I know I'm late to the peanut gallery here. But, I really don't understand the whole "Yes but, no Pornography" take Twitch has. This feels 'similar' but opposite to when Only-Fans wanted to go No-Porn. Neither move worked for the respective site and they went back on the original move nearly immediately. I personally can't make sense of why either company did these things. If it's for advertisement I'm still confused because I would think similar advertisers would be on both platforms. I've heard of banks refusing to do business with porn related sites in similar ways where they just cut ties with them.
I'm truly puzzled as to wtf is going on here.
It's pretty simple.
Twitch wants to keep growing - they want more streamers, more watchers, more advertisers, and ultimately more money. They're in a weird position because they have inorganically grown a segment of their market around what is essentially softcore pornography. It doesn't
technically break any rules so they never stamped it out and now it's a huge part of the platform.
The problems they have are as follows.
- They can't lean
more into the porn as it creates issues with advertisers (doubly so the advertisers who are targeting the 13-18 group) and negative press from people already mad about what goes on a video game streaming site. This is important because a lot of high level esports partner/stream on Twitch, so it's not like it doesn't matter.
- They can't lean
away from it without a huge backlash from the whores and the army of simps. It's a ton of bad publicity whenever it happens that they would rather try and avoid. They know if they push too hard they're going to just throw that whole market segment away to Onlyfans/whatever else or lose their "woke" status.
So they're stuck in this weird holding pattern, however...
- Credit card companies
hate porn. Porn purchases are the most likely to be fraudulent, stolen cards, charge backs, and because Twitch is a site for children already - version of "Timmy stole daddy's credit card". Credit card companies
really want payments to be a well oiled machine and Twitch is a fucking mess. If they didn't have Amazon backing them, they would be in huge trouble.
- Twitch streamers are not actual employees - they're welcome to do whatever they want. This means they can do porn, run scams, lie about shit, fuck up copyright, etc with no career reproductions. They negative press they generate gets thrown at Twitch as if they were actual employees.
- Twitch streamers (doubly so the whores)
benefit from negative publicity. Each time a whore discovers some new "pornish but not against the rules" meta - their stream explodes in popularity, making them untold piles of cash overnight. This means that Twitch has thousands of people trying to find any exploit they can find because there's a gigantic pile of money at the end of the rainbow.
So they're kind of fucked if they do, fucked if they don't. They should just eat the bullet and move all the whores to a different site and keep it 18+ but they're so afraid of rocking the boat that they'll happily sit in this narrow grave they've dug for themselves.