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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

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.

KapKap55 5y ago
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.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  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.
bombcar 5y ago
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.
- makomk 5y ago
  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.
TchoBeer 5y ago
>Other women on the platform have complained about their audiences pressuring them into producing similar content. I'm not at all in touch with twitch stuff, so I'm just reading about this now. That's horrible. Would making stricter bans help?
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
> "Men garner popularity by exhibiting their skills, women garner popularity by exhibiting their bodies." In what way does this foster non-productive attitudes in boys and young men?
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    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.
floatingatoll 5y ago
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.
- robto 5y ago
  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.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- dangerface 5y ago
cblconfederate 5y ago
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.
slightwinder 5y ago
> 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.

KapKap55 5y ago

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.

sleepybrett 5y ago
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.

bombcar 5y ago

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.

makomk 5y ago
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.

TchoBeer 5y ago

>Other women on the platform have complained about their audiences pressuring them into producing similar content. I'm not at all in touch with twitch stuff, so I'm just reading about this now. That's horrible. Would making stricter bans help?

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

> "Men garner popularity by exhibiting their skills, women garner popularity by exhibiting their bodies." In what way does this foster non-productive attitudes in boys and young men?

Manuel_D 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Clewza313 5y ago
  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.

floatingatoll 5y ago

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.

robto 5y ago
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.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
dangerface 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago

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.

slightwinder 5y ago

> 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.