>the handful of people who put in effort under reddit's brand are in an exploitative relationship.
In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv.
I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface.
But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'.
Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it.
Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games...
It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities.
Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.
Twitch still uses flash because HLS wasn't widely supported until recently. Everyone knows Twitch takes half of the $5, there is no naivety there. And the gamification of subscriptions is a good thing for streamers. Anyone who has been a partner with both Twitch and YouTube will tell you Twitch is miles ahead when it comes to actually caring about its partners.
I'm not arguing against the choices of Twitch per se, I'm commenting on the bunch of free passes they get because the viewers see themselves as part of the 'twitch community'.
Saying that the gamification of subscriptions is good for the streamer is the same as saying that games with micro-transactions, designed to be addictive, are good for the developers. Of course it is, but someone is paying for it...
The music detection stuff I feel was probably bigger than them. DMCA and whatnot. You forget YouTube follows suite in this regard.
Not keeping videos forever honestly made sense to me. They were very scientific about it in their blog post and showed that honestly, nobody is really watching these archives. If at most they're there to watch a certain clip (which can be highlighted which ARE kept forever).
Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
I'm not saying you're wrong; Twitch can certainly go down that route, but most of your examples are in my opinion exaggerated.
> Banning cleavages again makes sense... Otherwise the site would turn into a softcore cam site with gamers.
Wait what? I've never seen or heard of anything remotely close to "softcore cam" on Twitch, I find it extremely stupid and rather discriminatory to ban cleavage for female gamers. It's a very bad omen for further possible restrictions imho.
I've seen softcore pornographic material from twitch. Women flashing their breasts or ass at the webcam.
Granted, that sort of thing apparently is uncommon because the people who did it were apparently almost immediately banned... but that's rather the point, isn't it? You don't see it because they ban it.
How are they exaggerated? Some of these can be 'good', but they still are all unilateral changes, which is precisely the problem with the false sentiment of community.
I'm not sure this is an "exploitative relationship", unless you also define your relationship with a supermarket chain or netflix to be "exploitative". You give money for a service. Said service tries to extract money as efficiently as possible.
It's a capitalistic relationship, certainly. But it's very different. reddit volunteers provide their efforts to improve reddit's brand, for free, generally just for personal gratification (from people who will turn on you and drive you to suicide the moment you make the wrong move). Thos efforts are exploited by reddit, rather than rewarded.
In some ways, it feels like Twitch.tv.
I'm a little sad when I think of all these people making an 'exception' with twitch.tv by turning off their ad-blocks, by gladly giving $5 per month PER subscription (and some people subscribe multiple times on the same channel), by excusing a streaming website that still uses Flash and has a terrible, TERRIBLE user interface.
But it's all forgiven, because of the 'community'.
Well, that 'community' sold for a billion and you won't see a nickel for it.
Remember when Twitch was so much better than Youtube? Yeah... but the service is slowly changing to please corporate, and you won't have any say in it. New subscribe buttons no longer remove ads, they've added some music detection stuff that mutes videos, they no longer keep videos forever, they decide to ban 'cleavages', then games...
It's a one way relationship. The naive viewers are doing all these concessions for a company in which they have no equities.
Edit: Forgot to mention the new gamification of subscriptions "X suscribed for Y months in row!". That's pure genius. Evil, but still genius.