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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

The OG twitch was justin.tv, a live streaming service. It began with literally streaming every aspect of your personal life. It eventually transitioned into game streaming, but it was originally for anyone who wanted to stream.

I don't really understand why anyone cares what is streamed there. I believe in the idea that anything should be possible, and allow the commons/people to dictate whether they like it or not. If people want to see a naked chick sitting in a gaming chair giggling why stop them? Who cares?

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>I don't really understand why anyone cares what is streamed there.

>Who cares?

Just like why people _do care_ what's posted on HN?

Why do we have guidelines and rules?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe we should post some porn here too, I don't really understand why anyone cares what posted here am I rite?

Terrible stuff gets posted here all the time and the community flags/moderates it.

Twitch doesn't have a way for the community to moderate what's on the website except for reporting it. Having humans deal with reports is pretty much impossible at Twitch scale, they average 7 million streamers per month. Not viewers. 7 million streamers.

I care, because I don't want to see it when I'm looking to watch a video game stream--there are places for porn. And "well we'll just have opt-in categories" sounds great, except that these categories are thin and (on Twitch especially) not composable; as the purveyors are looking for more clicks, it means trying to rules-lawyer the categories to get in front of eyeballs who are not looking for mature content, because maybe they'll catch more who are.

If their categorization was perfect--sure, go nuts. It's not and it won't be, so it makes for a worse site for me.

Yeah so it could be handled like virtually every other site on the earth (ie, google, reddit) where you can check a box in your account to show/hide NSFW content. Easy peasy.

They sure could, except Reddit has self-interested, decentralized moderation that contributes to preventing containment breaks. Twitch is bad at moderation and giving them more ways to screw up is bad for my enjoyment of the site.

>I believe in the idea that anything should be possible, and allow the commons/people to dictate whether they like it or not.

What about illegal or highly distasteful/immoral content?

distasteful/immoral is in the eye of the beholder.

>why anyone cares what is streamed there

brand? Twitch goes from live streaming persona life to gamer to soft cam girls?

i would think Amazon cares about the Twitch brand.

Why can't it be both? What's wrong with cam girls? I am a libertarian capitalist. If a woman wants to sell her body, 100% more power to her. We should be moving towards freedom of expression, not away from it. If you don't want to look at it, that is also fine and I respect that, but don't put these bizarre tightrope-walky restrictions on what can and cannot be seen. The twitch announcement is absurd.

Not everyone shares your views. Most people probably don't, and Twitch wants to keep the majority happy, not just you.

But more importantly, advertising. Once you're known as a website with lots of pornography, expect your cost per ad to drop to about 10%. And with potentially unmoderated adult content you risk having all major payment providers refusing to do business with you. See what happened to Pornhub about non-verified user uploaded content a year or so ago. Requiring things like uploading ID in order to stream will harm the non-adult segments of Twitch. So unless they want to go full-on porn site, mixing adult and non-adult just harms the rest of the business.

Not even an exclusive libertarian viewpoint. Libertarians should only care if force is used as a response to freedom of expression, but it says nothing about it being inherently good or that it shouldn't be shamed out of decent society. Places that overly promote nudity for the masses tend to be dump cities, none of which are very friendly to libertarian ideas.

> don't put these bizarre tightrope-walky restrictions on what can and cannot be seen

you seem fragile.

I just pointed out branding might be an issue.

let's be honest. Amazon u-turns the nude policy because of ads. how many brands will pull ads when they found out Twitch is a porno site.

> I am a libertarian capitalist.

So presumably you agree that a corporation is perfectly entitled to set completely arbitrary rules about how their platform is used? Even if it causes some of their potential customers to abandon them?

After all, if there's sufficient demand then a competitor will spring up that relaxes some of those arbitrary rules and eats their lunch.

Advertisers care, and large conglomerates care about PR backlash, because invariably if you let 18/19yo stream their boobs (legal and extremely popular) then 17.9yo will also do it and suddenly you’re trafficking in child pornography and a threat to the very fabric of society (as well as subject to nontrivial criminal liability).

Advertisers want eyeballs. You're not trafficking child porn if an underage kid happens to see your ad alongside a stream of a naked woman. Give me a break.

It's more that credit card providers care, for some weird reason, and therefor everyone cares.

Do you really believe that advertisers don't have an interest in this?

Advertisers only care when the rest of the world cares. If people/consumers are not worried, then advertisers are not worried. If twitch managed to foster a strong community of half naked live streamers getting tons of traffic, advertisers would throw money at the platform.

You explained it yourself fine. Justin was for all content. Twitch is for gaming. Clear cut and simple. There are TONS of live streaming services to choose from, this one is meant to be for gaming.

>There are TONS of live streaming services to choose from, this one is meant to be for gaming.

Those ones have more competition, or less potential viewership, or a worse feature base than Twitch does. It's like saying "Yeah totally don't worry, just move from YouTube to Rumble! It's the exact same!"

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