Comment by cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business on Tense exchange between a streamer and Twitch director speaks to the state of streamer-platform relationships

It’s just a bit more platform enshittification, honestly.

Every social-oriented company is realizing that the Free Money Tree has died, burned down, and is now a rotting stump in the middle of the High Interest Rates woods, and they’re in utter panic because not a single one of them is actually profitable, has ever been profitable, or reasonably has a path to profitability.

Reddit, Twitch, Discord, etc. are all living on borrowed money and time and the only way they’re going to survive is if they either squeeze money out of the users directly, squeeze it out of their partner/content creators, or find a new investment which isn’t something that’s happening anywhere.

100% have to agree. The cost of operating these massive online platforms vastly exceeds any profit options they have available to them. Without some form of aggressive data mining, advertising, subscription services or combination of all 3 they will continue to lose money.

Part of the problem is, IMO, the corporate structure built around these companies.

I’ve always wondered why Twitch has 1200 employees, or Reddit has 2000, or Twitter had 5,000. What do they all do, and is the cost of carrying so many people justified?

I’m betting (and honestly, the Twitter shitshow kinda has shown) that you maybe don’t actually need 1,200 people to run a streaming site, and maybe you don’t need 2,000 to run a text-based link aggregation site and that this weird tech company obsession with growth and size is actively counterproductive, at least to some extent, when it means you can’t carry the costs of the company without having to absolutely trash the experience of your users to do it.

I thinks costs could be trimmed a ton in a lot of companies. Although that likely means layoffs and not lower salaries for the executive team.

IMO, exec salaries (and any equity grants) should be exclusively tied to company profitability but that’s one of those things that’d never happen in a million years.

There’s just no incentive to build sustainable businesses when you’re working with free money and I think a lot of tech firms (not just social media ones) are going to crash land over the next couple of years.

well, technically giving Stock as salary/compensation is tied to company profitability. But I don’t think that’s working for now because the awarded stock amount is adjusted so the monetary value not changed at the time of receiving the stock itself.

Maybe the commons shouldn’t be run as for-profit businesses

They don’t have to, but for capital intensive industries like streaming, it’s not something that you can easily build or federate, at least not until bandwidth and processing gets a lot cheaper

Chinese effort to nationalize segments of their internet tech industry has had pretty bad consequences in the past 5 years, so I’m not quite sure that will magically solve the problem either.

Owncast, while not federated technically, exists. Bandwidth over the years has gotten a lot cheaper, and even real time video encoding has made significant improvements with av1 reducing bandwidth over all, though I’m not sure owncast supports it yet. A reasonably motivated streamer could absolutely host their own website and livestream to it, at not an outrageous cost.

It would be prohibitive to size though, as you’d have to scale up servers and distribute bandwidth between multiple servers quite quickly. Having server usage be done in a cooperative fashion across multiple datacenters - which is one thing that twitch effectively does - would be preferable. I think that something like Owncast would be ineffective to distribute to more than a few dozen people.

I wonder if we’ll come up with a better solution that’s accessible and affordable, or if we’ll forever be reliant on shitty megacorps for big streamers like we like to see today.

Scaling from a few dozen sure is a big undertaking, but the vast majority of streamers are streaming to only a few dozen at a time. Something a relatively strong VPS can handle. Once your audience is above that, then is it not unreasonable to expect actual broadcasting infrastructure? I think the argument being made is that twitch as it is, with basically infinite free video encoding is massively unsustainable.

Platforms like Floatplane exist, which is sustainable. So its not an unfathomable problem to solve, its just more complicated than text.

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