Hacker News Reader

> It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice.

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?

I also didn't get the impression at all that they're kids; quite the opposite. They have golden handcuffs, just like a lot of people in tech. The difference seems to be (and this is what I felt the article conveyed, at least to me) the grueling effect of having your life and brain on display around the clock.

I think it's possible to both respect how they got there and their agency, but also feel some mixed feelings about their lifestyles. Especially if you see tyler1 and xqc do 8+/10+ hour streams every day respectively, while taking 1-2 vacations per year.

"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.

> 8+/10+ hour streams every day respectively, while taking 1-2 vacations per year.

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.

but the success of a small shop owner doesn't have the same scale as the e-celebrities, despite similar time commitments.

I'm not sure why you started that sentence with a but.

Through most people who are earning money through twitch and similar don't earn that much either.

> Plenty of people in all careers don't know how to run their lives at 26

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.

"life"

one doesn't live a live, they live a life.

> It treats streamers as kids who can't take care of themselves and don't understand the long-term impact of their lifestyle and career choice.

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.

What makes you think it's judgmental?

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.

> 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.

People like to be bitter about others finding success in spaces they don't they don't like or don't take very seriously.

I don't think this article is that biased. This kind of lifestyle is pretty common for top streamers, and I'd argue it's about far more than just not knowing how to run their lives.

It's actually a lifestyle common for many self employed people, not just streamers.

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.

Agree, I thought the way the article was written made me really sympathetic to Tyler. Plus, while the article does talk about streamers in general, I really read it much more as a story about this specific streamer, not about streamers in general.