Twitch finally takes action against gambling
jacobwolf.report
jacobwolf.report
https://twitter.com/ostonox/status/1572264800616599552
https://nitter.rawbit.ninja/ostonox/status/15722648006165995...
Ha. Take that with a global annual production of salt.
If they are in fact the decision makers or able to influence policy, yes that' doesn't seem right.
- a lot of the streamers also game
- even if they don't, there are streamer cliques and social groups which are primarily gaming, of which they're a part
- a lot of viewers who only watch gaming will watch some streamer within the aforementioned clique/social group and be exposed to crossovers
- a lot of the viewers of that category also watch gaming streamers, so this will put those streams in the "people who watch this also watch" algorithmic bucket
None of the above are significantly the case for gambling except maybe the last one, and even then much less so.
In my experience, Twitch recommendations seem to be based heavily on what you watch, so if that's what they're seeing its probably because they watched it at some point.
I've only ever watched MTG tournaments and a handful of replays of factorio & pokemon streams. I too get the hottub streams recommended from time to time. Stopped after I reported it as porn a few times, but that might be a coincidence.
Some hot tub streamers regularly get 10k+ viewers. If that viewer base overlaps with $your_favorite_streamer, then you will get hot tub streamer recommended. That said, I personally don't see problem with hot tub streamers; it seems like incredibly puritanical moral panic for some reason and I don't know why that gets so much attention in 2022.
They never refocused on gaming as that was the entire focus of the site's creation. During the early days any non-gaming content was strictly prohibited on Twitch.
For a while justin.tv and twitch coexisted, with justin.tv for general content such as "social streams" (equivalent to "Just Chatting" on modern day Twitch) and largely streams of copyrighted content such as tv shows (an obvious liability).
Prior to Amazon purchasing Twitch, justin.tv was shut down and a lot of the general "social" content started becoming allowable on Twitch over time.
Half of the front page has never been glorified camgirls. This is just more moral panic. Amouranth is practically the only streamer who is pulling enough numbers to be in the top 10 of any section. The featured section of twitch has never featured hot tub streams. Of the top 5 hot tub streamers, as of writing, the top one with 800 viewers are otters (like the animal), 1 is a vtuber and another is a man.
The issue is incredibly overblown. Amouranth is the only one doing numbers regularly.
>More and more streamers are abandoning games and going for boring IRL garbage instead because that's what Twitch promotes.
That has nothing to do with hot tub streamers. Kai Cenat and Adin Ross are some of the largest growing streamers in the past year, and they are primary Just Chatting streamers. This really just feels like you are complaining about Eternal September. It sounds like you just don't like that the world is changing. "Old man yells at cloud".
>Some of us like to use twitch to see people playing games
Some of the largest streamers on Twitch don't play games. Expecting twitch to remain some "insider only country club for video games" is ridiculous. No one is forcing you to watch hot tub streams. Getting recommended a titty streamer won't kill you. It really just comes across that you are mad that there are women on the platform doing stuff you don't like. It's arbitrary censorship; I doubt you would accept this kind of censorship on any other platform. And even then, when you look at the hard numbers for these titty streamers it's incredibly hard to take the moral panic seriously. Amouranth is only one doing numbers (and she is literally an outlier, I believe she is like top 10 on onlyfans as well) and the rest have fewer viewers than a Zoo's livestream.
There's definitely a moral panic component, but there are nonetheless negative aspects to having this content on Twitch. Women on the platform report feeling pressure and an expectation of producing this kind of content, because so many other popular women on the platform do it. There's also the idea that this juxtaposition spreads the message to viewers that men gain attention by exhibiting their skills and women get attention by exhibiting their bodies.
I do support the ability of people to produce this kind of content - or even explicit streams, for that matter - but I'm sympathetic to the idea that twitch should spin it off into something like lifestyle.tv in the same vein that twitch.tv was once a gaming spinoff of justin.tv.
That's kind of ridiculous. You don't get to tell people they can't voluntarily do an optional thing just because you don't want to do the same optional thing.
Twitch already bans content like pornography, but people are free to do what they want on OnlyFans. These creators should be entirely free to produce "hot-tub streams" and other such content, just relegated to "lifestyle.tv" or something to keep a barrier between softcore-erotic content and typical creators.
Twitch was originally 100% games. That's literally why it was created, and why I signed up and started using it. Now that it's no longer focused on gaming content, I am losing interest and finding it harder to watch content I enjoy. It's that simple.
Watching someone playing a game and subsequently being suggested a stream of someone sitting in front of a camera doing literally nothing as thousands in donations come in just feels like twitch telling me "hey, stop watching that entertaining content you like, watch this unrelated garbage instead because it's more profitable for us". And like others have mentioned, these streams being shown off right next to gaming streams pressures the streamers to move over to that type of content to potentially grow their audience and get paid more.
In case you're not aware, Twitch was a spinoff of justin.tv that was created as a place to contain gaming content (which was quickly becoming very popular at the time) while justin.tv continued to host other kinds of streams, but justin.tv was eventually shut down because Twitch completely dwarfed it. Now Twitch is becoming justin.tv again. They should just repeat the process in reverse and revive justin.tv to contain all of this non-gaming content, but they wont because it's easier and cheaper to just shove it all into the same space.
doesn't twitch let you just go directly to the streamer you want to see?
why are people making excuses about being camgirls or not? and also is this misogyny? or something like people are needing to pretend they aren't paying for some sexually attractive things? I don't really know Twitch's community, I remember teenagers though
My barometer for this issue is why is this content a problem on Twitch, but not on Instagram which has a much higher penetration amount kids and teens, and is way more brazen about it.
Misogyny? In my gamer community? It's more likely than you think™
It’s basically convenient whataboutery that fits their politics.
Once that happened, a bunch of influential streamers started to suggest that they may do a strike if Twitch didn't address the issue, and that was the final straw.
TechCruch's writeup is pretty good https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/20/twitch-sliker-gambling-dra... (though also, the article itself covers this, so, you know...)
And the very likely reason for the exception is that Twitch has signed a 13 billion deal with a famous sport betting company tied to the NFL. This is peak hypocrisy from Twitch and it seems to get very little media coverage.
No, they couldn't. That is nonsense. I am a former twitch employee, of 4 years, and the recommendation algorithm is a complicated service, managed by whole teams of people.
A random employee couldn't just take a bribe, and get someone recommended.
The closest that someone could maybe do, is submit someone internally, to be hosted on the front page carousel for one specific day, for a few hours.
But even these manual requests are reviewed by a team of people, who especially make sure the front page people are brand safe. So the idea that they would put a "hot tub" streamer, on that manual hosting list is absurd.
Twitch has some serious, serious problems.
However take this with a pinch of salt too, I wouldn't like to bet on being fully correct! ;)
The danger, and likely future however is sites like DraftKings and Fanduel setting up slots and being allowed fully, then sponsoring streamers. Basically, the danger with banning the unregulated stuff yet still being very supportive of gambling (which Twitch and more so Amazon obviously are) is opening a door to further normalization and mainstream acceptance of gambling (see Poker taking a nosedive due to regulation yet paving the way for the massive boom in fantasy sports)... but hey, at least some guy in Curacao won't be getting the millions, some CEO and shareholders in the US will. Still, it is a good step by twitch, and I hope it really does end the #ad gambling streams.
We may see a surge in Fantasy sports betting and e-sports betting though. Having xQC watch NFL games on stream while betting thousands on regulated sites is probably a future Amazon would be very happy with.
It's not just where the money is coming from but whether the odds are different from regular players. The gambling sites who sponsor this can very well adjust the odds per user so that the streamer gets consistent wins where as real players get the real odds which favor the house.
I've seen such gambling "ads" on YouTube, obviously they're not presented as ads nor even as gambling, rather they're presented as a way of making money, a loophole in the game, all the way to saying that there used to be an old version of this game but they closed it down due to many people winning, but this new game also has a loophole (how convenient!). In the "ad", they were consistently winning, in such a way where there's basically no way to lose even if you tried it on purpose. I very much doubt the video was falsified, rather the gambling platform was able to change the odds per-use so that their affiliates can get consistent wins so they can promote the platforms without requiring video trickery.
Two of those websites, the ones I’m familiar with, use (at least some of) the same third party websites. For example, Pragmatic Play.
It’s a vastly different conspiracy to say that the websites listed on Twitch’s policy are setting odds in favor of their affiliates when it involves at least two different companies.
That’s not to say this has never happened before, though. There was previously a website called CSGO Shuffle on Twitch that was setting odds in favor of their owners and partners, but those owners and partners also didn’t disclose that they were advertising and didn’t disclose that they were involved in the company.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/21/12246138/twitch-bans-phan...
Not strictly true. Casino operators have access to the game provider tools. Some providers allow you to tweak RTP per game or even per player.
Yes, the Casino operator doesn't make the games, but they don't need to when the game creators expose all this configuration through their tooling and APIs.
From https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-secret-australia...
> In 2016, the pair set up Easygo which focused on developing games for online casinos and helped build Stake.com into an online casino powerhouse.
However, many of their games are from the classic providers.
I would be surprised if this were true, kindly list the providers which do that, I will be happy to eat my words.
They cannot adjust odds of the slots, that's not how that works. The casinos can cover any losses of slot streamers however.
Also why does this "children" thing keep coming up? Casinos don't want children to play their games, they don't even have money to spend!
I am a head of operations in an online casino. I am responsible for gameplay provider integrations, psp integrations and many things more.
The slots rtp is absolutely set by the game play providers, even the aggregators just pass it on. It is not configurable in any way, not on user level, not on casino operator level, it is always global scope.
The game play providers earn by rev share, they are the top of the food chain and it would be economical suicide to provide different APIs, they have some settings depending on some GEOs, but these are things like no auto play, stake limits etc.
Any regulated casino is using these, the audience is not naive, of course, there are some fly by night operators using pirate games, but this gets detected fast and is often the reason for these casinos having bad rep online, amongst affiliates who will not have them listed etc. These are operated by incompetent people.
From a technical perspective, even if we assume that the operator indeed can’t adjust the odds, it would take an engineer only a few hours to mock out the API endpoints the front end calls to return consistent wins and then it’s just a matter of using a browser extension or a proxy to redirect all traffic to the fake server to be able to film such a video (still much easier than faking the video itself).
Let people get into destructive behaviours, but for Pete's sake, don't promote the damn thing.
Meh. I don't know that that's resolvable. The fundamental desire for this in the market is real, the job of regulation is just to keep a lid on the worst excesses. Given the choice between a very large regulated market for a good and a somewhat smaller but completely unregulated black market for the same good, most people would prefer the former even if there are sharp edges.
If you don't have the option to sue people to get back money you're owed, you're forced to resort to less savory options. And on the other side of the incentives calculus, people who defraud and steal from regulated businesses and their customers tend to go to jail. Rip off a fellow criminal and most of the time no one cares.
The solution is legalization and regulation, and to the extent society can't bring itself to do that, it's tantamount to declaring its willingness to tolerate the black market replacement.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbYLxrM5NdU&list=PL4qw3AkxFD...
As a poker player, this is very good news as far as I'm concerned. There is a lot of quality content on Twitch from poker players, especially during big events like the World Series of Poker.
In other cases, there are strategies to just lose less money.
Anyway, all that to say, there's definitely slot advice videos and all that out there.
Poker is a good reason why your definition is incorrect. Poker is gambling, but it doesn't resemble you slowly losing your money to the house. I mean, that happens too, but it resembles slowly losing your money to the other players.
Unless you're in the small % of winning players, then it looks like gambling where you slowly win money from the other players.
If you're a pro (or better than your competitors), it's kinda like being the house in a blackjack game, except a lot less variance, because the edge is greater.
But still a lot of variance. Poker is gambling, and it feels like gambling.
Being able to use it literally anywhere but that game springs to mind as an easy check. If crypto is the same as game currency doesn’t that invalidate the vast majority of claims about the benefits of crypto?
This has been and is still in danger as being banned as gambling. So the answer is that you don't bother, and you ban that too.
Gatcha games for non-transferable characters: probably shouldn't be marketed to children, and should be legally required to display odds, but not quite capable of triggering the full gambling addiction.
Gambling for in-game items which can be resold for real money: this is just an illegal casino with extra steps.
Yup, it's just a pachinko.
If I'm spending my money on a slot, I have the chance to get my money back. Gatcha takes my money forever and when the game is gone, so is everything I spent and won. For that reason, Gatcha games and loot boxes are even more predatory, because they are giving an advantage to people and pumping up their sense of pride.
The risk there is of gambling addicts "borrowing" money with the intent of winning back their losses/debts, losing and repeating (as claimed with the Sliker situation that prompted this all). Throwing good money after bad is presumably much less common/excessive when you can't cash out
Yes - and you (and all the customers) know that upfront. Which means you can't use the "chance to get my money back" delusion as an excuse to throw good money after bad. Hardly anyone ever does that and then stops; inevitably they take the winnings back to the casino and lose them again.
> giving an advantage to people
Gatcha (or any other pay for improvement) + PVP is also a pretty terrible combination, since it encourages people to whale their way up the scoreboard.
Don't. Don't differentiate those, and ban them all. Nothing of value would be lost.
You find them on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Twitch and Reddit
I don't understand why people want to make the parallel and include TikTok, well, maybe i know why
Do your research
Here for example:
https://crypto.com/nft/brands/ufc
When it is this mainstream, you can't say "oh it's because of TikTok", no, it's because of Western companies and celebrities promoting it, and using various mediums of communication; no legislation, no nothing
Twitch has several large contracts with sports gambling on their site as wll.
Makes you really wonder about the true motivations of the selectivity of the ban.
Power law, folks.
There are more cynical benefits too like how it's easier to disappear into the night with people's money, but you don't have to go that far to see why it might be useful.
The same applies to gambling marketing. Do you know if Twitch streamers are using their own money or playing with "house money"? Do you know if the casino is giving Twitch streamers more favourable odds to make the service look better?
Edit:
> Crypto casinos can also be "provably fair" to win trust from people when they have no track record.
Do such casinos currently exist, or is this a hypothetical? AFAIK currently existing crypto casinos are opaque.
Also absolute: you being unable to comprehend OP’s comment about what “provably fair” means.
> Well, it's obvious why. Crypto is much simpler than interacting with dollars, and it's easier to bypass gambling laws, many of which are quite draconian, when you're not interacting with dollars.
It has since been edited with no notice.
Provably fair is standard in the popular casinos. Any casino that lets you give them a "client seed" is doing this. Example: https://stake.com/provably-fair/overview and https://www.bustabit.com/help/provable-fairness
Doesn't this address part of your main argument?
"Satoshi Dice" was probably the biggest one, back in the day. Looks like it's still running
- If you keep track of the wins and losses you'd figure it out fairly quickly - a 30/70 game doesn't play like a 49-51.
- Why would the casino lie? Someone who is going to take a 49/51 bet may as well take a 30/70 bet, if they already understand odds they understand that they're paying the casino money for their time.
Now, as it grows and as certain content becomes more popular it becomes rather less murky and clean. Still I wouldn't call it all bad.
Lootboxes are extremely scummy, but doesn't the fact that you can't make money from it make it not gambling? Otherwise wouldn't places like Chuck-e-Cheese with ticket prize arcades be considered gambling? Or card games like MTG and Pokemon? In those cases you can even sell your prizes to other people for real cash.
Why do video game loot-boxes get extra scrutiny?
For context, I hate any game that implements them and believe they're the largest reason that mobile gaming continues to suck.
Can you explain how this contextualizes your above statement and questions?
See: the whole CS:GO lootbox fad. On top of the value of the cosmetics which could be traded, "Creators" were making enough money streaming lootbox opening to be able to afford hypercars.
> to prohibit streaming of gambling sites (..) that AREN'T licensed in the US or other jurisdictions
That mean, it is to promote the gambling sites that are licensed, and to discourage people from promoting sites that are not licensed
Anyone who says "they take action AGAINST gambling" are full of shit and are part of the problem
But you get the society you deserve
So the logical fix is not to do anything about the streamers, but to catch the sites offering services to US people via VPN's.
All for free.
i don't understand the comments here about censorship. is Twitch above the laws?
This effectively kills most poker streaming, no? The US only allows a handful of sites in their US-only version so any non-US citizens streaming are unable to even use the platforms that are approved there. I rarely but occasionally watch a bit of them as a cheap way to relive my poker days so I am not too happy about this.
Further, it seems like the problem was that a streamer was soliciting loans which doesn't have that much to do with whether US-approved gambling sites are allowed or not.
The legality of both in-person and online poker varies from state to state.
[0]: https://www.beatthefish.com/us-poker-sites/uigea-unlawful-in...
That's a nice way to put it.
In reality, they all flaunted the (bullshit) law, and set up all kinds of phony businesses and things to process all the payouts, because banks wouldn't do gambling stuff. I got a check from a golf shop once. Then the feds went after them on fraud and similar charges, and shut down Full Tilt, Poker Stars, and Absolute. Seized domains and funds and stuff.
That's when they "withdrew from the U.S. market."
On the streaming front, Twitch has made a number of changes in the past few months. Typically Twitch Partners had to exclusively live stream on Twitch. They've relaxed these restrictions to really soften the blow for what's coming. A big change (just announced today) is that subscription splits to 50-50 in almost all cases. A lot of mostly bigger streamers were grandfatheered into better deals (ie 70-30).
If you don't follow Twitch, the $5/month subscription (and Twitch Prime that came later for Amazon Prime members) really did create a way for smaller creators to be able to survive where they otherwise couldn't on ad or sponsorship revenue alone.
But Twitch has been trying to move away from subs because advertising scales so much better for Twitch. The general guideline for ad density now is 3 minutes per hour and you could get 6 ads of pre-roll on joining a livestream. It's kind of crazy how much they're pushing it. This really gives the impression that Twitch is desperate for revenue now they're owned by Amazon. In today's announcement about the sub split changes they basically said 200 hours/month of live streaming costs them $1000/month. That might well be the retail cost on EC2 but it's nowhere near the true cost (which is much less).
Now in the last 2 years or so, gambling has really started to dominate the platform. This is quite literally people playing slots on auto-roll for hours every day, sometimes for $1500/spin where each spin may well be 6 seconds. This has been driven by largely unregulated crypto casinos like stake.com. I say "largely unregulated" because stake.com for example is registered in Curacao.
The likes of xqc and Trainwrecks (2 of the biggest streamers on the platform) were getting paid in excesss of $1 million/month each to play slots on stake.com. That's how big this is.
Twitch announced yesterday that most pure luck gambling (eg slots, dice) that weren't registered and legal in the US (because of greater regulation) would be banned from the platform.
It's hard to say why the timing of this is now. Some speculate this is because of the streamer ItsSliker being exposed for scamming $300k+ from other streamers and even viewers over 1-2 years to fund a sports betting addiction (note: the Twitch ban doesn't apply to sports betting).
Gambling has been controversial on Twitch and this blew up with the Sliker drama, which led to an entirely separate issue being raised: the alleged cover-up of a sexual assault of one streamer by another. This event was allegedly covered up by a big streamer (Mizkif) who is a member of a large organization called OTK. It was announced there'd be an independent investigation of this and he was suspended from the org yesterday.
These are of course serious allegations and should be treated as such and they may well have criminal consequences. It's worth noting that the cover-up accusations came from Trainwrecks after a fresh round of gambling criticism (including by Mizkif) in the wake of the Sliker scamming drama. The victim has since spoken out on the issue and said Train made that public accusation with her blessing and support.
All of this has really rocked the Twitch world and, if anything, should just show you how much money there is in gambling, how damaging it is and how much it corrupts.
The real question is "why did it take Twitch so long to ban non-US gambling?" Like you mentioned, the controversy from these gambling streams is not new. Did Twitch decide that the controversy finally outweighed the revenue they generate from these streams? Did Twitch fear that they faced potential liability for hosting these streams? Or did someone at Twitch leadership suddenly develop a conscience?
I only bring it up because it's part of larger Twitch changes this year. It's going to hit streamer revenue. The banning of crypto slots is another massive blow to a lot of streamer revenue.
To be clear, I 100% support the crypto slots ban on Twitch.
What I don't get: who the fuck watches this kind of stream, and why? Are the viewer counts actually real or is all of this just a massive scam where everyone is inflating counts with the endgame of defrauding advertisers?
It's also worth noting that not all slots streaming is what's called "cash balance", meaning the streamer is betting real money. A lot are betting fake money where their losses aren't real but neither are the winnings. It's never advertised that this is the case. But this is an even worse level of deception.
That all beiing, I too am fascinated with the psychology of watching someone else play slots. It does seem to be real. Watching someone quite literally lose $100k+ in an hour has a certain fascination. There are big wins too. Trainwrecks for example has spun a $7m+ win.
You could more generally ask why people watch other people play video games. I never understood why (years ago). But it makes sense. You get to exxperience someone else playing something for the first time (which you can never do again). You get to get a lot of the psychological "pay off" for playing a game without the investment.
I imagine slots is similar. If you read about gambling addiction, it's not the wins that are addictive. It's not even the losses. It's that period of not knowing the outcome after you press the spin button. That's what people get addicted to.
So a viewer can get that same pay off from watching someone else hit the spin button.
At least that's my guess. Once you get over the fascination of watching money disappear that fast (which for me didn't take that long), it doesn't appeal to me at all.
I was confused too, but I tried watching a stream and discovered I do actually get a strange dopamine hit just watching somebody spend $200,000 on a single slot machine pull over and over. I somehow thought you'd have to be risking your own funds to activate those neurons but it totally works just seeing somebody else do it.
I never thought I would get sucked into gambling. Especially slot machines. In fact I used to make fun of slot machines even being considered 'gaming' when there' literally no human input to the result. But I kind of understand it now even though on a higher level it should be boring.
Especially those in Bathtubs + Bikinis...
Personally everyone on Twitch is a prostitute in some way, whether it's of their personality or looks.
Or is it only girls you're having a problem with?
It's all panhandling imo...
Porn being """Free Speech""" is a Farce
Yes I have a problem with the Women, because nobody is interested in Men in Bathtubs - That is not the dominating Pornographic Content I have seen on Twitch - It's all Women in Micro Bikinis
It's legal and doesn't even meet the definition of pornography so it's up to Twitch's ToS.
> Twitch said it will bar all gambling content on websites that aren’t regulated by U.S. gambling restrictions
I think this line mostly refers to the U.S. because there are large streamers who stream gambling sites from Canada or elsewhere due to lighter local restrictions.
1. One which barely has anything to do with gaming other than having 3 lines of code to store a game identifier with a stream to say which game the stream was mainly streaming. They even have entire streams that do non gaming shit and that's what all the top streamers do most of the time.
In other words, this is outrage porn against streaming services (I think, as like with counter strike go loot boxes[2]. i don't understand your culture though [not that i cant, i just dont care] so I could be entirely wrong). This is no different than when cameras or VHS came out and people complained about piracy and whatever. Whatever political takeaway we're supposed to be getting here is invalid. Twitch is just a streaming site. If I make my own streaming site (which I'll never do, because the web is horse shit), I shouldn't have to hire people to purge gambling on it.
> but you are profiting from them looking at your ads while they gamble
And VHS profited from mass piracy. Get a grip.
2. yeah, loot boxes are fucking cancer, i don't care for making them illegal though as that requires paying more tax and they will just come up with different cancer. you cant fix bad developers
Twitch isn’t taking action against gambling. It’s censoring streamers.
Publishing video of oneself gambling is very very different than accepting wagers. They are taking action against the publishing of videos of performative gamblers, not against gambling.
How is that even remotely censorship?
A meaningful definition would highlight the desire to suppress a point of view, and you're going to have a hard time justifying "gambling as a point of view", because it's not really a position on an issue.
It's censorship in the sense that things are censored, i.e., prevented from being shown or communicated, which is the definition of the word "censorship". Putting a black bar over someone's genitals or bleeping profanity is also censorship. It's just not government censorship, and therefore has no relation to freedom of speech.
The text box here being limited to 5000 chars (or w/e size it actually is) would be censorship under that definition. The fact that I can't also upload audio to HN would be censorship. Does acoustic physics censor me because I can't yell loudly enough for everyone to hear my views on how to cook pasta correctly (salt, the secret is salt)?
I just don't find those things to be in the same category as a government arresting protestors, for example, and I don't find Twitch banning otherwise illegal gambling content to be in that same category, either.
I just don't find those things to be in the same category as a government arresting protestors, for example,
Correct; that is government censorship. There is not, however, a qualitative difference between Twitch deciding to ban one behavior from being depicted over another, whether it be gambling, nudity, racism, or people doing that trick with their spit where they let it stretch down several inches and suck it back into their mouths.
I'm not seeing a real "point of view" being expressed here, which IMO is also an important part of censorship.
Well your opinion disagrees with the dictionary. I don't know what to tell you.
Because I'm having a hard time believing "watch me gamble on sites that I'm not legally allowed to gamble on" really qualifies as "a point of view" or "expression" in a meaningful sense (though yes, I bet if we pulled out our Webster's Dictionaries we could squeeze the definition into this conversation somehow).
A kid watches gambling, what's the harm? They're gambling in school, it's a tail as old as time. Magic cards, pokémon cards, pogs, marbles. They all have aspects of gambling.
Their platform, their rules.
According to GlobalWebIndex in Q2 2019, this is an approximation of the age demographic on Twitch, ranging in age from 16-64 years in age:
16 to 24 year olds: 41% 25 to 34 year olds: 32% 35 to 44 year olds: 17% 45 to 54 year olds: 7% 55 to 64 year olds: 3%
From https://www.streamscheme.com/twitch-statistics/:
> In 2022 the age demographic on Twitch is as follows:
> 18 to 24-year-olds: 35.85%
> 25 to 34 year-olds: 32.14%
> 35 to 44-year-olds: 15.33%
> 45 to 54-year-olds: 8.62%
> 55 to 64-year-olds: 4.97%
Children have been lying about their age on the internet since the beginning of the internet. Any service that says no children are using it without very sold proof is ignorant or lying.
Censoring unregulated gambling is something else entirely.
Didn't realize it was Twitch's job to patrol what is posted on Discord.
Jokes aside, I have no idea what your issue is with people singing songs or cooking on twitch. Did they hurt you somehow?
what do you mean by "the wrong place for this"? As in on the platform is the wrong avenue to address gambling?