Wow is that an old version of NGINX. Bad sys admin! If you are going to change your server string, have some fun. Set it to “server 1.0. Today’s special is caramel horse apple”
The poor thing is probably mining bit coins and deploying ransomware!
I’ll never understand how Twitch became as big as a thing as it is.
"So you’re telling me that instead of watching a fifteen minutes of nicely edited video of content I can watch for hours of a greasy man in a tank top play a game for four hours and get fifteen minutes of good content in the time span? "(Literally) “Take my money!”
Smaller streams make more sense to me. It’s like a virtual social setting, an old school chatroom, but with a focus of attention, and a guy kind of structuring the whole thing, and a guy who can be engaged with. Occasionally, the streamer can be cool, most of the time they’re kind of a goblin, though, so the good streams are few and far between.
Larger streams don’t make much sense unless you kind of view them as being like, the same appeal as talk radio, or something, because the chat scrolls way too fast and most of it is emotes, so most messages will never get read, and never have anything good to say in the first place. There’s not much of an advantage for any of it to be live content, it just sort of is a relic of the format. Sometimes you get higher production stuff, most of the time it’s just some bald asshole ranting about the prices of things in costco and doing other bad stand up bits.
Edit: Also a big appeal is how brainrotted people are. The focus (I’m generalizing now across all internet platforms) is less on some specific information, and is more on “personality” and appeals like that, because that’s the most sustainable way to pump out a metric ton of content at all times, and algorithms tend to reward when you pump out a ton of content. And so you get a lot of parasocial relationships and non-content, and viewers, frankly, just watch whatever’s in front of them. There’s not a lot of control these platforms, increasingly, give you over what you’re watching anyways, and people aren’t going to keep pulling that skinner’s box lever unless they get a hit at some point. Most of the content ends up being dogshit, so you get a kind of selection for people who enjoy dogshit, and a lack of other options, so people just acclimate to their lack of alternative and become kind of complacent in their environment.
For twitch more specifically, you also basically just get shit that’s meant to only reward people’s dopamine centers, when they get their message read by the streamer, and then they keep pulling the lever on the slot machine over and over multiple times per stream. Either that, right, or you’re getting a lot of people who just don’t have many social relationships, and just want to feel like they’re part of a larger organization, or being, even if it’s totally mindless and meaningless. People who want to “turn off” and just kind of mindlessly be part of the flow of the chat, or what have you. That last part is the brainrot, basically.
A stream is a very different format for content, but that doesn’t necessarily make it worse - only different.
As streams are live, anything could happen, so there’s the possibility for unexpected excitement and being a part of that as it happens
Live chat can make a stream feel social and connected with other viewers
Streams give you the ability to speak to the streamer and change the outcome of the stream
I think that the way people consume content has also changed. A lot of people watch streams “in the background” just as noise while they do other things, not in a way where they are giving the stream their 100% focus in the way you would with a short and well-edited video.
This is 100% me, I just commented elsewhere a similar thing, for me I love that the streams tend to be long. I like having things playing for long periods at a time so having to stop and find a new video every 10 minutes is maddening especially if I’m at work and it’s more like background noise about a topic/game I enjoy.
I watch forsen a lot on twitch, and his chat streams at a hundred messages a second so no one will ever see your individual chat. It’s awesome because it’s like a hive mind at work. Everyone is spamming one emote, and then something on stream happens and then every single chatter simultaneously starts spamming another emote in reaction to that. It’s fun.
For me smaller streams aren’t fun because everything’s (generalizing here) super moderated. No unrelated chat, nothing negative, no backseat gaming, etc. It’s basically post something positive about the streamer or the game and that’s it. Of course if you’re watching your buddy with three other guys not applicable.
You can ask questions about the game and get a direct answer, often including someone showing you exactly the thing in the game you asked about.
Some streams are genuinely entertaining, such as GTA RP streams. These people mostly aren’t slobbering fat guys (though some are) but are actually working and acting the entire time.
I’ll never understand how Twitch became as big as a thing as it is.
You already answered that in your comment.
You want to watch videos, not livestreams. Of course a video will be better at being, you know, a video (nicely edited, in short format, etc). A livestream is different for many reasons, none of which interests you apparently.
Nothing wrong with that tbh. It’s just not for you.
I mainly watch speedruns and esports live because if you’re watching a video you already know if a runner has PBed or which team won (in the case if esports)
As a genXer I don’t get it either. The model at the moment referenced here makes much more sense to me at least. Not understanding twitch is a real marker of shifts in generational mindsets. I think I understand tech, but I wouldnt invest in tech sectors as I clearly don’t have the instinct for it anymore.
I always did this. I let my friends play and I watched. Dunno why really. I still find it extremely hard to play single player games (or solo multiplayer), I just get bored. I need to either watch or play with a friend.
For me it’s that twitch is a lot more personal, at least it used to be.
I met some of my best friends hanging out in smaller streams. That was 8 years ago. We still hang out daily in discord or on twitch when one of them streams.
I much prefer to watch gameplay on twitch. It’s a much more natural way of consuming content vs the super energetic, loud, pushy YouTube videos.
Edited game content provides very little entertainment value to me, while I mostly have streams turned on as background noise and check in occasionally to see what happens.
A buddy from college is a somewhat famous twitch streamer. I remember seeing him a few years after college and asking what he was up to, and couldn’t believe he was making any money just streaming himself playing League. My brain couldn’t comprehend who would want to watch that. That was like 10 years ago, and dude is still doing it, and hasn’t worked a real job in a decade. I’m low key jealous AF.
I had an application from someone who had his previous 3 years of work history as “Twitch streamer”. He didn’t even put his twitch name on there so we could look him up. That one went in the bin.
Right? The 15 minutes of watching someone else play would even be a challenge for me if I’m actually trying to pay attention. That is the kind of content I barely can do as background noise.
From my view, I enjoy watching Twitch for two main reasons:
For the same reason I like watching live sports rather than a 15 minute cut of highlights - the feeling of experiencing events in real time, the payoff of seeing a big play unfold after all the anticipation leading up to it, watching strategies and counter-strategies unfold in real time, that kind of stuff.
For the same reason I like watching video essays, stand-up comedy, interview shows, podcasts, or other media where one particular person is the focus - that person is entertaining to me. They have a personality I vibe with, they’re funny, they have an interesting perspective, etc.
To a lesser extent, it’s also nice background noise. I can throw a stream on at the beginning of my workday and not have to fiddle with it until I’m done with work, because it’s a constant, reliable source of background noise.
For years, Twitch’s “Just Chatting” section has basically been podcasts, Reaction content where streamers play a youtube and go take a shit, and (generally female presenting) streamers in various states of undress. You may have heard of “the hot tub meta” which involved putting on a skimpy bikini.
This has resulted in some pretty awkward front pages where it can look like you are looking out the window in a beach town or left a PG-13 movie on. Because, you know, bikinis.
This came to a head semi-recently when “the topless meta” became a thing where (generally) female (presenting) streamers would put on a tube top, position the camera like they are doing a face stream in the early 2010s, and make people think they are actually topless. So obviously a bunch of the most generic white guys with man buns on the planet (and Kai “Trick guests and other streamers into being raped by my violent rapist buddy” Cenat) lost their shit and competed to go viral with their Reaction content to putting something tamer than what TBS shows on daytime television when they play Austin Powers on the screen.
So Twitch/Amazon actually made a good decision for the first time in years by allowing artistic nudity and sexualized content so long as streamers checked a box that would add content warnings and take them off the front page. Which led to a race to promote OF/Fansly content by the streamers interested in that and to show how sexualized content is destroying the white man by the usual suspects. And Twitch, rather than try to moderate this, rolled it back.
Because, as OP demonstrates, there is this completely asinine “theory” that bikini streamers are ruining and taking over twitch. And, while I am not a fan and wish we had the content warning policy, they really aren’t. The top 100 streamers by almost any metric are almost universally dudes (many in tanktops because they hit the gym and male nipples aren’t scary) with the few female streamers being people like Pokimane or QTCinderella who actively do not do this kind of content.
But just look at people like andrew tate and like half of kick. There is a lot of money in pushing incel content and hate.
Yeah. After watching Charlanahzard's video I went right to Twitch to the Just Chatting section and I saw that exact thumbnail on a video. It was playing old videos but it was just so absolutely perfect.
I agree that 95% of the reason is just men being uncomfortable with women having success in “their” space when it involves their sexuality, but I can also sympathize with being unable to find a mid-sized chill stream to watch because so many of them are half-nude ASMR streams or body painting. It’s like how YouTube has so much trashy corporate garbage protmoted in its algorithm, it’s just exhausting to wade through sometimes.
The way incentives are currently set up on both sites just happen to prioritize those types of content though, so it’s pointless to get mad at the creators as if they’re doing something wrong. Twitch is still a step above YouTube in this aspect as well, since at least you can’t AI generate trash content that gets uploaded 100+ times daily on a livestream. You’re at least getting real people.
I see two streams where the face cam looks like it is a major part of the stream and I am pretty sure that was just “let’s make a thumbnail”. One workout stream which was a pretty standard gym attire. The only risque thing I found was one “Bodypaint Xmas (heart emoticon) !socials” and said body paint was good enough that I genuinely had to do a triple take to figure out she was not wearing a shirt. Oh, and a sumo wrestling channel that I followed because holy shit that is awesome.
Like most things: Your algorithm based recommendations mostly say a lot about you. Assuming you actually have a front page that looks like you left TBS on all day: Maybe stop watching the titty streams if you don’t want to see more titty streams?
It wouldn’t be on the front page anymore after the recent policy change, but if you go to “just chatting” it auto-sorts by view count, which is where most of that content is.
Their recommendation algorithm doesn’t care what you watch, it cares what other people who watch the same streamers as you watch. So if I watch a lot of shroud, I notice more titty streamers popping up in my recommendations because shroud viewers are more likely to watch titty streams.
More than anything it’s annoying. I come to twitch for gaming content. I really don’t appreciate my recommended tab needing to be censored. It’s not taking away viewers, but it is making the experience on the platform worse for many.
I still stand by not needing to actually censor something tamer than going to a public pool but…
That is literally what the policy changes were. Tag content that maybe shouldn’t be on the front page of a site where over 50% of users are 16-44. And everyone lost their minds and killed it.
And I am not familiar with shroud’s content. I know back in the day he was a “god gamer” but not sure what he streams these days. For what it is worth, after I “just couldn’t” with moistcritikal anymore, my youtube recommendations cleared themselves right up. Because, shockingly, watching someone who Reacts to everything means you tend to get the same trash he is Reacting to in your feed.
Most of my twitch follows are weird channels (like watching otters play in a pool) or O(100) streams like Remap. But I’ll tune into the occasional Pokimane or Disguised Toast stream and my front page is still pretty much gaming.
If I’m in public browsing through twitch, when that stuff pops up, it’s sure not looking like a public pool. 99% of the time it’s a woman with the bottom of the camera cutting off her nipples and a ton of cleavage right in your face. I have NSFW blurring turned on for every other service, because who would have known, people don’t want to see that stuff in public.
Everyone lost their mind because the problem got 100x worse the moment twitch loosened the guidelines, and there’s no way they could have subjectively moderated all of it.
Shroud is still 100% gaming. That doesn’t matter though, because as a large streamer, there’s a lot of overlap with the teenagers watching gaming content and titty streamers.
When I don’t watch any big streamers/fps streamers for a week or two the recommendations are almost always gone, except for the one I clicked on once out of genuine curiosity.
Just checked the Just Chatting tab. With five streams per row
Victoria (930 viewerrs) is “topless meta” at the top
Five rows in we have “melina” at 5.6k viewers with what looks like a splash screen of her in a lacy top. Maybe it is lingerie, maybe it is just a camiosole. A lot of leg is showing, but that is the kind of shit you see on a bus.
Eight rows in we have my big beefy sumo boys. I will admit, I tend to not see man ass in a thong in my every day life but I don’t think people mind.
Also eight rows in we have some hot pussy action with an adorable kittens stream
And at 46 rows I gave up because that seemed high but scrolling back it was at least in the 30s. The rest are just people podcasting, Reacting to other content, or whatever
And for funs, I checked the Beauty & Body Art tab. One person is getting a haircut, one dude (?) is face painting, and someone feminine looking looks like they are doing actual body paint but I can’t tell if they are doing pasties or what.
So of forty-ish rows I see three things that I would give a second take if I saw it on the street. Big beefy sumo boys, cute little kitties, and a woman in a tubetop.
I’ve noticed that softcore stuff has its prime-time, and it’s about late night in america - mid-late morning for me. Your comment was about 3 hours before I’m typing this, so it was definitely not a prime time.
This is exactly it. Insecure CHUDS hate that female sexuality has power over them so they seek to assert cultural control over it. It’s the same reason repressed assholes all over the world want to tell women what to wear and how to act.
I agree that 95% of the reason is just men being uncomfortable with women having success in “their” space
You ever watched those camgirl streams? They’re not having success in “men” space. Some of them literally coming straight from porn to expand audience. If twitch is about gaming, how forty minute breaks “gone to change bikini” is gaming? I keep getting recommended streams like that again and again even though I keep pressing “not interested”, sometimes I click on these streams and go straight to clips to see whether that person does anything but being naked, and recently I found one of the most popular clips from one of those channels that was with a girl in a public place being half naked and some little child asking her “are you a camgirl?” At least that was fun.
Sexual content is not the only thing that taints twitch. Various “political analysis” trash streams are also there. This is just not appropriate for a gaming platform. And twitch was like specifically created and stemed off from justintv to be a gaming platform.
I agree that 95% of the reason is just men being uncomfortable with women having success
back to your argument. There are thousands of women streaming on twitch who are actual gamers or do gaming related stuff. Damn, there’s even ex-pornstar Sasha Grey who’s just actually gaming. There’s absolutely zero issues with girls on the platform, the issue is complete derailement of the platform with softporn content (and shitty politics, but nobody cares about that).
A lot of the most popular streamers regularly have long gaps with the camera pointing at three empty chair so don’t act like having a brief break is crime of the century, Sips is away for about fifteen minutes an hour making tea or whatever he does - and that’s only real streamers, someone like xqc will watch an entire someone else’s content while out the room then come in and eat silently while he watches another whole someone else’s content.
I know a lot of people here will never be able to accept it but a lot of the bikini streamers are actually really interesting conversationalists too, like she’s not someone I watch often but amouranth ripping the trolls can genuinely be the funniest thing I see in a day - she and many others are generally interesting, intelligent, and insightful – and no before people imply it just because they have boobs doesn’t mean they can’t be smart.
Compared to Charlie, xqc, and most the popular streamers they put a lot more effort into their streams. Depending who you watch and what your tastes are they can make great background streams, I’ve discovered a lot of great music certainly more than any local radio station.
It’s funny to me seeing people making a show of saying they’d never watch such content then acting like they know exactly what it’s like - what they mean is they assume anything with an attractive woman is terrible because attractive women are nothing but dumb sex objects.
If you want Charlie to be able to tell dirty jokes, make god slap, talk about wild internet drama, and play violent video games without getting censored then don’t side with the over boiled morality police, support the troops on the vanguard in the struggle for artistic liberty – the bikini hulahoop girls are fighting for your freedom.
Twitch is no longer a gaming only platform. It went full circle back to being an everything streaming site. People chat, people draw, people code, people make stuff with their hands. It’s been that way for awhile.
You know I’m partial to the explanation that none of the viewers who watch this kind of shit would really want to watch anything else anyways, because they’re just here for the softcore porn market, so it’s not really hurting anyone. Or, if they would watch anything else, they clearly have their priorities, and it’s not the problem of the softcore streamer to stop streaming so kai cenat can have 0.5% higher viewership since theoretically they’re “stealing the views with their feminine wiles”. On the other hand, I do think a lot of people (mostly kids) tend to eat whatever you put in front of them, and it’s not as though tastes can’t change over time, with exposure, rather than something or other being necessarily higher value to the viewer. The only people who could probably attempt to know the truth, if they wanted, would be twitch themselves, because they have access to that collection of statistics, of what viewers are getting converted over to what streams. It’s not so clear as to be just a zero sum game, but it’s also not not a zero sum game, is basically what I’m saying.
FWIW though I don’t really care about softcore on twitch because ALL of twitch is softcore. All of it. Most of the people who complain about this shit are just idiots sitting around doing react content or gaming and doing really dumb stand up, and all the viewers are parasocial andys. The only good twitch streams I’ve seen are a guy getting tortured in a closet and a dude doing amateur cooking for random people he meets outside, and then a very small handful of people livestreaming technical subjects and doing live tutorials because that’s easier and provides more feedback than videos, even if it’s not scalable. And the sumo guy, that guy’s sick.
Also worth considering twitch makes a decent portion of its operating budget from them, if you want a service to keep continuing functioning so you can watch niche channels then don’t chase their cashcows from the platform
There’s a company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, called “Battery Man”. Which is funny on a lot of levels. They lean into batman symbols a lot. But also, Manitoba is often abbreviated as Man (historically it was our postal abbreviation and such).
I'd say that's still unhealthy because it helps perpetuate the myth that less sleep is a thing to admire. Maybe instead we should start bragging about how much sleep we are getting. As a dad of an 18 month old, I already regularly brag about that to my coworkers who also have little kids.
So fucking true, a lot people take so much pride in not getting enough sleep it is scary, and then they actually start judging if you sleep more than 6 hours
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