Denied OBS PR regarding Kick support lights up | Hacker News Reader

Denied OBS PR regarding Kick support lights up

github.com

38 pointsagvxov20 comments

Never heard of kick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kick_(service) doesn't seem bad on first glance unless you REALLY hate a streamer enough to say the whole platform sucks.

>There's nothing wrong with it. Twitch promotes sexual content/channels to children and this project is perfectly okay with that because it reinforces to young boys that women are worth nothing more than what they charge for their OF subscription and to young girls that they can make money really easily by using this lovely free software. If that was actually considered detestable or vile then the project would obviously remove Twitch from the services.json file. This project empowers women to take their shirts off and stream on Twitch with only a few clicks!

Pretty funny.

from a zero day GH account with no contributions to anything

Person with limited coding experience wanting to add their site of choice to their streaming program of choice? This isn't exactly Linux kernel contribution, it can be explained pretty reasonably.

OBS really painted themselves in a corner by adding sketchy camgirl sites but refusing to add a game streaming site.

It's fortunate it's open source then

Kick has a pretty bad reputation in the streamer community.

It first became notable when twitch banned certain gambling content, which kick allows. This gave it an initial reputation of being a site that allows content that Twitch does not.

the Wikipedia article mentions the site being founded with "a focus on looser moderation". When a site becomes known for lax moderation policies, it has a tendency to attract people whose content violates the rules of other platforms. While this might sometimes be good, a lot of the time it attracts people who want to promote bigotry or other hate.

As expected in the early days, the site did attract streamers that most competing services did not want to have. This has earned the site a bit of a stigma. There was at least one incident that would have resulted in the streamer getting suspended on literally any other game streaming service, and nothing happened over on Kick, and we know they knew about it, as their CEO was in the chat during the stream.

The site has tightened up its moderation a bit more vs the earlier days, but it has still yet to fully shake the stigma.

In this case it has tighter moderation than twitch. the latter's devolved into what is basically a soft core porn site for teenage boys to form parasocial relationships on

Allowing e-whores to grow on the platform was a mistake.

Key question from the comments on GitHub:

"Are you sure this doesn't have anything to do with OBS being sponsored by YouTube and Twitch?"

I would like to know what influence these entities wield on OBS.

Just a bunch of kids in the github comments arguing with each other.

A project has every right to decide how it's ran or how it works - it must. The project maintainers can very well just say "we don't like this service because it starts with a K", or because there's a conflict with their project sponsors. One of the 'rewards' for maintaining a project (especially on the size of OBS) is to make opinionated decisions like this.

I presume OBS supports streaming to generic RTMP endpoints, so it can still be used to stream to whatever service they want. Or, people (or even the company themselves!) are welcome to fork the project and support whatever projects they want.

I'd hope the average Github user wouldn't take the time of day from an HN comment section.

They’d detest anything resembling an intellectual conversation. Much like Reddit.

Well that’s a bit surprising.

I’d never heard of Kick … and several actually explicit adult sites are in the service.json file…

This feels like it might be a bit of an overreaction… but I dunno. I’m not about to expose myself to any site like Twitxh/Kick/YouTube right before bed…. It’s not good for my sleep quality… so I’m not really in a position to judge anything about Kick.

Kick competes for the audiences of OBS sponsors YouTube and Twitch while Chaturbate and co (mostly) don't, despite these websites having controversies just as serious as Kick's owner's (Stake.com) own controversies, such as models performing indecent acts in public, parasocial relationships causing (mostly vulnerable, lonely) men to spend or even steal massive amounts of money [0], and lack of resources for models who are trafficked or victims of stalking.

Really, really interesting to see this stance from OBS and very difficult to not view it cynically, especially considering the very lacklustre reasoning. Is OBS saying that they're denying Kick because they don't want to associate themselves with them, implicitly saying that they're happy to be associated with every other site on that list? Seems like a very silly stance to take.

[0] - It's not that long ago that Grant Amato stole hundreds of thousands from his family to send to a camgirl on MyFreeCams, before eventually murdering his parents and brother due to their objections to his parasocial relationship with the camgirl

The title here should be different, as is it tends to encourage flaming.

I don't like that the first amendment is no longer enough because power to abridge speech in the "public square" is now given to corporations who bend to the public opinion of a small mob (mostly bored suburbanite youth) and advertisers. It's the Internet, can I make a dirty joke and say "fuck"? Apparently not. People are considerably more repressed than they were a couple of decades ago and they're cheering for it?

If content is so bad that it ought to be illegal, make it so and have the punishment go through actual law enforcement.

Then again a platform making money from its content producers does have some responsibility to be selective.

That doesn't at all extend to OBS Studio though.

How absurd.

Kick is a platform. It isn't kiwifarms, it isn't 8ch. Further, I think it would be more defensible to lock out Kick (not defensible, but more defensible) if twitch had any other real competition in the live streaming space.

An open source project locking out platforms for allowing freer speech than twitch is shameful. It's embarrassing.

I agree there should be a consideration of where OBS funding comes from, and if I were Kick I'd support a maintainer of an OBS fork.

It's closer to 8ch I think. There is the blatant advertised gambling due to being stake owned and then their non-existent moderation of hate speech that has allowed streamers who want to be incredible edgy like Adin Ross to thrive.

Just an aside, 8ch was a platform, the whole idea of the site was that anyone could create their own imageboard, similar to subreddits on reddit.

It just looks like a bunch of people streaming video games. I don't see why it should elicit this sort of response.

People are really into streaming video games. After gamergate, I assume that any conversation where video games overlap with the internet are going to be overheated.

As a wise man once said, "Write games, don't play them."

I wonder if they would be willing to accept a pull request that removed the custom stream target? After all if you're streaming to an unknown site, that might constitute support for that site by the obsproject. I mean the mere existence of this setting means that OBS must condone the use for kick.com already. I'm sure there are services with even worse morals than kick.com's, OBS may be unintentionally supporting even those!

Wouldn't it be better to just support approved vendors? That way we know that only trustworthy and upstanding services will be used. I mean maybe custom has some fringe use cases beyond public broadcast... but frankly speaking are you really going to preserve those marginal use cases when the morals of a society are at stake?

Truly a sensible decision on their part.

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