Twitch seems quite content with being a front for onlyfans. They recently started blurring stream thumbnails, and have never cared about linktree/etc links despite them being used as a "hide it under the carpet" for onlyfans as well. (Direct links bad, a link to a link is okay though?)
They may as well stop pretending and fully allow adult content, because it's pretty obvious that these streamers will keep pushing the limits until they get permabanned or twitch gives in to the "women streamers did nothing wrong" crowd.
“Allowing adult content” is easier said than done for any organisation. This is incredibly common knowledge at this point. For example, orgs dealing with adult content need to work a little bit differently. Some employees may just be personally uncomfortable with being around “big titty goth gfs” all day every day, and their job might change to require it. Internal HR disputes can also become more complicated, as lines of appropriate behaviour can ever so slightly blur. I’m sure there are a hundred other things that I haven’t thought of. The part that’s common knowledge is that payment processing becomes orders of magnitude more precarious and complicated. Anyone who was paying attention to this area remembers what happened to OnlyFans itself recently, where they were running out of ways to make payments work.
This is all ignoring what Twitch would be giving up by embracing this. What’d be the impact of the negative optics when it comes to parents? Do they stop letting their kids on Twitch? How important is that to their bottom line? What about the consoles / platforms that have a Twitch integration? Is that now seen as an endorsement of or gateway to adult content that the platform owners didn’t sign up for?
Even if Twitch were actually able to pull that off, there’s a whole lot on the line, and certainly market segments that they know that they’d be saying goodbye to.
They only need to incorporate a separate entity that deals with the adult content, which then has to deal with the legal side of the problem and reap in the (probably) considerable rewards.
Honestly, why not. That would allow them to get more aggressive with enforcement for untagged streams, allow them to keep the obviously impression generating engine of the "Just Chatting" OnlyFans crowd, and maybe even with the weight of Amazon behind them, force the credit processors to lighten up a bit.
Or it would be nice if they could, anyway. In reality with the age verification laws popping up in more places, they probably want to stay far away from the impending bureaucratic and legal nightmare.
> In reality with the age verification laws popping up in more places, they probably want to stay far away from the impending bureaucratic and legal nightmare.
One could argue they are already there, putting an unblur button on streams is basically the same as an "I'm over 18" button on adult sites. No verification, no auditing, the button does nothing but make it look like they care.
Frankly I don't understand why all the naughty streams don't get moved to a sibling platform, call it Twitch Red that only deals with those. They can share 95% of legal and operational costs, but it has the benefit that it isolates the game streaming platform for any questionable content that might raise the eyebrow of sensitive jurisdictions and advertisers. There must be something obvious I'm missing otherwise this is a very large missed opportunity.
In part, I would guess, because if they did that, there would be a much higher likelihood that payment processors would decide to blacklist the Red version of the service—something they can't really do with just the adult streams on Twitch as it stands.
I would further guess that this would only be one aspect of the broader marginalization of the Red version of the service—they wouldn't be promoting it openly on the main Twitch, because that would antagonize the "think-of-the-children" types, and it would no longer benefit from cross-recommendations and from people watching a Call of Duty stream until 11PM, and then noticing in the sidebar that their favorite adult streamer has come online and switching over to them. They would probably even suffer from the one quasi-legitimate excuse the payment processors have for banning adult sites: much higher rates of chargebacks, as people with overly judgmental and insufficiently communicative significant others try to hide them on their credit card statements (or any of a bunch of other reasons).
It would be great if we could collectively treat sex work as work, just like any other form of selling our bodies and minds to support ourselves—and, indeed, for the time being that is effectively what Twitch is doing, and in doing so benefits both themselves and these streamers, who otherwise would have to use more stigmatized platforms with much less reach.
Not that I use Twitch much anymore, nor am I really bothered by see a random boob or dick every once in a while. What does annoy me is that the OnlyFans "models" see every other platform as means to push their OnlyFans subscriptions. How the hell are the so much money flying around that it can finance that many OnlyFans creators?
We can't funding for ad free search, video stream or software development, but we have millions of men and women doing OnlyFans... I don't get it.
> How the hell are the so much money flying around that it can finance that many OnlyFans creators?
I'm willing to bet that 60% of OF creators, after accounting for the required equipment, are not making money. I'd also bet that at least 20% of those making money are from a country where $150 a month is a whole salary.
And then there's the question of how many of them are being trafficked.
People are hypocritical. There are a lot of religion fanatics, prude morality fighters and others activists fighting against "sins". But in the end of day they all come home and watch porn. And many pay for it directly or indirectly.
And markets with most prude societies are usually ones with highest porn consumption. Humanity.
Poster above wondered where are money coming from and this was the answer. There are people who pay to webcam models on Twitch and this is the reason why Amazon allow it to happen. Money.
Anyway I feel like power users are just more likely affected here and see soft porn on Twitch more often. To be honest I only ocasionally use Twitch, but last month I've been watching Trackmania there a lot. Like every day for several hours at least.
And know what? I dont see any NSFW stuff whatsoever because I only watch few top streamers playing certain game. There simply no need to ever go to twitch frontpage or look at boobs.
PS: As gamer I would really appreciate to just have NSFW toggle so everyone can watch whatever they want.
Well.. no I was wondering if that many people are actually paying for OnlyFans for it to be profitable for that many creators.
Parent comment got it right, I feel like it would be reasonable to expect the OnlyFans creators to keep their almost shameful self-promotion of platforms like Twitch or YouTube. I don't care what kind of content they produce, as long as it's consensual they can do whatever they want, and it's not the nature of the content that irritates me, it's the insane level of self-whoring, it's pretty cringe.
I can see it from the point of view of Twitch, it's content, it sells, it makes money so leave it.
Because 99.9% of twitch problems, and bad press, from the last few years are focused on people using Twitch as an onlyfan funnel. I would cut them out asap.
That just doesn't seem demonstrably true but I'd love to see some citations. My recollection is that Twitch's biggest issues have been regarding gambling and high-profile bans for misconduct e.g. DrDisrespect or nudity from streamers who don't even have OnlyFans accounts.
You're lucky - we have just the right study that already happened on another service! https://arxiv.org/html/2401.11254v1
Turns out that deplatforming works and has overall positive results.
"The Great Ban: Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of a Massive Deplatforming Operation on Reddit" - worth a read and answers your questions. Apart from the one about whether they change.. we'll likely never really know, but at least they won't pull as many others down with them.
>> Turns out that deplatforming works and has overall positive results.
Did you read this?
"Horta Ribeiro et al. (2021) assessed the impact of deplatforming across multiple platforms, concentrating on the migration of users from banned subreddits to newly established platforms. Their findings indicated a significant decline in user activity on the new platforms. However, they also found a subset of users who increased their toxicity and radicalization."
They specifically call out that departed users in past studies end up MORE Radicalized. So the people who leave get worse in some cases.
This study looks at those that remain on redit and found that:
"Our results reveal that 15.6% of the affected users abandoned Reddit after the ban and that those who remained reduced their toxicity by 6.6% on average. Despite this modest toxicity reduction, 5% of users increased their toxicity by more than 70% of their pre-ban level. The presence of such resentful users was widespread across the analyzed subreddits. However, these users likely had little impact on the platform given that only 16% of users increased both toxicity and activity. Likewise, only 21% users increased toxicity and also obtained positive engagement from the community."
Your calling that effective? It's hardly a dent in reddit, and further more the people who left likely went off and got worse.
I referenced 1984 for a reason:
"Other promising avenues of future research are the development of predictive models for the outcome of moderation interventions. These would allow to estimate the likely effects of an intervention in advance of its application, enhancing the possibility to plan the strategic enforcement of moderation actions."
This should never be a thing in our word. EVER. the fundamental assumption that it will only be used by the right people is the very thing Orwell was raging against in 1984...
> Your calling that effective? It's hardly a dent in reddit, and further more the people who left likely went off and got worse.
No, I said the result was overall positive and the study confirms that.
You've cherry picked what you got out of that text a bit:
> They specifically call out that departed users in past studies end up MORE Radicalized.
The text specifically says "found a subset of users". It's not "departed users", but a subset of them. Of course there's going to be a few that got worse... they're people.
The main point is: How did the whole system change? - Slightly positive. Where did the most toxic people go? - Away, where others won't easily find them by accident. We're not going to prevent the already evil from finding each other, but we can succeed in creating environments where they're not the normal group.
This is a complete non-sequitur. The GP was talking about harassment, which is a massive problem on any non-moderated public forum, regardless of political leaning of the harassee (or harassers).
Yeah, and surprisingly we're seeing many people defending Nazis' free speech but never Isis' or Al Qaeda's one…
As if they only realized it would in fact be detrimental to society because they belong to the target group of these terrorists, when they don't feel threatened by Nazis because they don't belong to a targeted minority.
Platforming them also doesn't seem to be bringing about any change though. Your argument assumes this fantasy that they will have a dialogue. That's just not what happened, they just make their own echo chambers inside the platforms. These platforms are literally optimized for community building. Banning and deplatforming achieves mental peace for people who just want to go to twitch and not be bombarded by literal nazis.
Where do you fall on Israel vs Gaza? Does your platform let you speak freely? Is there a chilling effect due to fear of getting banned? I can say the words Tavistock here and guarantee that I will get downvoted just for mentioning it.
Shoving it off into a dark corner doesn't make it go away. IT makes people ignorant to the fact that it's going on.
I’m ok with shoving some stuff in a dark corner if it makes it harder to accidentally stumble on it when using a platform for generally more wholesome purposes.
The problem with the “where do you draw the line” type arguments is that they suggest because it’s hard to agree on where a line should be drawn, that one shouldn’t be drawn at all. But reality is different. It’s better have some rules and continually review their approaches and boundaries than allow a free-for-all from the worst people and normalising their behaviours because you can’t be bothered to answer those difficult questions.
I have no idea where all this is coming from, the original post talked about literal nazis. Allowing for exaggeration I can extend that to overt racists and those kind of bad people. Don't move the goal post now by muddying that with more nuanced topics (although, this one shouldn't be, it's clearly a colonizer situation, but again allowing for exaggeration and examples). You have to draw the line somewhere.
1984 is an entire book talking about how terrible fascism was.
One of 1984's core tenants is that control of speech, erasure of history, revision of the present, removal of WORDS to mold what people think. It's a fundamental treatise about why fascism controlled people, the narrative, and how it changes everything. (It talks about bureaucracy as well but that's another topic).
Using 1984 to defend fascism, against the fascist tactics highlighted in 1984 being rolled out in the world we live in is a pretty nuanced take. But you have to get past the word nazi first.
Bro nobody is talking about 1984 type system but you. People having standards about who they talk to is not fascism. Companies not doing business with bad actors is also not fascism. I would gladly defend the right of someone to do a Nazi parody but only if there's little risk of them turning out to be actual nazis.
That's not what I am saying. Nazis are bad, but the GP has a poor way with words and it looks obvious to me that the comment was made in a context that applied to "the anti-nazi crowd's MO of bullying" not applicable to just nazis, but anybody they disagree with. Basically cancel culture, whether you're a nazi, or just somebody they don't like. The point was specific to the bullying, not about Nazis. The GP clearly conflated these two ideas when responding.
You can be an opponent of both "cancel culture" and nazis at the same time. And you can be an opponent of cancel culture while still publicly calling out legitimate Neo-Nazis (even though I think it is a waste of time). But if you call somebody a Nazi for disagreeing with you, or voting for a republican, or having a viewpoint that isn't leftist, then that's crossing a line. This happens all the time, and the GP is obviously aware of it like many of us are.
Just because some people (like the GP) do a shitty job of criticizing cancel culture, that doesn't make cancel culture any more right or wrong. It is what it is.
Damn, how to expose yourself as a shallow unintellectual not worth listening to: thinking that because it says "socialist" on the label it means all socialist parties are Nazi-like.
By your logic, the Democractic People's Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) is an example of democracy...
No one considered Hitler a "socialist" (which still had a very positive association at the time). It was just a label he piggy backed on. None of the important socialists of the time ever had one good word to write about Hitler or his party. In fact, Hitler put communists and socialists in jail. Pointing out "Hitler was a SOCIALIST" is just a dumb ahistorical take, the mark of a propagandist.
And for mister Kelogg, he wasn't "the foundation" of the American Progressive movement, he was just a progressive. Plenty of other Progressives from that time were not eugenicists or avowed racists. Unfortunately, racism and eugenics were very popular in many parts of society in this time. There is still no doubt that today's Progressive movement is decidedly anti-racist and anti-eugenicist, while all neo-nazis are still proud to hold these 19th century views (with modern-day morons like Charles Murray to invent and lie their way to a more modern-day scientific racism).
Sorry I have to respond to this but it’s so problematic and common I feel the need.
1. Let us not get hung up on what the nazis were selling at that time, place and language by using the word socialist (oh wait it wasn’t in English!?! Oh that’s a translation??!!!). In any case, that’s nearly meaningless unless you really think the People’s Republic of China under Mao was really a republic? Then I can’t help. TLDR , political labels are meaningless lies. This is not a serious argument to point out their name.
2. All of these authoritarian movements have different origin stories and sometimes they’re pulled out of different movements, and it’s hard to attach their origins to the final product, more confusingly for labels such as progressive and conservative (or left and right ).. they may be very very “right” or very very “left” in two different policy areas. If we want to stick to the nazis.. they were a good billion times more interventionist and militaristic than any American progressive movement ever was so (super right wing I guess?!?), despite legitimately saying some things you’d hear out of the American left at the time.
3. Ultimately authoritarians are mostly about being in power, and whatever else you go for here, that’s the main takeaway you should have taken away from the nazis neither left nor right but being about themselves being in power.
In any case, the nazis were the nazis and the fascist salute they’re famous for I’ve seen made by more than my fair share of otherwise entirely right wing organizations such as Franco’s Spain, who openly opposed and fought against communists and socialists.. and yet were assisted by the nazis directly in Guernica. You can read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia for a good first person account if you’d like to understand how confusing this all can be to label the nazis as either progressive or socialist.
Of course the most challenging example of all of this is Chile’s Pinochet. Nazi salutes at his funeral for a man that also openly fought communism, had an economic policy designed entirely from University of Chicago economists in a way that would have made Milton Friedman proud, much more free market than anything we had in the states at the time. I still don’t really connect the University of Chicago to fascism, because that’s silly.
The fascists movements are at least definitely fascist but I assume they would have been anything to be in power.
How are any of those socialist policies? That happens in many countries whatever the system. This is like saying north Korea is Democratic because they have it in their name.
When you tolerate things such as child pornography, doxxing etc it makes the practice appear sanctioned and encourages others to join in. We saw this quite clearly with Reddit and Twitter.
Someone dressing up as a nazi and speaking isnt an actual crime.
Bringing in actual crimes is false equivalence. So yes those things should have consequences. We have jury trials for a reason. Take the content down, send to the police and court. IF it isn't a crime then reinstate the user.
It's not an equivalence, but it's not unrelated given the number of people who committed actual crimes and were found to be very much involved in Nazi groups online. This just comes up again and again.
Believe it or not, this was the top comment and I was at -1 for a half hour. I like to think my gentle, humorous, highlighting of the surreality may have motivated fellow posters to notice it was a bit loose with the facts. (I've been working at this for a year or two, it's a tightrope)
The "counsil". A bunch of mOdErAtOrs not doing real work, inserting themselves in a position of almost ultimate power by riding a wave they themselves manufactured.
What is safe and in what way does the Safety Advisory Council improve it? The group that created a very toxic environment around Twitch when it included a political activist identifying as a deer (!) that threatened to silence everyone.
Twitch is losing money. Now it's losing less. (I'm not saying it makes sense or will make a dent or anything else, just putting the fact out there - twitch has limited time to figure out how to make things work)
If twitch cared about money, they could easily stop providing storage and bandwidth for all the South American and Russian channels streaming pirated movies and TV 24/7.
That it doesn't matter that the saving is trivial. I think it's a signal of one of two things: Either they want a popular committee dependent on their income and easy to manipulate. Or we're to see lots of savings at any cost at any opportunity. That's what I meant by "losing less" - not a truism, but a beginning of doing anything and everything to reach breakeven. And lots of it will be stupid and not make a difference apart from making things just a bit worse.
For those who are not aware, the safety council was not the trust and safety team that handles bans.
Instead, this was a small group of livestreamers and community representatives that meet once a month or so, and give their personal opinion on proposed changes that Twitch brings to them.
> The Safety Advisory Council's members include Dr. Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyber Bullying Research Center, and Dr. T.L. Taylor, the co-founder and director of AnyKey, an organization that advocates for inclusion and diversity in video games and esports. There's also Emma Llansó, the director of the Free Expression Project for the Center for Democracy and Technology.
These safety and alignment councils are just positions for losers and leeches. They live on the back of programmers without doing any work at all. They have a different background and they want to live at the expenses of others, just to say that they work in AI.
