Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

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> "The companies" aren't marketing high-cost options in any way. Twitch's highest subscription tier is $25/mo. Patreon suggests a higher tier of $30. Those are not "ruin mom's credit" or "dump your life savings" prices, so it's disingenuous (at best) to suggest that something nefarious and exploitative is happening in regards to platforms' marketing efforts.

You're ignoring superchats and tips which is where most of the money comes from. Watch any fairly popular livestream, especially during the "just chatting" style periods, and you'll see $500, $1000 or higher superchats getting dumped in every few minutes.

I mainly watch VTubers (never paid one money, for the record...) and the so-called "Girlfriend Experience" (or Boyfriend Experience, to a much lesser extent) is a real thing. Look at what happened to Uruha Rushia -- she accidentally leaked that she was dating someone and that caused her entire contract to get terminated.[0] Her "GFE" style made her the top Hololive earner in 2021, making $1.6 million from superchats alone.[1]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/t06ryl/what_i...

[1] https://animecorner.me/hololive-vtubers-dominate-top-10-list...

> You're ignoring superchats and tips which is where most of the money comes from.

Tips represent less than 40% of revenue for nearly every type of content creator, so let's not exaggerate things. Super Chats are also limited to $500, so you're exaggerating the amounts you've seen.

More importantly, you're conflating the original comment's generalization about how "the vast majority" of all highly-supportive fans have "unhealthy obsessions and are trying to have a girlfriend experience." Whereas what you're discussing is a corporate content farm[1] of exactly 61 brands, most of which are specifically designed to create a "girlfriend experience" in order to intentionally develop obsessions. That is an extremely specific situation which is not representative for >99% of content creators.

[1] https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Hololive

Hololive is just one example within a specific niche (and even within VTubers it's not the only one -- Nijisanji is pretty large as well now). Are you really telling me that people like Amouranth, Valkyrae, and Pokimane aren't aware of the girlfriend experience? That the whole hot tub streaming drama that led to the creation of an entire new Twitch category wasn't extremely exploitative of lonely, addicted men?

Unhealthy parasocial relationships are an extremely lucrative revenue stream for content creators, just like whales with gacha games. Platforms do nothing to discourage this and in fact even encourage it.

Again, you're exaggerating everything. There are literally dozens of hot tubbers among many tens of millions of creators. You're purely discussing extreme niches which, even when combined, don't represent a significant portion of the overall market. So, I'll reiterate that making a declaration of "the vast majority of super fans being dysfunctional and exploited" is outrageously false and disparaging, not to mention being based on no actual data or working knowledge.

You two sure know a lot about this stuff ;)

Rushia had five whales donating over $25k to her. I saw a Ninomae Inanis fan drop $30k in Ame's charity stream. Coco had fans that would use two or three alternate accounts to drop multiple $500 chats per stream.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Super Chats are limited to $500 per user per day, so the parent comment's claim of seeing individual $1,000+ Super Chats was false regardless of the total donations for a stream. Furthermore, people subverting the platform's limit does not magically make the company "nefariously marketing" and "taking advantage" of people. In fact, you're describing the opposite of nefarious, as the daily cap is clearly meant to slow the rate of individual contributions.

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