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> Or two years ago, or three? Because 3 years ago (2020), their average concurrent viewer count increased from 1.26 to 2.12 million and average monthly streame

> Or two years ago, or three? Because 3 years ago (2020), their average concurrent viewer count increased from 1.26 to 2.12 million and average monthly streamers grew from 3.6 to 6.9 million. Both nearly 100% growth. Then the next year they both grew by about 30%. The company, for good reason, probably thought they needed more people -- more support staff, more payments to process, more server admins, more HR people to support those other people, etc. But in 2022 growth declined, both viewers and streamers. It is still Q1 of the next year, a perfectly reasonable time to lay people off as future projections have been lowered. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/ I know it's more fun to rant on HN and try to make corporate executives seem evil and nasty and selfish, but if you did a bit of research you'd see it is all pretty justifiable.

savingsPossible 4y ago
You can be reasonable from your point of view, and still be evil and nasty and selfish. I'll bite the bullet: damn maximizing profits. It's a bad, inhuman goal. You got people creating things other people enjoy and are making money. That is more than enough, more than most people get. When you maximize profit at the expense of your workers, instead of just keeping it sustainable, you are acting like an evil, nasty, selfish bastard. How the hell do we get coders, mostly workers, defending the POV of the employer like that? Coders of the world, *ing unite :P --- But if they don't maximize profit, another company will, and eventually it'll eat them for dinner. Well, lets get some laws then? Say, lets *ing cap profits. Company sizes. Again, workers of the world and all that Communism was a resounding failure, and one sad consequence of that failure is that now we seem ok with growing concentration of power and wealth, and everyone seems to think like a capitalist, when so few actually are. An important goal for a decent democracy is to counterbalance the inherent tendency of concentration that comes with capitalism, so that common people keep having cash and capitalists keep working for said common people. --- But then other countries will... (see above. Laws and all that. Free movement of capital, low tariffs without regard to other democratic and social goals, they stop democracy on its tracks while concentration grows) --- While we are at it? The whole 'build a moat' startup thing? Well, it can (maybe?) protect you from google and facebook, but is also a call to reduce competition in a way that specifically harms users and workers (coders of the world, unite with the workers and stop pretending you are not workers yourselves?) --- Also: https://nitter.net/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049#m https://nitter.net/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049#m profit per employee. Again, your salary might not look so hot now, specially if you are helping getting other people unemployed also, what a nasty metric to try to optimize (sorry for the nitter link, if twitter is somewhat more confortable: https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049 https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049) (coders of the world, kindly notice that your employers are actively trying to reduce your share of the pie, and, well... At least think about it? Call me maybe?)
- listenallyall 4y ago
  what evidence do you have that Twitch is making money? why do you seem to think employees should have a job for life, anything else is "evil"? can you concede that some percentage of employees, for a variety of reasons, are not providing value to the company?
- Panzer04 4y ago
  Maximising profits might come at the expense of the worker, but it benefits the economy as a whole. The reason maximising profits is such an excellent goal is because it indirectly leads to maximising profit per worker (especially in lean times, when there's less cash to go around and you focus more on efficiency as opposed to revenue). The highest net benefit to society comes from having the highest possible productivity per person. Layoffs suck, but they also improve business efficiency since in general the less productive workers are laid off. It's a bit harsh to say, but those freed-up workers eventually end up somewhere else, where hopefully they fit in better, be more productive etc. A big reason other systems fail is because they don't focus on that metric. There's no feedback loop from per-person productivity, resulting in either stagnancy or even degradation in living standards.
  - savingsPossible 4y ago
    If the metric is important (and it might well be! -- I bet it is) it needs not translate into more profit for amazon. Say you want to maximize efficiency, and you think revenue per worker is a good proxy. Then you can use the extra resources for: * charitable donations * keeping the employees and putting them in an open-source charitable division I agree that market forces are powerful and can be used to do good things. I disagree that this fact should be used to justify evil behavior and greed (also, laying A off and hiring B is ok -- they are not, they are reducing the workforce) (also, the argument is symmetrical. If they had not hired, and were profiting too much, I'd think that almost as greedy and evil -- the difference is the disruption of the life of the person fired) (also, firing A and giving the money away to some charitable cause is ok) (also, profit maximization pure and simple is ok, as long as the government has the balls to take a lot of it and redistribute, to keep capitalists from concentrating too much money -- concentration leads to distortions, in the sense that the needs of the ultra rich are prioritized. The point of having a healthy economy is to have people in general live more and better lives.)

savingsPossible 4y ago

You can be reasonable from your point of view, and still be evil and nasty and selfish. I'll bite the bullet: damn maximizing profits. It's a bad, inhuman goal. You got people creating things other people enjoy and are making money. That is more than enough, more than most people get. When you maximize profit at the expense of your workers, instead of just keeping it sustainable, you are acting like an evil, nasty, selfish bastard. How the hell do we get coders, mostly workers, defending the POV of the employer like that? Coders of the world, *ing unite :P --- But if they don't maximize profit, another company will, and eventually it'll eat them for dinner. Well, lets get some laws then? Say, lets *ing cap profits. Company sizes. Again, workers of the world and all that Communism was a resounding failure, and one sad consequence of that failure is that now we seem ok with growing concentration of power and wealth, and everyone seems to think like a capitalist, when so few actually are. An important goal for a decent democracy is to counterbalance the inherent tendency of concentration that comes with capitalism, so that common people keep having cash and capitalists keep working for said common people. --- But then other countries will... (see above. Laws and all that. Free movement of capital, low tariffs without regard to other democratic and social goals, they stop democracy on its tracks while concentration grows) --- While we are at it? The whole 'build a moat' startup thing? Well, it can (maybe?) protect you from google and facebook, but is also a call to reduce competition in a way that specifically harms users and workers (coders of the world, unite with the workers and stop pretending you are not workers yourselves?) --- Also: https://nitter.net/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049#m https://nitter.net/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049#m profit per employee. Again, your salary might not look so hot now, specially if you are helping getting other people unemployed also, what a nasty metric to try to optimize (sorry for the nitter link, if twitter is somewhat more confortable: https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049 https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1342521433470210049) (coders of the world, kindly notice that your employers are actively trying to reduce your share of the pie, and, well... At least think about it? Call me maybe?)

listenallyall 4y ago
what evidence do you have that Twitch is making money? why do you seem to think employees should have a job for life, anything else is "evil"? can you concede that some percentage of employees, for a variety of reasons, are not providing value to the company?
Panzer04 4y ago
Maximising profits might come at the expense of the worker, but it benefits the economy as a whole. The reason maximising profits is such an excellent goal is because it indirectly leads to maximising profit per worker (especially in lean times, when there's less cash to go around and you focus more on efficiency as opposed to revenue). The highest net benefit to society comes from having the highest possible productivity per person. Layoffs suck, but they also improve business efficiency since in general the less productive workers are laid off. It's a bit harsh to say, but those freed-up workers eventually end up somewhere else, where hopefully they fit in better, be more productive etc. A big reason other systems fail is because they don't focus on that metric. There's no feedback loop from per-person productivity, resulting in either stagnancy or even degradation in living standards.
- savingsPossible 4y ago
  If the metric is important (and it might well be! -- I bet it is) it needs not translate into more profit for amazon. Say you want to maximize efficiency, and you think revenue per worker is a good proxy. Then you can use the extra resources for: * charitable donations * keeping the employees and putting them in an open-source charitable division I agree that market forces are powerful and can be used to do good things. I disagree that this fact should be used to justify evil behavior and greed (also, laying A off and hiring B is ok -- they are not, they are reducing the workforce) (also, the argument is symmetrical. If they had not hired, and were profiting too much, I'd think that almost as greedy and evil -- the difference is the disruption of the life of the person fired) (also, firing A and giving the money away to some charitable cause is ok) (also, profit maximization pure and simple is ok, as long as the government has the balls to take a lot of it and redistribute, to keep capitalists from concentrating too much money -- concentration leads to distortions, in the sense that the needs of the ultra rich are prioritized. The point of having a healthy economy is to have people in general live more and better lives.)