Chess Grandmaster suspended by Twitch for streaming Dr Disrespect playing chess | Hacker News Reader

Chess Grandmaster suspended by Twitch for streaming Dr Disrespect playing chess

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45 pointsnitinreddy8838 comments

I don't follow anything on Twitch much so I googled why this person got banned and here's the closest thing I could find to an answer. It's an unconfirmed answer but the source is a voice actor from Call of Duty being interviewed on an a YouTube gaming channel (DanAllenGaming) who says he heard it from "people who work at Twitch."

https://gamerant.com/call-dutys-ghost-voice-actor-says-dr-di...

> Apparently, Dr Disrespect was using an offer from Mixer as leverage while renegotiating his Twitch contract, something that frustrated the company. With Mixer announcing its shutdown only a week after these discussions began, Twitch found out that Dr. Disrespect was likely lying about the Mixer offers. While there is a possibility that the offer was legitimate, it makes little sense for a dying company to offer a huge new deal to a star. Regardless, the issues were supposedly caused by either a failed attempt at trickery or a risky negotiating tactic, and Twitch cut all ties in response, refusing to deal with Dr Disrespect in any way going forward.

And then 2 people on this Quora link say it's for a different reason:

https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Dr-Disrespect-banned-from-Twit... > He recently did an IRL stream from inside one of the toilets in E3. Twitch forbids people from streaming illegal acts, and filming people in a public bathroom is likely a violation of California’s “invasion of privacy” law

> He recently did an IRL stream from inside one of the toilets in E3. Twitch forbids people from streaming illegal acts, and filming people in a public bathroom is likely a violation of California’s “invasion of privacy” law

On top of that, there were minors in those toilets. That's close enough to child porn that I don't blame Twitch one iota for yeeting him from their platform.

Which would've made sense at the time. But they did ban him for doing that, for two weeks. His permanent ban came a year later.

The bathroom incident resulted in a temporary ban, not a permanent ban, was over a year prior to his permanent ban.

As for his negotiations with twitch... If I Recall Correctly, he signed his contract with Twitch MONTHS prior to Mixer shutting down. Twitch had just lost Ninja to a MASSIVE deal at Mixer and Shroud was leaving for Mixer too on another massive deal, so twitch signed DrDisrespect (Doc) to a MASSIVE deal (numbers were never reported). Then after Mixer shut down, twitch banned Doc for no apparent reason (there was nothing he had done recent to the ban). At the same time though, twitch was under a lot of pressure in the media for losing a lot money. An early speculation about Doc's ban was that twitch needed to stop paying his contract to clean up their balance sheet. Which is supported by a lot of the monetization changes that have happened since then (ads, ads, and more ads, all mandatory) and reports from streamers that have inked deals with YT that Twitch wasn't opening the purse for them like they had in the past (Lupo and TimTheTatman have said as much).

> I don't follow anything on Twitch much so I googled why this person got banned

The simple answer is: there is no answer. Neither Twitch, nor DrDisrespect did communicate openly why the banned happened, and what happened in the background since then. There are many rumors and claims, most of them came out right after the ban happened and are kinda disproven now, as they came with some heavy prophecies.

It's a big mystery overall, nobody has really come out with an answer, from any side or level. Maybe in some decades we get some answer

Twitch desperately needs competition. There are seemingly endless examples of completely opaque indefinite bans that can ruin peoples' income. Of course most people won't have sympathy for people who make money playing video games, but at the same time, Twitch's wildly inconsistent policy enforcement wouldn't fly in almost any other situation.

Twitch has had a few alternatives pop up from time to time (most famous would be Microsoft's Mixer) only for the site to be laughed at by Twitch's users and not given a chance. After a while the new site shuts down because it hasn't picked up momentum.

The problem is the viewers not giving the new sites a chance.... only for then complain about twitch having the streaming monopoly.

They laughed at Mixer exactly because it would shut down within a year. Companies like Google and Microsoft don't have enough staying power. Why would users switch to a platform that's going to shutdown within a year anyway?

One year. Mixer was online for one year and they shut it down. They say it's because it didn't grow fast enough. But the truth is that they just were never serious about it. Everyone could feel it. Mixer was a bluff and it was just not very believable.

>One year. Mixer was online for one year and they shut it down.

Uhhh...?

> The service officially launched on January 5, 2016, as Beam. (...) The service was acquired by Microsoft in August 2016, after which it was renamed Mixer in 2017 and integrated into Microsoft's Xbox division (including top-level integration on Xbox One). (...) Citing an inability to scale its operations, Microsoft announced on June 22, 2020, that Mixer would be shut down by the end of July 22. [0]

Sure doesn't sound like one year...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixer_(service)

I think if you only count it from "even casual stream watchers have heard about it" it was about a year until shutdown. I mean, I knew what twitch was and was even watching people from time to time, and I have friends who stream and I don't remember anyone except one person ever mentioning mixer. It simply didn't seem like a viable alternative until just before the ninja thing.

It's the classic chicken egg problem for any platform play. In order to be attractive you need people using it, however if nobody uses it why would I go there in the first place.

Mixer tried to lure people by signing Ninja, but as it turned out that Microsoft tried to do the same thing Google did with YouTube users (forcing a stupid Microsoft account on them, with opaque sign up and what not).

This should really be mentioned more often more often when discussing monopolies: you have to convince users that your platform is better than the massive ubiquitous one, or they won't leave.

If Discord was advertising itself as a hot new startup trying to disrupt the instant messaging space at a time when the ubiquitous option was Skype, someone like me might have welcomed them with open arms. Now we're stuck with Discord, but only because it won over almost everyone with the quality of its UX and the ensuing network effects over every alternative.

This is what makes me think that being pushed towards a selection of functionally competent and siloed, monopolistic platforms is simply the new reality. I have a hard time believing that you can convince tens of millions of people that their platform is a bad choice if they never see any problems, no matter what we might think of their opinions.

> The problem is the viewers not giving the new sites a chance… only for then to complain about twitch having the streaming monopoly.

The overwhelming majority of users on Twitch are tweens, just like YouTube’s audience and they don’t even know what a tech monopoly is.

We’re the ones complainh about it, but guess what. Twitch doesn’t care about our viewership.

Its happening across all the major web services. Happens on youtube all the time, obviously google services, Discord, twitter to name but a few. Then you have the big shops like Amazon and Ebay that are big on exposing their customers to fraud. Honestly it just feels like all these web platforms are following the same arbitrary rule book and every last one of them doesn't care about keeping its customers. I am not sure they are even wrong, they just get more successful and bigger every year, its a successful strategy.

Employees are expensive. Automatic content moderation is imperfect, but comparatively cheap. I think this inconsistency is partly caused by this cost optimization pressure, and then to at least some extent by corporate bias since at least the egregious cases might get reviewed by a human since losing contributors costs money too.

The 0 cents model works. Its horrible as a customer if you are in the small percentage that get booted by an algorithm, and its arguably against GDPR but these companies fire quite a lot of customers to maintain high profitability. It clearly works, no on wants to pay for customer service or any form of reasonable due process.

The problem isn't competition. Dr Disrespect is on Youtube and doing fine. He's maybe not pulling down hundreds of thousands a month, but he's perfectly accessible, and I'm sure he's making a healthy income. The real core of the problem is that moderation is a difficult problem, these companies only work economically because they don't responsibly moderate their content, and when you're under-investing in something it's easier to just not answer questions about it than it is to actually go into details about your continual screw ups.

> There are seemingly endless examples of completely opaque indefinite bans that can ruin peoples' income.

Care to give some examples? Usually indefinite bans are only coming after a longer series of smaller bans or something very serious happened. And recently there also was a series of reinstated streamers who came back after an indefinite ban. But I think this was EU-only for legal reasons. might be good to bring this to the rest of the world.

> Twitch's wildly inconsistent policy enforcement

It's not inconsistent, it's actually very consistent in the last years, since they seem to have established a kind of rule book internally. Its just complex and not matching the people's hate. Though, there are single exceptional cases, that's true.

Not just a grandmaster, the #1 blitz player in the world by several measures (FIDE, USCF, chess.com). It's amazing to have as much unfiltered access to a super GM as Hikaru gives. Very entertaining to watch...

To be accurate, I think Carlsen beats him pretty consistently, I think Carlsen would have a higher blitz rating if he tried for it. But Hikaru is a lot more entertaining. Hikaru has a great vibe.

Not only did he get suspended, but he was suspended while also competing in the Grand Prix, where he needs to likely make the semi finals to make the candidates tournament.

He openly said during interviews since the suspension that he was losing sleep over it and was distracted from the tournament play. So far (as of me writing this) he’s lost one match and drawn two. He likely needs one or two wins to move out of the group stage. It’s not inconceivable, given he won the first leg of the Grand Prix, that the suspension will have played a major role in him not making the candidates tournament.

Edit: He’s playing as I write this, if you’re interested in following the match.

https://www.chess.com/events/2022-fide-chess-grand-prix-3-po...

afaik Twitch bans like these are sort of on purpose and for clout.

Lots of prominent streamers are getting banned for things like live-streaming movies and TV shows (violating some copyright). These are temporary bans (like 3 days) and the streamers are already so rich and popular they really don’t need to stream anyways.

This is actually really good for Hikaru because he gets his name on more news and it makes Twitch look stupid.

Indeed. You're pretty spot on with this

It's good for us too - we got proper Hikaru game recaps on YouTube.

Disclaimer - used to work at Twitch.

The policy may make Twitch look stupid, but it's for a pretty good reason - people would get banned, and then just play multiplayer (with voice or even video chat) with their friends who were also streaming. This effectively allowed them to continue to stream and interact with their audience despite their 'ban.'

Agreed that people often get banned on purpose as a way of keeping their name in the news.

Wouldn't they not get paid still though? Or does the friend just send all donations their way? I can't imagine subbing to someone because they have a person in the lobby who I liked

At the extreme: Keemstar has long been banned from Youtube, but remained prominent through DramaAlert which is not technically his channel.

The fact that the streamer might gain in publicity doesn't justify these ridiculous bans, come on. Are we now saying Twitch is doing them a _favour_?

There is nothing ridiculous about suspending someone for streaming someone else who is banned. It's about as obvious as it can be that it is content that is explicitly not permitted as it has already been banned.

It's extremely ridiculous. Does twitch publish a list of everyone they ever banned? Do they have private detectives following the bannees around to keep track of their real name and appearance and online handle? For all time? When the list is 100k entries long, does twitch expect every new entryant to twitch to review it? To hire their own PIs to determine who or what a "DrDisrespect" is? And repeat the process for every entry in the 100k long list?

Yes, because multiple big popular streamers have said that it's a net positive if you can keep the moral high ground, as you will come back and have more viewers than before.

Judging from your comment, i believe you think he has the moral high ground.

The ban itself doesn't need to be justified to say that he can (and most certainly will) profit from this ban.

The next logical step is to think about streamers provoking (short) bans where twitch looks dumb and hacker news discusses them when it normally wouldn't. Was that the case here? No idea. Is it especially unlikely, I don't think so.

So is there a burden on the content creator to maintain a list of known persona non grata, who can never be seen nor heard on the platform?

Or is this list published by Twitch somewhere?

I really want to know what Twitch is like from the inside. I cannot think of another creator platform that's so inconsistent and/or spurious with their bans.

You're in luck! https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/10/twitc...

Was he talking with Dr Disrespect or only streaming his moves?

Had disrespect's face/stream up on his stream making commentary over top about moves that ought to be played.

There is no rule explicitly listed saying you cant do exactly what hikaru did. He has since been unbanned.

lets go to trovo, we do not have to put with all this

*Grandmain

ftfy

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