[technonerd]

It's been a interesting past couple of days of drama but the article fails to mention that twitch employees were accepting large amounts of money from gambling streamers live on stream.

https://twitter.com/ostonox/status/1572264800616599552

https://nitter.rawbit.ninja/ostonox/status/15722648006165995...

[scifibestfi]

Is that what triggered this action now? It's odd because any category of streamer could be paying employees large sums of money to recommend them. A lot of gamers say that Pool & Hot Tub streams are being recommended despite only watching game streams. Now that's probably because they have high engagement and sub activity, but they or any category could just as well be influencing employees.

[nemothekid]

>A lot of gamers say that Pool & Hot Tub streams are being recommended despite only watching game streams.

Some hot tub streamers regularly get 10k+ viewers. If that viewer base overlaps with $your_favorite_streamer, then you will get hot tub streamer recommended. That said, I personally don't see problem with hot tub streamers; it seems like incredibly puritanical moral panic for some reason and I don't know why that gets so much attention in 2022.

[lucideer]

For this particular category I think there's going to be a lot more contributing variables than for gambling. Not only would it have high engagement and sub activity but:

- a lot of the streamers also game

- even if they don't, there are streamer cliques and social groups which are primarily gaming, of which they're a part

- a lot of viewers who only watch gaming will watch some streamer within the aforementioned clique/social group and be exposed to crossovers

- a lot of the viewers of that category also watch gaming streamers, so this will put those streams in the "people who watch this also watch" algorithmic bucket

None of the above are significantly the case for gambling except maybe the last one, and even then much less so.

[steveklabnik]

My understanding is that this is not the catalyst. The catalyst involves a bunch of drama between various streamers, which led to the revelation that a particular Twitch streamer had fraudulently asked to borrow something like $350,000 from various other streamers and viewers, and had gambled it all away.

Once that happened, a bunch of influential streamers started to suggest that they may do a strike if Twitch didn't address the issue, and that was the final straw.

TechCruch's writeup is pretty good https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/20/twitch-sliker-gambling-dra... (though also, the article itself covers this, so, you know...)

[stale2002]

> It's odd because any category of streamer could be paying employees large sums of money to recommend them.

No, they couldn't. That is nonsense. I am a former twitch employee, of 4 years, and the recommendation algorithm is a complicated service, managed by whole teams of people.

A random employee couldn't just take a bribe, and get someone recommended.

The closest that someone could maybe do, is submit someone internally, to be hosted on the front page carousel for one specific day, for a few hours.

But even these manual requests are reviewed by a team of people, who especially make sure the front page people are brand safe. So the idea that they would put a "hot tub" streamer, on that manual hosting list is absurd.

[sam0x17]

The decision happened literally live while Hasan was talking about how terrible it is that gambling content is still allowed on Twitch in front of an enormous audience so I'm inclined to believe this exposure forced their hand on a decision they were already considering making, probably for a while.

[debacle]

It came out recently that a streamer exchanged lewd photos of herself for a ban on one of her "competitors."

Twitch has some serious, serious problems.

[rstat1]

>A lot of gamers say that Pool & Hot Tub streams are being recommended despite only watching game streams

In my experience, Twitch recommendations seem to be based heavily on what you watch, so if that's what they're seeing its probably because they watched it at some point.

[zzixp]

According to what I've seen on /r/livestreamfail (take everything with the finest grain of salt possible), it was only one twitch employee who took money, and they have since passed away.

[MichaelCollins]

> it was only one twitch employee who took money,

Ha. Take that with a global annual production of salt.

[legohead]

Supposedly it was a raffle created by the streamer, which the employee should not have joined. But I wasn't there so again, hearsay.

[gloryjulio]

(We know so far)

[blint_carton]

I wouldn't be surprised if that's against a "Twitch/Amazon code of conduct", but that fact at face value doesn't mean anything nefarious. These could call center employees, qa testers, developers, etc that have no connection to the internal politics of deciding what is allowed on the platform.

If they are in fact the decision makers or able to influence policy, yes that' doesn't seem right.

[plandis]

This was the give away to random people in chat that happened months ago?

[randac]

Yes. IIRC there were two low level Twitch employees who won something in the giveaway, but I believe they were entered because they performed chat moderation (yes, using the same mod tools normal channel moderators use) for the streamer in question (Trainwrecks). It's being made out like this was some form of bribe, but that seems disingenuous given they have (had, one died, one left the company) no influence over Twitch policies, and the decision to accept gifts (or not) is their responsibility as an Amazon employee either way. Perhaps they have colleagues who they could sway who are involved in policy setting, but that feels like reaching to me.

However take this with a pinch of salt too, I wouldn't like to bet on being fully correct! ;)