy. His job is uniquely voluntary. He plays what he wants to play. People tune in and pay him if they want to. And somehow the result is that if he wants to stay at the top of this world he's trapped in that chair for unreasonable spans while people drop by to either praise or abuse him.
If this is the natural evolution of celebrity-fan relationships I think it reflects way worse on the fans than the celebrity. This is what we demand for the sake of our entertainment.
Maybe this is pessimism, but calling streamers "creators" feels like a perverse label.