Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

What has Twitch actually done new business-wise in the past 5-6 years? Every typical user still uses the same StreamLabs widgets and alerts for years without many new ones, and most of the streaming workflow improvements are upstream in OBS itself.

I honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014 would be the future of Twitch, and Twitch did allow some developer tools for interactivity between players and games, but very very few devs make use of it outside of an intentional gimmick because there's a massive chicken-and-egg problem there that Twitch hasn't facilitated.

View on HN

Moving all the thirst traps to a "hot tubs" channel was pretty innovative.

https://www.pcgamer.com/twitch-addresses-hot-tub-streaming-c...

real innovation would have been to spin it off as a separate streaming website that allows paywalled subscription and creating an OF competitor

Amazon doesn't want to get into the adult industry.

It also doesn't not want to get into it, because it could have banned hot tub streams, but chose to quarantine them instead.

As sibling posts explained - it wants to be in a one-foot-in-one-foot-out sort of position on the question.

Maybe I’m missing something about “hot tub streams”, but cute girls in bathing suits sitting in a hot tub doesn’t quite meet my definition of “adult content”. It might be unhealthy parasocial content for lonely boys, but it’s not porn.

They are porn ads, those girls makes their money on only fans and they stream to get guys to pay them for porn.

You can see this for example, she isn't allowed to pay for normal ads since most networks doesn't allow porn ads, but streaming is a way for her to advertise:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/amouranth-reveals-her-on...

Okay but how is that a Twitch problem?

From what I know they can't link their OnlyFans directly on Twitch (they need at least one intermediary website) nor even acknowledge its existence directly on stream.

Horrible idea!

By keeping softcore erotica nudge-nudge on their video game streaming site, they allow viewers to tell their parents and girlfriends that they're watching games and chat. Spinning it off would kill the market for that content without doing anything for the video game side of the house.

Sexual content on platforms is in such a weird place. It gets tons of views, but you can't have a platform that's only adult content or it scares off advertisers. But if you have a successful platform that has adult content and you try to remove it, the platform becomes nearly worthless: see Yahoo and Tumblr. A mainstream brand like Visa has no issues advertising on Twitter, despite the massive amounts of adult content on Twitter. Yet you'd never see a Visa advertisement on Pornhub.

If you're running an ad-driven platform, you need to be in this weird Goldilocks zone where your platform has sexual content but isn't really known for sexual content. That's where Twitter, Twitch, Instagram and Reddit are, and it's why OnlyFans tried to push the "not just for porn" angle so hard for a while.

Eh—the draw of putting that content on Twitch is siphoning off part of a huge audience by sharing space on a popular non-porn platform. Separating the two would remove the reason people are streaming there instead of OF in the first place.

I'm not sure how creating a more limited product (than OF), and reducing twitch viewership, would be innovative.

They deliberately don't want that.

Twitch is the top of the "marketing funnel" to onlyfans for a plethora of onlyfans streamers: https://i.imgur.com/jeOq6ek.png

OF spammers have also completely ruined NSFW reddit, because the simp mods do nothing about it.

Same with instagram. I actually find it kind of shocking how obvious sex work is on twitter and instagram, it's generally frowned upon to pay for sex in the progressive circles I'm used to, but I guess on the internet we all live in San Francisco.

>I honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014 would be the future of Twitch, and Twitch did allow some developer tools for interactivity between players and games, but very very few devs make use of it outside of an intentional gimmick because there's a massive chicken-and-egg problem there that Twitch hasn't facilitated.

I've believed the same thing since 2014 which is why I started Muxy in 2015. We build tools that let viewers and broadcasters interact with gameplay in real-time. It's been hard to make bigger strides as management at Twitch seems to turn over faster than we can build working relationships. We're finally seeing some real traction with publishers and studios over the last 18 months. You might know us from the Bits days when we launched the cheer cup in summer 2016.

>I honestly pegged things like Twitch Plays Pokemon back in 2014

Most of the comments on Twitch strike me as pretty weird. If I look at Twitch their problem is that, as a business, they never really broke out of their gaming niche. It's strange to suggest that Twitch should have catered more to the audience that they had already captured. Not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but for a company that took tons of VC and was acquired for a ton of money I don't think the answer to their "we need to make more money" problem is to cater even more to gamers. It's like trying to squeeze blood from a stone; we already see it in the way Twitch is squeezing more of the revenue share from large creators and refusing to entertain Google's huge content contracts.

I don't see how Twitch continues to grow by just focusing gaming - especially when the esports side is going through it own struggles now and even teams are being forced diversify into content (e.g. 100Theives selling energy drinks).

Twitch's "problem" to me is while it was a stroke of genius to break out gaming into it's own site out of Justin.tv, is that same audience has become openly hostile to any sort of non-gaming content. If you ask me the future of Twitch is with creators like KaiCenat who are able to bring different demographics to the platform with other types of content. Of course the Twitch superfans would hate to hear this; I don't envy them at all.

> If I look at Twitch their problem is that, as a business, they never really broke out of their gaming niche.

At the least, Twitch has a de facto monopoly in the gaming niche, to the point that the only way YouTube/Facebook/Microsoft could compete at all was with exclusivity contracts, which didn't even work as it didn't bring other streamers to the platform.

Encouraging the development of highly interactive programs like TPP isn't gaming specific either.

Gaming niche? "Just Chatting" is far and away the most popular category right now; ~100K more viewers than GTA V (most of which is GTA:O and RPing).

Not sure what point you are trying make.

1. The top 3 gaming categories eclipse Just Chatting; and there are hundreds of gaming categories on Twitch

2. Most Just Chatting creators are gaming creators. There are exceptions (KaiCenant, Hasanabi, various female streamers); but the site is still geared toward gaming.

"Just Chatting" is basically the fallback-category for everything non-gaming. This inflates the size massively. And yet if you take the next 2-3 biggest categories, they will combined already beat it.

The biggest things I can think of that might fit that window of time are the adding of "bits" (a more streamlined way of donating to streamers) and Twitch Prime subs (where Amazon Prime customers get one free sub per month to assign to a streamer of their choice). Arguably the latter might be more attributable to Amazon rather than Twitch itself.

Most of the innovation is driven by the streamers and target viewers anyways. Just check out the events that people like Ibai are doing - bigger and more fun than anything Twitch has done.

Which is probably part of the charm of twitch and part of the reason it stays relevant and people often complain that Youtube's implementation is limited (mostly because of how the chat communities work).

I find it difficult (outside of adding more dev tools and allowing for things like twitch plays pokemon as someone mentioned earlier in this thread) that a corporate implementation of a new "thing" will be as successful, partly because of the vicious backlash against whatever corporate sanitation measures would have to be implemented just to allow it on the platform.

I think there's a fundamental disconnect in what is most fun and engaging about watching and commenting in chats on twitch and what twitch as a company would allow if they tried to invasively step in an manage the product.

A good example of this was a few years ago, there was almost universally panned attempt to create some form of "moderation council" which turned out to be absurdly tone deaf and I haven't heard anything since.

Guaranteed ads, amazon affiliate links in bio, integrate amazon luna more, and change revenue splits.

The guaranteed 30 second as on stream load was the final straw for me. I used to wander around the music streamers channel but ended up with as much as time viewed as the actual streams.

ad block works on twitch. Even the DNS only blockers that you can get for iOS.

Can you recommend one?

Its softcore porn and weird anime/furry stuff for socially awkward teenagers

>Every typical user still uses the same StreamLabs widgets and alerts for years without many new ones, and most of the streaming workflow improvements are upstream in OBS itself.

So what, if it works well enough, which it seems like it does? Can't we just leave things be?

It works, but could be a lot lot better and is not very user friendly, which would benefit Twitch's two-sided market.

Unfortunately Twitch's current API is too locked-down/fussy to build a feasible alternative.

It’s more than that; there is no room to innovate here for a startup. We were #2 to Streamlabs with ~40% market share by minutes watched @ Muxy in 2016-2017. However, there was no way to monetize without dark patterning viewers to subscribe to our platform when donating, which others did, but we refused to do.

We have so many cool unreleased widgets for bits and streams that have been dormant because it’s not possible to monetize them. Twitch could fix this…

That's cool, "monetising" usually means making the experience of viewers worse, so good on Twitch

Reply on news.ycombinator.com