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What do folks on the Motte think of the "Waves" glasses? Here is the link, quoting the short tweet:
The idea seems to be another in the long string of VC-funded tech companies who seek to make their name on being controversial in the beginning, and slowly becoming socially accepted. It's extremely frustrating that this profit model seems to work, but we can't deny it does (some of the time) at this point.
On the one hand I'm deeply incensed at the thought of other people recording me without my consent. On the other hand... we already waived these rights two decades ago with the Patriot Act, effectively allowing the government and major corporations to spy on us all the time with no repercussions. I personally find it hard to be sympathetic to outrage against these glasses when our nation's legal system has completely bankrupted any notion of a personal right not to be filmed anyway.
I'm not sure which side of the culture war this benefits either. As it stands, it seems a pretty predictable evolution of trends we've been seeing in privacy and technology for a while in the West.
Twitch is basically softcore pornography at this point. So much "content" revolves around implicitly or explicitly referencing sex, and even the most innocent looking female streamers are apparently sex-crazed addicts or are at least pretending to be?
I have a very dim view of livestreaming.
I looked for the biggest streamers on twitch and they seem to be almost all male. Pokimane is 13th biggest, Amouranth is 34th which surprised me. I think they're the only 2 women in the top 50, eyeballing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitch_channels
I think that since the females are creating the drama non-twitch viewers hear about, we're getting an inaccurate view of the platform. I don't really use twitch and certainly don't use it like the normal twitch user. I doubt many here use twitch that much either except in niche usecases. It seems to be overwhelmingly dudes playing games.
There's also #25 AriGameplays, #29 Rivers_gg
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Well, Amouranth specifically moved to competing site Kick in exchange for a bunch of money. Looks like she only recently returned.
And not for nothing, Kick's whole value proposition vs. Twitch is that its more lenient with the content it allows, since they are trying to drive traffic to gambling sites.
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Comparing streamer popularity by follower count is a misleading metric. Several of these accounts amassed millions of followers because they were already popular on another platform, like YouTube, and the people who watched them there would create Twitch accounts just to "follow" them. This explains how someone like Myth, the twentieth most followed account, has only a fraction of viewers on his livestream compared to streamers with far less followers. Others accumulated a large amount of followers when they very popular for a relatively brief amount of time and now have fallen off, so to speak.
I'll give a concrete example. Ninja is #2 on that list, with 19 million followers. The streamer I'll compare him to, Emiru, has 1.8 million. However, when you look at how many views their recent broadcasts have received (Emiru, Ninja), you'll see that Emiru far outpaces him:
Emiru (excluding today's and the two broadcasts that were under 10 minutes): 683K, 218K, 318K, 402K, 426K.
Ninja (excluding the non-gaming stream: 121K, 93.1K, 154K, 88.7K, 117K.
Same with the streamer I linked to in my original comment, ExtraEmily. She routinely pulls 15,000 to 20,000 concurrent viewers, which I'd estimate puts her near the very top of streamers in North America, despite having less than a million followers.
OK, sure. But if I go here (The Highest Peak Viewership Twitch Streamers for this month), it still looks like a total gamer sausage-fest. https://www.twitchmetrics.net/channels/peak
Or here, I see Emiru. She's got 25th most views this month. There's another woman at number 43, extraEmily that you mention and eyeballing it, that's it for women. The rest are all men. https://www.twitchmetrics.net/channels/viewership
There are some huge female youtubers few adults have ever heard of: Anastasia Radzinskaya and Kids Diana Show. They're children and do songs for kids, hit em with the autoplay algoroithm, get hundreds of millions of views. Besides them and some musicians youtube is pretty barren of women.
Twitch is like youtube, chess, sport, business, science, maths, war, standup comedy and much else besides, top talent is male.
You're not wrong. I want to argue that viewership by hour is not a good metric because because men usually, from my experience, stream about 1.5 as often as women do in a similar period. Or peak viewership is kinda just decided by twitch itself based on who they put on the front page (and people covering e-sports are going to get that over women who just simply don't cover e-sports). And who knows what the real numbers of any of this are because of how botted everything probably is.
But then there's the twitch payout leaks and they're pretty much the same thing as those lists. 99% men. But "top talent" is pretty reaching, it's just internet ratings, or are we prepared to say that television's top talent is Shonda Rhimes?
I suspect its similar to the amount of people that want to play a male vs female character in a videogame when they have the choice, apparently the vast majority pick male every time. Men are probably the largest demo here and prefer to play as a man and watch men. I remember hearing Northernlion say a few months back that 3% of his viewing audience is female on Youtube.
Though, I don't think it's that hard to have a good number of women to follow on either platform though like I said before they put out less content and also drop out way more often whether retiring, maternity leave, or simply stopping streams apropos of nothing. It's kinda like how women have three set matches and men have five in tennis. If women's matches were five sets then there'd be like five women in the world who would be capable of competing. I have exactly two women I follow who consistently put out content and aren't going offline for weeks or months at a time for maternity, vacations, or mental/physical health breaks or just in general being flaky. And I'm not saying that it'd be better if they did because women are generally better at communicating with the audience and you don't get the summit1g playing a game for 20 minutes of complete silence then dying and saying "aw damn" and going back into the queue in complete silence but maybe you would if they tried as hard as guys do.
EDIT: To give a more concrete example of why I think numbers are botted look at Rifftrax and MST3K in the leaked numbers. For as long as I can remember MST3K had at least 100 more viewers than Rifftrax averaging around 600-700 whereas Rifftrax had 400-500. When the latest MST3K kickstarter happened the numbers went up to 1000 and stayed that way for like six months before dropping back to 600 until this year when they finally dropped below Rifftrax and now the numbers are about the same for Rifftrax and MST3K has about half that. The payout numbers make it seem like Rifftrax is 5x more popular than MST3K and as someone that switches between the channels it's easy to notice that Rifftrax's chat is about 5x faster/more populated than MST3K's and has been even when it had double the amount of viewers.
I don't even think it was nefarious on the channel's part I think someone just wanted to support MST3K by paying for bot viewers. I also wouldn't be surprised if people were paying for bot viewers on Rifftrax as well but it's just been more consistently the same. It's hard to find an apples to apples comparison for what viewers are willing to pay so it'd be hard to make a similar comparison to other types of channels but this is probably as close as you'd get.
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