> Community and advertiser feedback made clear that we need to offer more ways to control the content that’s recommended as well as where ads appear. So, we’re introducing a new category: Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches. If you have chosen swimwear that is allowed under the “Swim and Beaches” contextual exception to our standard Nudity and Attire policy, you should stream into the Pools, Hot Tubs and Beaches category.
People set up kiddy-pools in their room with a bit of water to get this "contextual exception" for the express purpose of streaming suggestive content. Why not just remove the exception and let people stream sexually suggestive content and make a separate category for that without a ridiculous "beaches and pools" euphemism?
They don't want to be a porn site. The problem they have is that the porn content drives away advertisers and non-porn related contant. So they have to steer away from porn, but wherever they draw the line there are going to be people testing the line, and there's an audience for it. So the compromise they've clearly come up with is they don't allow porn, but if you happen to be sexy wearing practically nothing, that's fine - as long as it's got some pretext of not being porn, because porn is what will kill their non-porn related business.
What's funny is that they insist on pretending that these streamers aren't trying to sexualize themselves. The streamer that caused this blog to be written basically uses her twitch channel as a front to sell her nudes on another site.
If people want to sexualize themselves for money that's their business, the problem is they keep trying to find loopholes in the conduct policy to transform a site about videogames that children frequent into something sexual.
They mention the tools that allow you to filter channels on their website. They make it really easy to block channels that are recommended to you. Why not extend that functionality to the entire site so you can just click 2-3 times and get rid of any channel for any reason forever? The answer is simple: Money.
> The streamer that caused this blog to be written basically uses her twitch channel as a front to sell her nudes on another site.
As long as the content on Twitch isn't sexual, I don't think it matters to Twitch (or advertisers) if it's serving as lead-gen for something that is sexual. Content produced as lead-gen can be valuable for its own sake.
(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)
It is though and that's why ads were banned and that's why Twitch wrote this blog post. There's no nudity, but the entire point of her stream is for her to show off her body in exchange for money.
>(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)
This is valid thing for people in many professions, but Onlyfans and patreon are used as a kind of a loophole for Twitch's policy on pornography. There are also some former/current adult film actresses that did/do actual hardcore pornography for a living and they aren't allowed to shill pornhub on their channel page because it violates terms of service. Some of them keep their clothes on because they go to twitch to make non-sexual content and don't even want anyone hinting that they are aware of their background in adult film, but some of them are indeed on twitch because its just another outlet for them to sell sexualized content.
Also a reminder that I'm not judging people that want to sell sexualized content of themselves. There are communities for that. If show HN was 90% muscley dudes in g strings writing things about their latest tech project on their inner thighs it would diminish the quality of the community as a whole. There are lots of people that are OK with porn existing that don't want the primary places they hang out on the Internet to become known as places where people go primarily to masturbate.
This is an extremely comical take because Twitch is notorious for banning creators from their platform for their behavior and content off-platform that runs afoul of Twitch rules.
They just don't do it for sexual comment. If the creator is female.
Twitch's TOS bans 'solicitation' of sexually explicit content, and from a quick anecdotal sampling of streamers in this category 8/10 of them have direct links to or aggregate link pages to OnlyFans profiles where they do sell explicit content. Guess it depends on your definition of 'solicitation'?
Has there been any good meta analyses on the effects of suggestive content on children? My prior is that seeing sex was common enough in the ancestral environment, both human and animal sex, and children won’t be much effected from this content floating around.
The difference is that hot tub twitch isn't an actual interaction between two people, its a dopamine feedback loop that warps an un-jaded mind into thinking it's reality.
Is that also true of VR games, games in general, multiplayer games, concerts,TV, videos, watching a streamer play games, movies, social media etc. etc.?
Yes, I think so, just to a lesser degree. People playing VR half life Alyx don't actually think they are part of a human insurrection fighting alien overlords but an alarmingly large number of people watching these hottub streams think they have some legitimately romantic connection to the streamer, or a chance of it. Young men can be remarkably stupid in this way.
A little late to the thread, but wanted to add my 2 cents anyway. It's not exposure itself to sexual that is the issue, it is encouragement (implicit or explicit) that the children emulate or partake in the same behaviors. For every ancient civilization that mated in front of their kids, how many also mated with their kids? Don't be too quick to dismiss the long term mental effects on exposure and normalization of sexuality to the sexually immature.
I think you're right with the ancestral environment, however I don't know whether the types of contents you can find on the internet are in the same ballpark and whether or not they have a negative impact on a child's development.
They want the simp $ but without being a porn site. So twitch will just evolve into girls-gone-wild light.
This is kinda hilarious though some brand managers must really be squirming when they are tying to sell advert spend for furniture or something on the twitch beach boob cam.
There are already lots of adult content sites; the reason these streamers exist on twitch specifically is because they can reach an audience that isn't on adult sites.
There is not enough money in it for Amazon to start ramping up in pornographic material. The chances of brand degradation, possible boycotts due to women looking young/revenge porn is much much too high to be worth it.
Amazon already is in the pornographic-streaming market, just at a remove.
Who do you think the biggest customers of AWS's media-streaming IaaS infrastructure offerings are? People who need to move terabytes per second of live video over the Internet, but for some reason cannot make an Enterprise partnership with one of the public-facing media-hosting services (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, etc.) There's really only one industry matching that description.
I'd even bet that those infrastructure services already share a common backbone with Twitch. So this offering already basically exists. It's just white-labelled, rather than Twitch-branded.
That’s a gross oversimplification. That’s like saying “every application hosted on a server running Linux is basically the same”. AWS makes money by hosting all kinds of things, it doesn’t mean Amazon the company is a once removed partner of every single company using their infrastructure.
> It doesn’t mean Amazon the company is a once removed partner of every single company using their infrastructure.
I mean, that was my point: that Amazon prefers the optics of not being a partner to these companies, even though, technologically (not financially), there's no difference between what they're doing right now, and what they'd be doing if they ran a "Twitch for porn." Which is why they're just fine with being twice-removed partners to these companies, through vertical integrators.
Amazon are fine with e.g. Heroku and other PaaSes repackaging their IaaS services into convenient vertical-specific packages. Amazon don't want to run Heroku; they just want to eat 90% of Heroku's margins. Which essentially gets them all the upside of running Heroku anyway, without the risks of actually going into the PaaS vertical, marketing to small customers, etc.
The same logic applies with porn production: Amazon would much rather not create "Twitch for porn", but rather allow someone else to use AWS to create a "Twitch for porn", and then have that service pay AWS exorbitant egress-bandwidth fees. All the same benefit of owning such a company themselves, with none of the hard work, and better yet, none of the tarnish.
But also, keep in mind: if 80% of the customers for an infrastructure service are using it for a use-case in the X vertical, then that service is effectively a service-provider in the X vertical, whether it wants to be or not. Even if AWS isn't explicitly running a "Twitch for porn", if 80% of e.g. Kinesis Streams infra is being allocated to transcoding porn, then you'd better believe that the devs for Kinesis Streams, and the ops staff that run it, both know what their service is usually used for — and likely have spent time tuning their service to cope with the particular needs of that workload. To do otherwise would be irresponsible!
Well that's pretty much my point, I said Amazon didn't want to make more money, I said that they didn't want to degrade their brand. It's not some moral high-ground, they just did cost analysis and realized that it was not worth it to get directly involved (as in branching out).
They are talking about moving the existing lewd stuff out onto a new platform, not starting a PornHub alternative. There is obviously enough in it for Amazon, otherwise they would just ban the pools outright.
I understand the distinction, but ultimately the reputation issue for twitch would be identical.
"They're opening a porn site?"
"No no, its a separate site for softcore...err sexually suggestive material"
It isn't a win either way, and they'd be entering established markets that already have entrenched businesses and wouldn't have the 'walk through' traffic the video games sections of twitch provide.
Yes, but it is more effective to let someone else own the second site that offers adult content. Then, for advertisers, there is no brand confusion caused by a common owner.
in old times, TV had late night shows, bordering soft porn, in which advertisements like alcohol and cigarettes seemed popular. It was never without ads (or it wouldn't exist). I wonder how come the online world advertising ecosystem has evolved to be an infantile one
I saw the same culture policing from advertisers warp the foundation of YouTube too. Why are advertisers like that? Why don't they just go where the people want to go?
It's just a speculation, but it's probably a bullshit excuse to ban whoever they want honestly. Advertisers can definitely back out from smaller websites, but from Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitch? I doubt it. They're supposed to throw away all that reach because of what, because their ads appeared on a couple of videos that were either sexually suggestive or because someone said the N-word? I run adblock, but if I'm not mistaken there are plenty of ads that are sexually suggestive themselves. On top of that I believe YouTube are about to play ads on all videos, if they aren't already doing that (by the way, they promised that they won't do that, but it was years ago, so no one remembers that). It's just that they'll ban you for whatever arbitrary reason or you just won't get any money if you're lucky.
No, they don't want to admit to being a porn site. Tying themselves in knots with silly rules like this means they're just a gateway for people to promote their OnlyFans pages.
If they want to be a game streaming site, why allow player video at all? Pare it back to what it was actually for.
There is clearly value in the experience of being able to see the person playing the game. It might even be inherently important to the gameplay in some circumstances. The whole thing is personality based entertainment for the most part and you get a lot more personality across when you can see the streamer.
I generally don’t enjoy Twitch because of the nakedness (no pun intended)of the business side. Twitch has every aspect of adult cam sites except explicit content and streamers obviously react and are incentives to interact when people toss them dollars but it makes for a poor viewing experience to me. But they are certainly continuing to fumble on where they’re choosing to draw lines on what is or isn’t explicit.
Imagine a household where the parents run a porn blocker, while a teenager wants to view risqué things.
Twitch wants to keep them both happy: Not so much censorship as to drive the teenager away, but enough prudishness that porn blockers don't censor their entire domain.
I wouldn't doubt that a large percentage of the viewers are underaged users who actually do not have any experience with adult material.
Twitch is a gaming site. Kids watch youtube videos of people playing games, they get funneled to check out the minecraft/fortnite/etc. category on twitch then they get curious and check out the large streamers on the site. What do you know? There's a streamer who is sitting in a hot tub with 20k viewers (enough to put her in the top streams). It doesn't matter that twitch has a "mature audience warning".
Anyone who has used the site for any amount of time knows Twitch is providing a clear on-ramp to underaged kids accessing nearly-softcore porn.
They can't have their cake (young, gaming advertisers) and eat it too (allow nearly naked young women in kiddie pools) on the same site... Only reason they are even being forced to make a change is because of advertisers. I can only imagine if parents actually knew the extent of the hot tub streams, twitch wouldn't be allowed in a lot of households, but since its a "gaming" site first, its under the radar.
Last time I was looking through streams I saw a woman in a bikini in a kiddie pool riding on a giant inflatable hot dog. I think her normal stream is painting herself with body paints? It’s hard to avoid and that plus the super coarse language make it seem insane to me that people let their kids watch Twitch streams. I’m sure there’s good content somewhere but it’s just not for me, if I want that stuff I’ll just go to Pornhub. Feels more honest.
You're missing the point of Twitch and also its culture. Twitch is closer to cable TV than anything else, even the terminology is the same, with 'channels'. Except that anyone can create a channel and stream it within the rules. The fact that there's some content you don't like on other channels being does not mean you shouldn't watch the streamers that you like.
Just like there's a wide variety in content thats broadcast on TV channels at different times of the day. There is even a Science and Technology channel with some developers streaming their coding. There are some game developers that only code their game while streaming the IDE.
Why should a Wolfram viewer care if there is some risque content on other categories? Even if you're looking around after the stream, you can just scroll past it like you do on Netflix.
I personally mostly watch only the few streamers that I have followed. I rarely come across the streamers mentioned in the article except when there's some Twitch drama that I hear about on Reddit or from friends.
Clicked on wolframs channel, on the left side bar of recommended channels is a live indicator for someone named "Amouranth" streaming pools, hottubs, and beaches with 14.9k viewers.
> Why not just remove the exception and let people stream sexually suggestive content
Because you'll lose your card processor and have to switch to a high risk processor which halves your income. America is super weird when it comes to sex and there's no alternatives.
Probably the lost ad revenue. No company wants to advertise on those streams. By breaking them out in way where advertisers could opt out of that stream category, suggestive streamers (a huge segment of traffic) would lose money for Twitch.
But isn't that already exactly what they're doing by breaking it into hot tub category and letting advertisers opt out of that category? So the question is if they let advertisers opt out anyway, why this hot tub category instead of an explicit suggestive category.
Because if Twitch becomes known or associated with explicit content, it will drive advertisers away, even if their ads are only shown over non-explicit content.
Payment processors? Not that Amazon don't have opportunity to run their own, but still the whole thing on that side is a mess. So they choose to not try to cross the line...
Many advertisers don’t want their ads on sites that show sexual content, even if their particular ads are not shown on the sexually suggestive section of the site. Twitch must have decided that it wasn’t worth risking those advertisers.
Because twitch is a disaster, the openly hypocritical armpit of internet streaming. Less honest than an actual camgirl site, but preachy and idiotic at the same time.
What's the point of protecting their reputation when their reputation is the home of camgirls and hot tub streamers pushing their onlyfans pages already? At least if they were honest about it I could respect that, but they're not.
As Traster said, they don't want to be labelled as a porn site in spite of the streaming content they have, and so i.e. they must implement a change that gives them some plausible deniability in the face of advertisers.
I never used Twitch before the pandemic -- watching people play games was never really my thing. But then I discovered the entire second use of Twitch, streaming music. Since March 2020, it's been possible to find someone streaming music at pretty much any time of day.
One day I was watching around 2am Pacific time, and the stream ended. I was looking for another one when I saw someone in the music category with 13,000 viewers (most DJs don't crack 1000). So I went to check it out.
It was a hot tub streamer holding a guitar while she thanked people for their tips and subs. In the 10 minutes I watched, she never once played anything.
I was fascinated by the fact that she had so many people basically just watching her in a hot tub and giving her money. She wasn't doing anything compelling.
To each their own, but I had no idea there were so many people on the internet willing to pay for such a thing.
> I was fascinated by the fact that she had so many people basically just watching her in a hot tub and giving her money. She wasn't doing anything compelling.
I mean don't they do the same thing as most people on twitch (video games) just with a fake avatar? Honestly I still remember when face cam was rare and you had no idea what most streamers looked like.
On one hand, it seems like people that watch trains. I've no idea why people like to watch trains, but I'm sure I have equally strange interests compared to them.
On the other hand, some of these stans are paying a lot of cold hard cash to these streamers, just to get a shout-out, maybe, and that is clearly insane.
I've no idea what to make of the whole situation and perhaps I should just go look at some other corner of the web.
As someone who has repeatedly been pulled back to this specific brand of content when bored, my understanding is it takes advantage of a need for companionship. It hacks into that human instinct while accompanied by motifs that are already familiar (knowledge of foreign culture, moé art styles, openness to sending coded signals about sexuality) instead of featuring video feeds of real people that may push away the socially anxious. The value add appears to be: Now you "know" a girl who knows about the exact things you do and does not shy away from making targeted innuendos from the outset (unlike any average person who would be creeped out, going by society's rules for real life interactions), validating the pent-up feelings that the target audience would usually just blow off, and whose level of physical attraction is not predetermined by nature but is instead designed by an artist to surpass nature.
Most importantly, nothing is scripted or predetermined (or it at least feels that way), and they regularly acknowledge that the people making up the audience exist, in real time. "You guys." It's difficult to feel the same empathy when you're just watching a television show.
There are some signals they send to tone down the intimacy of the experience. The model is designed and rigged by artists, who sometimes have their own channels and are frequently welcomed and thanked, to make the experience feel like the product of hard work and creativity instead of stardom and charisma alone. Much of the entertainment value (and the only real reason I continue to care) comes from the interactions between the streamers themselves rather than with their audience, which are highlighted for posterity and endlessly remixed. There have been enough times where five minutes after dropping into an arbitrary stream something interesting would happen as a result of the streamer's behavior or circumstances, and only a few hours later the fanbase would post the highlight. Some of them end up with hundreds of thousands of views after a few weeks.
Additionally, in my mind the thing they did better was to not try to "act" as much, which would make the experience feel fake, much the same as just watching television where nobody is attempting to speak to you directly. It's the supposed sense of "authentic human interaction" packaged in the 2D format which is the major innovation over the static things from decades past like comics, and which was only possible to have with the ease of livestreaming and real-time comment feeds.
For me at least, the most interesting parts are actually when the streamers are "doing nothing" - sitting around talking about things, playing video games together - in just the same way as someone in real life might do with their friends every Friday evening, except the friends are guaranteed to be attractive and interesting to listen to. It is designed to be close enough to the "basically nothing" you'd expect from interacting with actual friends to de-stress (unless you set your friends to that high a standard), or being invited to a party where all you have to do is listen to other, more interesting people's anecdotes and laughter to feel as if you're a part of something.
I'd been to several of those parties and gatherings many times in my adolescence, where I felt something by just surrounding myself with people having a good time and feeling no pressure to be a part of it. I sometimes wished those moments would never have to end and the people that made them up didn't have class to go to at 8 in the morning the next day or other obligations that would prevent them from getting back together in a room any time soon.
This is the commercialization of those after-school hangouts, seven days a week.
At times it feels like the genre has obsoleted large swathes of content if done properly. People who watch television shows with a predetermined outcome no longer have to make up their own idea of attraction when someone playing a 2D character can actually respond in real-time to real (but faceless) people. I'd given up a few things I used to follow in the past which I'd realized were just trying to fill the same void that the streamers did, and the streamers filled the void that much better. No, this isn't the most healthy thing to admit.
But I make it very clear to myself that none of these people will ever know or care about who I am as an individual. The streamers essentially carry the weight of tens of thousands of people they will never know in an attempt to satisfy them all for the company's benefit. They're entertainers. But there are many people for whom that is not the case and the attachment becomes (a higher level of) parasocial. None of us can deny that the temptation is a lucrative one for the agencies that succeed.
Also, there is not an insignificant subset of people outside of YouTube who find the idea of paying money for call-outs to be "cringe", and I completely agree, but nobody on the business side has any incentive to stop them. Many people want to send money thinking all of it will go to their favorite streamer (which is decidedly not the case, given it goes through both the agency and YouTube). Also, the official chat feeds are militantly patrolled to prevent defamatory remarks from showing up on-stream (or even comments about unrelated streamers), so there will always be a subset of opinions that will never be discussed there.
Especially on the internet, home of more pornography than any human could ever consume in a million lifetimes. I don't understand what would compel someone to sit and watch and tip someone in a bathing suit attempting to play video games.
The one I saw wasn't even playing games. She is literally just sitting in the hot tub in a bikini. And in the corner it says "new bikini with 50 subs".
It's not porn, it's human interaction, acknoledgment and a form of power. The viewer can control with their money what the streamer is doing, they are recognised and build a form of relationship. This is on both sides a darker aspect of sexuality and behaviour that humans are not learning much about. That's why it's hard to understand and recognise such things.
It's not uncommon to see donations of 5k USD and up in a single transaction. And oftentimes all this person gets in return - that is, if the camgirl.. apologies, streamer notices the sum come in at all - is a "you're so sweet thanks!".
I just can't understand what they're hoping to get out of handing away so much money. Do they believe theirs will be reacted to differently? But why them? It's just so irrational!
I think it makes them feel appreciated when others are thanked as they now feel that they are part of the group (who is being thanked). Their individual donation doesn't need much praise if any. I agree with one of the other posters that it is related to loneliness. I could be mistaken obviously.
I think there's a significant amount of nuance in this situation. On the one hand, I don't object to people steaming and monetizing suggestive (or even explicit) content. These content creators should be able to produce and monetize this content without stigma.
On the other hand, I do think the juxtaposition of this content with the rest of Twitch content is problematic. I think putting this content in the same category as gaming content unintentionally conveys the message, "Men garner popularity by exhibiting their skills, women garner popularity by exhibiting their bodies." I suspect this juxtaposition of the most popular male streamers' content with that of some of the most popular women's content on the platform and exposing this young people ends up fostering non-productive attitudes among boys and young men. Other women on the platform have complained about their audiences pressuring them into producing similar content. I've also heard from women and girls that it's off-putting to see the prevalence of women in bikinis, not playing any games, on a platform that ostensibly about gaming. I think Twitch is in the right to see this as a problem.
But what's the solution here? On the one hand, I think it's giving these streamers the short end of the stick to have ambiguous policies and issue unexpected demonetizations or bans. Maybe a more effective approach would be to have stronger separation between "just chatting" content and gaming content, to retain this content but mitigate the problem of that juxtaposition. I suspect this is what the "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" category will probably be, but maybe it'd be better to spin this off into sister platform that isn't explicitly tied into gaming.
This is the core of the problem that we're facing on every modern "all the things" platform.
How do you create a general content site, without spending money on human review and curation of all uploads, while segregating erotic and non-erotic content, without having your entire site banned/blocked/gated around the world for hosting erotic content?
This has affected Amazon, Blogspot, Facebook, Google, Imgur, Patreon, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitch, Youtube. Every general content site has this problem. Most try to solve it with "user flags", which are promptly weaponized and abused to silence others. Problems constantly recur around statues, breastfeeding, swimsuits. Advertisers want content to be segmented with certainty, but site operators don't want to pay human beings to do that. Standards of "erotic" vary wildly per city, country, religion. The list goes on.
What if human curation is the only valid solution? We haven't found any other solution that works yet, and AI is barely able to recognize human beings, much less discern whether content is intended to be categorized as erotic, non-erotic, or both.
Do you think this moderation paradox - of needing curation at scale, but automatic moderation + "user flag" moderation being inadequate - is a universal problem, or do you think it's specific to ad-funded platforms?
I wonder if a patron-driven community that sets its own moderation policy wouldn't have this problem, because when a topic gets too large it will inevitably splinter into smaller communities where the preferred moderation style of each subset can be catered to.
Mm, dunno. I suspect it's a universal problem, given that Patreon also fights with "how erotic is too erotic". But the core of today's practical concerns might simply be that advertising doesn't pay enough to afford content moderation.
I agree ai curation doesn't work but I don't think human curation works much better. Twitch has a team of human curators that will ban channels, no one knows who this team is there is no trial or opportunity to defend your self, channel or content. The person judging may be in a bad mood today, often diffrent people will get diffrent ban lengths for the same thing, there is no consistency or review process.
Disagreeing with the decisions of moderators is orthogonal to comparing AI and Human moderation.
AI moderators are terrible at enforcing a complex set of practices and rules.
Human moderators are excellent at enforcing a complex set of practices and rules.
Both are subject to the whims of those defining the practices and rules, and their enforcement will always fall within scope of those definitions. If Twitch’s moderators are given full empowerment to set the rules they moderate by, then it is appropriate to blame them for what is perceived as faulty moderation decisions. Chances are, they do not have any such authority, and at best can “recommend” or “advise” while being compelled to silence by their overlords.
You are absolutely right that humans make biased decisions, no matter how much we work to correct for it; judge sentencing becomes more strict when they’re hungry or their local sports team lost, and referees are less likely to penalize the home team when in the home stadium with home fans yelling at them. But these biases can be documented, studied, and gradually accounted for in training and post-decision reviews. It’s not perfect, but it’s still great.
With AI moderation, we bake the biases into the dataset and training models, and then we throw complex rule making decisions at a nascent ML network that can’t discern the simplest of decisions that any human moderators could: “Is this erotic or non-erotic content?”. Setting aside the biases of any possible training set versus Rule 34, it is dead simple to outwit any AI in this regard, in ways that most human moderators would detect instantly. It’s not perfect, and in fact it’s pretty awful.
I agree that the rulemaking decisions of modern sites are often terrible, biased, and exclusionary of entire categories of human beings and behaviors. However, the errors made by human moderators trying to service the complexity assigned to them do not somehow excuse the staggering naivety and incompetence of AI moderators. The heavyweights in this Ml moderation industry — Google, Amazon, Facebook — have failed to deliver effective ML moderation after billions of dollars and cumulative decades of investment, and paper over their failure by using user flags and human review teams to disguise the sharp edges of their solutions.
Camsites already exist, and there's nothing stoping you from streaming games on them.
The "pools, hot tubs, beaches" exception was a (stupid) loophole and they should just close it (I suspect that this is the end result moving forward, eventually). The hard part for Twitch is figuring how to do this with out appearing sexist.
Well, at least one major adult cam site banned streaming games a few years back due to copyright concerns. Not sure about other sites but I suspect they'd end up having to do the same thing if it caught on there; the plausible deniability of being on a games streaming site is important if you want to be able to stream games, since it's at best a bit of a copyright grey area and developers don't have the same incentive to permit adult streamers as they do plain game streamers.
Twitch does not see it as a problem. Advertisers (the actual important group in this discussion) and the gaming side of the Twitch community do care, for different reasons.
This situation has been ongoing for awhile with individuals pushing the boundary of sexual content, but this response from Twitch only occurred after a partner who creates this type of content pissed off Twitch's advertisers.
Twitch does see a problem. In the past they have handed out bans for people streaming in low cut blouses. Yet somehow now women in bikinis dry-humping pool toys in a portable hot tub set up in their living rooms is cool.
Like facebook or twitter they just need to have CONSISTENT AND CONSISTENTLY APPLIED rules. I can make a judgement on your platform when those two things are happening.
> I think putting this content in the same category as gaming content
This is not happening here. Twitch is not a pure Gaming-site anymore, for several years now. And those hot tub-streams are not listed in gaming-categories, they are in non-gaming-categories like "Just Chatting", "Music", even "Travel & Outdoors" (because there are also legit beach-streams which play the hot tub-routine).
Twitch started as Gaming-Only, and the majority of content is still gaming. But people should realize that Non-Gaming is already big on twitch too, and it grows. Twitch is bringing sports and fashing-events to the platform. Music has grown string the last year because of COVID. And some people have found their niche in tame porn-content. Which technically is kind of a joke, because the biggest Hot Tub-Streamer has sexualized content on Twitch for years. But in the past she used the Just Dance-Game to create sexualixed content, or did some fitness-stuff. She is literally infamouse on the platform for this, and Hot tub is just the latest trend in a series of long running content-attempts. Just because it now is now missing the gaming-part, should make it worse? I don't think so.
I suspect it reinforces the stereotype that women who enter "nerdy" spaces like gaming are more interested in attracting the attention of men, than actually engaging with gaming. It plays into the trope of a "gamer girl that sucks at games, but succeeds because she's hot". This leads to women's abilities being doubted, and their intentions often mistaken.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with doing suggestive cosplay or things like that. I also doubt that the average person is going to watch Amouranth, and then immediately assume that all the women interested in gaming are curating the same kind of appeal - this kind of influence is more subtle than that. But I do believe that the juxtaposition of male streamers' content, and many of the most popular women's content likely fosters these stereotypes.
I'd argue the opposite: around half the population of the planet is instinctively and immediately drawn to the sight of a fertile woman with her secondary sexual attributes on display, while the appeal of pixels mashing into other pixels on a screen is much more limited.
Also, Amouranth does actual pornography for a living, her own interest is absolutely more aligned towards getting new OnlyFans subs than some platonic ideal of enjoying gaming for its own sake.
Apparently 65% of users of twitch are men. Gaming and porn are interlinked in internet culture so it's not clear why companies should go on crusades against what is reality.
The whole point seems to be about separating 'child safe' content. This cannot be done automatically, they would have to hire moderators to manually curate channels and then block access by age.
These streams are closer to pornography than most people realize. There's a reason that these streams get so much attention: 14 year old young men love watching video games, so they go to sites where they can watch video games. If you start serving softcore pornography on the same website, well gee wiz, who could have guessed that it would be pretty lucrative?
You don't have to be a prude to have a problem with this. It's not a matter of stigmatizing sex work or being anti-women, it's about profiting by serving porn-lite on the same site where children are likely to be.
I don't personally care, but I'm floored that a company like Twitch/Amazon, with hundreds of people in HR and PR, would not play it safe and just ban it.
It seems pretty clear to me that they’d do so immediately if they felt they could do so without being called sexist.
First they group them into a particular category. Then they restrict that category behind a login. And then they restrict it further, and finally ban it entirely.
Sure, and it's reasonable for parents to express to twitch that if they don't actively control sexualized content (or provide parental controls), that they will lose the eyes of their child. It's reasonable for advertisers to do the same. Unless your concept of that is control the mouse and keyboard for the child at all moments, what's the issue?
I can go on Amazon right now and buy a 55-gallon drum of sexual lubricant and a ten-inch, anatomically-correct silicone horse dildo. If it's making them money, they won't complain.
There's a pretty big difference between selling between selling sex related goods on a shopping website and showing softcore porn to children on a video game streaming site.
My understanding is that Twitch is a separate org within Amazon. Amazon might oversee Twitch on an org level, but I'm pretty sure they're not involved with stuff like this.
The main thing is these are not "hot tubs" they are indoors, in a normal room, an apartment, in a kiddies play pool, with kiddies inflatable equipment. The water is, additionally, cold and a few inches deep. No-one in the world does this type of activity privately or in public.
It's so obviously soft core pornography and way away from the sensible "appropriate behaviour and clothing rules" that it's absurd.
Now there is the debate about sexuality and sex work. This is not applicable here. Amazon's Twitch is saying it's not sex work. One sure fire thought experiment is that, if it's not porn, would you be okay with a 13 yr old (the age limit on twitch) doing it?
To give credit to Amazon's Twitch they are dammned whatever they do.
Twitch is certainly aware of your argument because it’s true. Twitch doesn’t think there are actually hot tubs in peoples living rooms.
They know it’s basically soft core porn. They’re definitely not going to call it that. But they’ll separate it out from the rest of their content and let users and advertisers opt out of it.
I think this is the best option, at least for now. Shove all of these streamers into one category so they are now compete against each other. Previously, you could choose any game or category and scroll down until you inevitably found a streamer in a bikini. Now the entire category is bikinis, so there is a lot less uniqueness to their stream. It's a good solution to a problem that might go away on its own with the new rule.
They are talking about actually streaming. Would you be comfortable allowing a 13 year old girl in a bikini playing in an indoor inflatable pool that changes bikinis every 50 subs? The content is public, you can watch any stream without logging in.
Right, that's ofcourse different, but is that the right test?
"X is being done and filmed by an adult, and kids have access to this platform, would you be comfortable with a teenager doing the same?"
I can also think of a number of potentially dangerous activities, unrelated to sexual stuff, that would be appropriate for an adult to stream but not a kid.
> The main thing is these are not "hot tubs" they are indoors, in a normal room, an apartment, in a kiddies play pool, with kiddies inflatable equipment.
Some are, some not. There are Hot Tub-Streams in Gardes, Pools, beachs. And the whole thing did not even start with Hot Tubs. In the beginning it was just people on their bed.
The next looming issue for Twitch is the Slots/Video Poker streamers. Similar to swim suits, I don't think gambling as a whole should be totally against ToS. There are some great poker streamers, and there've been some quite successful charity drives around casino games.
But there's also one big streamer, famous with the CoD audience, that lately has been playing video poker on one of those bitcoin casino sites. He has swings of up to $100k in a single night. His audience slants young and there's typically about 40k people watching him. That... makes me a bit uncomfortable. I'm far from someone that wants a nanny state, but I'm squeamish about the idea of say a 20 year old kid watching this behavior as a role model, trying to emulate it, and losing a non trivial amount of money at a point in their life where that would have a huge lasting impact. This streamer can only do this because he's insanely rich so even $100k is just play money.
A test I like to use to isolate my concerns is replacement.
Replace "actual money" with "fake money" in this casino example. Is the streamer playing poker entertaining, or are people watching because of the high-stakes gambling?
Replace "woman" for "man" in these tub streams. Are people watching for the games or the streamer's personality, or for their body?
I'd go so far as to say you should be able to replace within any protected class with minimal effect on viewership. If that's not true, there's some bias being expressed.
Besides traditional gambling, there is/was this whole idea of paid "skins" in games (cosmetic enhancements that - thankfully - don't give you any advantage) and there is/was a site where you could gamble with them. Some popular streamers were gambling thousands worth of skins on these sites are were seen winning, while in reality I'm sure the gambling site was actually in on it and was sponsoring the gambling (if not outright skewing the odds in his favour) to entice viewers to do the same (but most likely lose).
They claim that they only prohibit things that are intentionally suggestive, but every streamer is afraid to accidentally show their feet because they get a ban. Twitch has inconsistencies in the way they apply their policies, and they sometimes don’t even tell a streamer why they got a ban. Creating a beach and hot tub category is the least of their worries. But at least it makes it easier for me to intentionally find attractive women in swimsuits who are streaming their sexiness unintentionally, and filter them out when I’m not looking for it.
>. But at least it makes it easier for me to intentionally find attractive women in swimsuits who are streaming their sexiness unintentionally,
...do you honestly think it's unintentional? The issue is twitch are open hypocrites. They take a cut of money people 'donate' to these sexually suggestive streamers. They don't need the advertisers on those streams because the money is already coming in from the viewers.
No, that was the internet failing to convey my sarcasm. Twitch just said, “hey folks, hot tub streams aren’t sidestepping the rules, so here’s a special category to make it easier for you to not sidestep the rules, wink wink.”
They ought to just enable explicit content and put in decent parental controls rather than this B.S. Advertisers might actually prefer having a clearly defined explicit content tag, rather than risking their ads running next to soft-explicit streams.
I've seen multiple streamers, especially women, who are playing games or normal twitch things and end up modifying their behavior because of fear of this rule. A whole bunch of twitch streamers are wearing slippers in case their feet end up on camera for a second.
The whole rule started because people were monetizing feet content which obviously leans lewd, but the poor rule targeting has ended up with all kinds of weird consequences.
I watch an aussie food streamer, she's always barefoot in summer. She's been streaming for around 3 years, the only problems she had were related to excessive swearing. Not even spanking her partner was a problem.
Part of it is less fear of Twitch themselves but how some of the more toxic people in the audience react. Sadly if a woman does something like simply stand up and walk across the room showing their rear in an utterly ordinary way, some folks will not just say nasty stuff, they'll publish the clip on reddit subs like /r/LiveStreamFail and try to drive up a mob behind it. Then said streamer increasingly has this mob of viewers that's a combination of horney enthusiasm or hate watchers, neither of which they wanted in most cases.
Sweet Anita has had some great discussions on this. She has Tourettes, including ticks that violate the ToS, but has successfully negotiated things with twitch to make that ok. So Twitch isn't straight up incapable of nuance here, they're just being inconsistent and incompetent.
Aside from the "I know it when I see it"[0] angle, here are my thoughts.
Long, long ago, I dabbled in content hosting, and still sometimes daydream about doing business along those lines. When it comes to the thought of my hypothetical service hosting purely sexual content it's not due to any puritanism that I'd prefer that my platform have rules against it.
Sexual content (ie. porn) brings with it regulatory burdens, potential public scrutiny, a large revenue stream that might end up incentivizing product development detrimental to the service's original purpose, and from a marketing perspective it might cause the public to associate your service with certain kinds of content (see: Tumblr) which limits your growth options.
It seems to me that Twitch so far isn't seeing the drawbacks I just listed when it comes to hot tub streams, hence their response.
Yeah. The post makes much more sense to me in terms of arguing that it doesn't go against regulations / rules of their payment processors, etc.
It seems they've had trouble in the past trying to draw lines around sexual activity. It's a safe bet that if hot tub streams got banned, all the involved streamers would still keep toeing the line as far as they can. Drawing a broad line & cordoning it off seems reasonable.
Though I wonder if there remains an incentive for pushing boundaries in 'just chatting'.
>Though I wonder if there remains an incentive for pushing boundaries in 'just chatting'.
I don't know about pushing boundaries but there will still certainly be lots of intentionally sexualized content in the just chatting category, it will just be milder than the new category on average.
The test of "the people who like that kind of thing also like this" could also apply here to decide whether a stream is sexual or not. Recommendation engines cut both ways.
> especially considering the ways that female characters are sometimes objectified or presented in a sexualized manner
Probably the most interesting and persuasive case they have. What if a human being dressed like League's Evelynn, a succubus? Would they be banned from Twitch? No, of course not. Would it be sexually suggestive? They've illuminated how disingenuous of a question that is, because Evelynn is a character in a game people stream.
A perhaps relevant anecdote: I interviewed at Twitch many years back and it happened to be on Halloween. My recruiter was dressed up as some league of legends character - perhaps Ahri (she had a tail and animal ears). It was not strictly western business casual but clearly it was not notably outside Twitch’s cultural norms.
The context here is that one of the most prolific twitch streamers recently had her advertising cut with no warning. (They still run ads on her stream, but she doesn’t get any of the proceeds, if I understand it.)
Someone put it like “she’s doing the equivalent of holding a finger in front of your face and saying ‘not touching you! Not touching you!’ for a no-touching policy.”
I'm not sure why it's relevant that they have OnlyFans links, unless Amazon's position is that no one who has an OnlyFans or who makes adult content on other platforms is allowed on Twitch.
> “she’s doing the equivalent of holding a finger in front of your face and saying ‘not touching you! Not touching you!’ for a no-touching policy.”
In other words, she's in compliance with the policy?
It's relevant because it makes it clear what their intent is: To advertise their porn through twitch, half the audience of which is underage.
It's the same reason some casual nudity subreddits banned people with onlyfans from posting, they infiltrate communities with the single purpose of getting customers.
She’s in compliance with the policy. And her channel isn’t banned — she’s free to stream.
But apparently when she streams, she doesn’t earn advertising revenue. That’s not really a ToS issue; twitch’s advertising partners get the final say there.
(It seems nuts that they still run ads on her channel at all, though. If they’re showing ads, it makes no sense that she doesn’t get a cut.)
>In what universe is this an acceptable outcome for a TOS violation?
in the universe where it's unlikely for small streamers to successfully sue twitch for stealing revenue. It's an egregious abuse but its one that has to be first arbitrated and then sued over and its unlikely to succeed so no one has really done it.
It wasn't a TOS violation until today's announcement... at the time her revenue stream was cut off her content was in compliance with the letter (if not the spirit) of twitch's published policy.
They also only cut her advertising after she blurted out on stream that her hot tub streams were good in the short term and long term detrimental to Twitch's platform.
Hasn’t the business model been either top-notch gaming or this, the soft core porn niche? I mean, most women streaming on twitch are using their looks and body for viewership. It’s the oldest play in the book. It’s all over YouTube as well (show a girl in a thong, get a million views). Twitch should just create a NSFW/Verified 18+ section and be done with it. I think the real issue is with advertisers. They don’t want to be associated with porn or even suggestive content. Twitch won’t police their platform so people are going to continue meeting the “bare minimum” definition and argue they are following the rules.
> I mean, most women streaming on twitch are using their looks and body for viewership. It’s the oldest play in the book
This is the real sticking point. If they came down hard against titty streamers they would be destroying a large portion of their own viewer base.
Not to mention how bad it would look from a "Twitch is being sexist" viewpoint. Top male streamers would continue to do extremely well, male streamers would be unaffected almost entirely ( I bet some stream shirtless or whatever sometimes and might get in trouble from that )
But lets be real, such a crackdown would basically only effect women.
Also any policy like that would hit women who are into positive body expression, without trying to use it as a popularity tool. I.e. they'd have to figure out how to tell apart those who work on being suggestive for money and that who just enjoy being suggestive in life. Kind of like the repeating issue for https://mobile.twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg who as far as I can tell is strongly in the second category.
But that's in the mind reading area - they just can't do it reliably.
> they'd have to figure out how to tell apart those who work on being suggestive for money and that who just enjoy being suggestive in life
I don't think they'd bother trying to tell them apart. The issue Twitch wants to police here isn't the willingness or coercion, it's the suggestiveness behaviour entirely.
If they actually attempted that, it would blow up in their face, because there's no clear line. There will always be very attractive women who will not want to cover themselves up just to satisfy some policy. They will get flagged in that situation as suggestive either maliciously or in genuine false positives. (This already happens in other places, which is why I'm so certain)
Not familiar with her at all but after looking at her youtube channel for a few minutes, what makes you put her in the second category?
Honest question, not judging just curious what sets her apart in your mind? I think there's a chance she has good content to go along with her obvious attempts to use her sexuality to get clicks, but to me it looks like she's being suggestive explicitly for money in addition to whatever else she might do.
And there are lots of people that use their sexuality for money and also have some kind of actual content to go along with it IMO. There's a spectrum of behavior in streaming/youtubing.
I’m all about body positivity but the policies of twitch are really hit or miss with who they come down on and who they let off the hook. It’s inconsistent. Super streamers get booted off for making a simple stupid side cuff rant yet violators of their policies continue to stream without recourse. It’s like it’s moderated by 16 year olds.
This is a consistent problem among all social media platforms, imo.
My theory is there a couple of key problems that lead to this crummy moderation, but it essentially all stems from the fact these platforms are too huge to moderate effectively.
First, because they are so huge, they have limited customer support. It's very hard to get ahold of a human being at any of these companies, because users are not the customers.
Second, to offset the challenge of moderating at scale, they have a lot of automation. This leads to people getting moderated without nuance. We don't notice the false negatives or when it's working right, but there are many false positives (because the platform is huge) and news about them spreads rapidly. Then because there is no real avenue for customer support, people can't get it fixed.
Third, because there are no real repercussions, moderators play favourites. There is no real customer service channel so complaints against bad moderating go largely unheard. When you heard about a channel being unbanned almost immediately when larger channels stay banned and it never seems to be fixed, that's likely a human who has a bias towards one over another. People who have an in with the moderation team can get preferential treatment for sure.
This is all just a theory. These companies don't really have any incentive to investigate their moderation teams for this sort of behavior so they probably don't. And if they did investigate it, they certainly wouldn't tell anyone if they found evidence of it.
> Third, because there are no real repercussions, moderators play favourites. There is no real customer service channel so complaints against bad moderating go largely unheard. When you heard about a channel being unbanned almost immediately when larger channels stay banned and it never seems to be fixed, that's likely a human who has a bias towards one over another. People who have an in with the moderation team can get preferential treatment for sure.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the massive user generated content sites have hand-curated Do Not Ban lists to protect their top VIP users from the whims of the algorithms. Would a top-100 app ever get automation-banned from the Apple Store? Would a popular celebrity get automation-banned from Twitter? I bet, for the select list of "favorites," any ban action goes through multiple levels of human judgment. For the rest of us schmucks, it's a roll of the algorithm dice.
I would tend to agree with this except for the issue of DrDisrespect and Twitch. They kicked him off pretty quickly for some in-character rant about politics. I won’t go into it here but he was considered a top-100 on twitch so I think there’s still room for those “elite ranked” streamers to get the hammer.
It's more generic - basically it's about not judging people's worth or intentions by their bodies. Whether they're unusually obese, unusually sexually attractive, unusually something else...
> Sexually suggestive content–and where to draw the line–is an area that is particularly complex to assess, as sexual suggestiveness is a spectrum that involves some degree of personal interpretation of where the line falls
This is just in general why I have an issue with prudeness in our society. I have no idea where prudeness comes from, is it innate to some people? Is it a taught trait? But it seems to cause so much discord and disagreement yet is inherently safe and peaceful.
> This is just in general why I have an issue with prudeness in our society.
My brain reacts to sexual stimuli, as it evolved to. I don't want that reaction when I'm riding the metro, or in a work meeting, or having a family dinner. So it's helpful to have a set of social norms about when and where to expect and accept sexual content and when not to.
> I have no idea where prudeness comes from, is it innate to some people? Is it a taught trait?
It's cultural. Norms change, sometimes rapidly. In video games, sexy characters who used to be contentious have been commonplace for a while now, and this hot tub streams thing is just over the line. Maybe in a decade, softcore streamers will be normal but streaming hardcore sex will just over the line.
> But it seems to cause so much discord and disagreement yet is inherently safe and peaceful.
Is the "it" here prudery or provocation?
Prudery is at one end of the spectrum with provocativeness on the other. There's almost no way you aren't prudish in some way. Prudery is usually about control but it's only bad when it can't be relaxed in private or when that control becomes a means of oppression.
Because as you get older over time you can observe how this kind of "content" messes up young peoples' expectations about the average human body, instills a shallow and superficial mindset about relationships, and generally does absolutely nothing of value for anyone except the parasite who is manipulating ignorant or desperate people using sexuality for profit.
It’s strange how people will readily admit that advertising can cause unhealthy eating habits but sexual content can never cause unhealthy sexual habits.
Probably it comes from the fact that humans are so naturally attracted to things sexual in nature, that without controls the whole world would look like the seediest red light district you can imagine. With everyone competing to be more and more extreme to get attention.
Let's imagine this is true - so what? Would people be unhappy? Would someone die? would people have less issues with their personal lives is sex expression wasn;t at troubles as it is?
I think it is a matter of preferences. More people would prefer it not be that way than would prefer it be that way. Probably people raising kids especially would rather not have explicit sexual stuff so in-your-face as it would likely be if we didn't have rules and societal standards about such things. I'm personally glad that my seven year old can use a computer and the web without being utterly bombarded with the type of stuff you'll see if you, say, stop over to the Pirate Bay or 4-chan or something. Then again, I'm glad I don't live in Victorian times where it is scandalous if a woman shows a little ankle.
That doesn't mean people would die or that some arbitrary percentage of the population would cross some arbitrary level of unhappiness if it were your way. The world isn't so black and white.
You presumably have different preferences. But you don't get to impose yours on the world just because you think they are better or more free or meet whatever ideals you have. We all kinda get to weigh in, and some sort of compromise is reached.
would you say the same about violence? let’s allow people to be violent as is natural. sex is tied to violence and competition. look how it is with animals; males fight to death for a chance to mate. that’s how it will be more or less
Tide and Coke and GM would definitely advertise on PornHub if they didn't know that a vocal chunk of their consumers would actively protest, and stop buying those products.
But advertising on a website that is oriented towards Let's Play and educational lectures and video games? Of course!
Twitch just needs to make the sexual content deniable and findable at the same time... which they have just done.
> We recently suspended advertising on some channels that were flagged by the majority of our advertiser base and failed to notify them. Our creators rely on us, and we should have alerted affected streamers to this change before it happened–it was a mistake not to do so. We’re working with individual creators to address their specific situations and restore ads where appropriate.
What do others here think about Twitch’s behavior here? Should there be SLAs for actions taken on an account and notification of the account holder of said action?
As long as they shove all those pool streamers into that specific category and don't show it at all on their main recommendation screen than I will be happy.
Nice, it's good that they're bringing clarity since there's so much of this sort of content now. Hopefully Twitch becomes more consistent and transparent with how they enforce content policies moving forward. There's very unclear feedback or warnings provided to streamers, and there seems to be quite a bit of nepotism. All sorts of streamers from all different communities can corroborate this.
> Second, while we have guidelines about sexually suggestive content, being found to be sexy by others is not against our rules, and Twitch will not take enforcement action against women, or anyone on our service, for their perceived attractiveness.
Twitch is open for 13 years old people, as a streamer (I don't remember who) said, what if a 13-year-old started a hot tub stream? Will it be sexually suggestive content or is it a 13 years old kid having innocent fun ?
Twitch is truly a mess... The enforcement is all over the place...
Not that Youtube isn't also "interesting" in some content moderation. Outright nudity is possible with thin veil of "educational" content.
I wish the platforms just applied rules equally and had clear rules. And not punish past content with new rules. But maybe that is too much to ask these days...
So no changes really, except they've made it a distinct category so that people can find this content easily without leaving the site and going to something like booba.tv for discovery (nsfw I guess, it is curated links to "sexually suggestive" twitch streamers).
It's a slippery slope. There are a lot of things that are intentionally sexual suggestive in society that we don't bat an eye at such as makeup, push-up bras, and yoga pants. When will they start banning these things?
It’s a tricky issue because it pits the capitalistic tendencies of wanting to make as much money as possible against the ethical tendencies of trying not to contribute to most girls’ body issues.
My real question is all the young men that will have to marry all these women exposing themselves online for money. Three times in the past week I drove by a car where a girl put her venmo on the window. On dating apps its now common for girls to have a venmo in their profile. This culture is far more widespread than just twitch.
Japan has a whole industry of cute girls in bikini or other costumes posing suggestively while acting cute or innocent known as Gravure Idols. I once asked
a Japanese friend why when you have porn, he replied something like "It's hard to fantasize about a pornstar being your girlfriend/wife".
There are as many Rule 34 categories as humanity has dreams, and no one has solved that problem at humankind scale.
> I really don't get it. What is the joy
You're asking why one specific instance of Rule 34 exists. It's because all instances of Rule 34 exist, and this one just happens to have become popular on Twitch. Rule 34, while distressing, is unfortunately a very real aspect of the human race at scale; it essentially says that if you can imagine something, it will be found erotic by someone, no matter how much it is or isn't erotic to you. I think it was first invented in the time of Usenet, when people would create ever-more-specific newsgroup hierarchies, but I'm honestly not sure.
When we democratized content creation, we made it possible for niche fetishes to be discoverable, to form communities, and to financially support content creators. For example, "1800s-era bathing costumes" is absolutely a niche that some subset of humanity will pay money to see more of. There are much more specific, weird, and uncomfortable niches. (We're lucky that this one is so boring and dull, relatively speaking, because it's possible to discuss it without squick.)
It's not about "getting" why it's erotic to some and not others. That's between you and your own erotic desires or lack thereof for any given content. It's about the greater question of how and when society will come to terms with erotic content appearing in "general content" pools on platforms that co-mingle all user-created content without human curation. In this case, Twitch openly admits that they haven't solved that problem:
> This is not intended to be our long-term solution to improve brand targeting capabilities and increase personalization in our recommendations. It does, however, solve a few issues for all audiences in the near term.
But they do clearly understand that, even within the bounds of "no nudity or sex", it's still very possible for content to be erotic to some and uninteresting/offensive to others. I am very curious to see what their next steps will be after this temporary patch, because there's no way to categorize or exclude all Rule 34 content on any content platform where users can upload content without human review and classification, and I don't think that Twitch's short-term compromise today will be a viable long-term solution.
Thinking about it more - it is most likely just very lonely men that is seeking a connection to an attractive women -
It reminds of Japan and their hostess clubs - no sex just companionship and chatting for an hour at a price.
It's the same unholy transformation every company goes through. Creating a company from nothing usually takes heart and soul. Once a company is established you stop needing the true believers. You stop needing the love. Love and maximizing profits are not compatible. I'll bet if you had data on the number of Twitch t-shirts sold over the last five years it would be a steady decline. Almost any company built on appealing to a specific demographic will choose to genericize itself if it can.
It makes a lot of money but I find it terribly sad.
Because Twitch focuses largely on marketing directly to children? You cannot separate the fact that Twitch is trying to become the site for all gaming (including children) and also allowing nearly-softcore porn on the same site. Its literally a few clicks away. Now, they think because they made a separate category, advertisers will be fine with it.
They are lucky that hot tub streamers haven't gotten mainstream news attention yet, I can't imagine the outrage of parents when they see some of the stuff thats allowed....
> I didn't know there were so many outraged prudes on twitch. Why should twitch have a sexually suggestive content rule in the first place?
If you're asserting that thinking hot tub streams break ToS, and Twitch's selective enforcement of that ToS causes problems very frequently on their platform, makes me an "outraged prude", well I'm sorry friend. Gaslighting an entire community doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
> Nudity or sexually explicit content (which we define as pornography, sex acts, and sexual services) are not allowed on Twitch.
Is wearing a bikini, facing away from a camera and touching your toes for $5 not sexually explicit?
> I don't see what the huge issue with showing off your own sexiness is. Sheesh!
The issue is inconsistency. I think they should update the ToS to support these streamers - they're some of the biggest streamers on the platform. To suggest that those streamers are not being sexually suggestive is, again, an absolute joke. Twitch themselves made the determination that sexually suggestive content is not welcome on their platform, not me.
Because there are other places for that. Many people browse twitch at work (let’s not debate that) and don’t want to see that kind of content. Or on machines visible at home around other family members.
These women have every right to do as they please, and most likely will continue to push the boundaries of twitch’s tolerance. I suspect we will have car washing streams or sauna streams next to get around the rule.
It seems like a lot of the people in this thread are not really twitch users and aren't really aware of what's being discussed. They're seeing "Hot Tub Streams" and think it's just a person sitting in a hot tub, unaware of how sexual these streams have become.
Even if that were the case, they need to be segregated, very clearly from normal streams. I don't want to see women or men in minimal close when casually browsing in a public place.
Americans are still ashamed of sexuality and think it needs to be locked up. That said, it's clearly not 'just chatting' and probably belongs in a 'sexysexy' category.
>Prohibiting every form of content that could be interpreted as suggestive would also result in far more restrictions on the video games and premium content that we currently allow, especially considering the ways that female characters are sometimes objectified or presented in a sexualized manner.
The joke is asserting that hot tub streams aren't sexually suggestive. The twitch community seems to love them, so of course Twitch will fight tooth and nail to keep them. But to suggest that they aren't sexually suggestive (and by proxy against Twitch ToS) is an absolute joke. They look like clowns.
They don't say that. Did you actually read what they wrote? It is very nuanced.
Their rule is that it can't be "overtly or explicitly sexually suggestive", and they acknowledge that it lies on a spectrum. They have to draw the line somewhere. To some people, for instance the Amish or fundamentalism Muslims, the line is very different from that of typical Westerners.
> There has been confusion around whether streams from hot tubs are permissible under our current policies, and we understand why our rules as written have contributed to that confusion. Under our current Nudity & Attire and Sexually Suggestive Content policies, streamers may appear in swimwear in contextually appropriate situations (at the beach, in a hot tub, for example), and we allow creative expression like body writing and body painting, provided the streamer has appropriate coverage as outlined by our attire policy. Nudity or sexually explicit content (which we define as pornography, sex acts, and sexual services) are not allowed on Twitch.
I again ask, is wearing a bikini, facing away from a camera and touching your toes for $5 not a sexual service?
Surely you recognize that these things lie on a spectrum. Is charging admission for beach volleyball a sexual service? No matter your level of prudishness, you will be able to find something that is right in the gray area.
> Is charging admission for beach volleyball a sexual service?
This question actually perfectly articulates the difference. When you pay $5 to watch a beach volleyball tournament, you're paying for volleyball, and may as a side effect experience content that _some_ may find sexual. By Twitch's ToS, this should totally be allowed.
As for my example, is there a nonsexual reason to pay a woman 5 dollars to bend over in front of you? What is it?
So you've come up with an example that is clearly on one side of the line. Ok, but not sure what that proves. I don't think anyone has argued that there aren't any clear cut cases.
What you are missing is that whatever rule you make, people are going to try to push the limits, because it gets them viewers. If twitch says that someone bending over in a bikini has no non-sexual purpose and therefore is against the rules, the creators could change the stream very slightly.... just enough so they can claim to be about exercise, yoga, modeling fashion, or dance. They'd still have the same audience, with the exact same reason for watching, but now it sneaks by the rule.
Pole dancing is an art and takes athletic skill, sure, but most people (at least in the US) consider it is purely viewed for sexual gratification. But creators could claim its "main" purpose is to enjoy the dancing for its artistic and athletic merit.
Sports Illustrated has a swim suit issue, and it's not about swimming so how is that sports? It's just an excuse.
The majority of art channels on twitch are people drawing sexy (often anime-style) girls and women. You can learn to draw from them, but the sexier they make them, the more viewers they get.
So... I really don't get what you are trying to say. You seem to not understand that there is gray area.
It seems that you think I'm referencing a contrived example to prove my point, when in reality I'm referencing the actual donation gifts for the vast majority of Hot Tub Streamers (which, please note, is not "people that sometimes stream in a hot tub", but is now a specific genre of stream of which many people exclusively stream).
People have been sometimes streaming from hot tubs for years, and it's always been the exact grey area you're describing. Only very recently has it turned into a hypersexualized scenario, which is why Twitch is putting out more content condoning it.
> You seem to not understand that there is gray area.
I do. You don't seem to understand that the vast majority of the streams this change will encapsulate are not grey at all.
Engagement doesn't pay the bills. In fact advertisers don't want to pay for this and don't want their advertising shown on these streams. Ultimately that's what the new policy is about. They're adding a new category so that advertisers can filter these things out.
What a truly excellent strawman. Do you see no middle ground between obviously sexual content and a Burqa? Is there no middle ground between writing someone's name on your breasts for $5 and going to the beach to swim?
What is that middle ground? Do you codify and say women can't write things on their chest? What about in a video game? Should streaming Cyberpunk 2077 be banned - it clearly has sexual content? I'm not making a straw man - I'm trying to point out your essentially saying "they should ban content I don't like", which means Twitch will apply the rules in anyway you fit - another complaint you have brought up.
Again, are you saying streamers shouldn't be allowed to go to the beach? Or are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to wear bikinis? And if another streamer watches a YouTube video that has a woman at the beach should they be banned?
> Again, are you saying streamers shouldn't be allowed to go to the beach? Or are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to wear bikinis? And if another streamer watches a YouTube video that has a woman at the beach should they be banned?
People set up kiddy-pools in their room with a bit of water to get this "contextual exception" for the express purpose of streaming suggestive content. Why not just remove the exception and let people stream sexually suggestive content and make a separate category for that without a ridiculous "beaches and pools" euphemism?