At this point Twitch is starting to become part of Big Content, and Big Content doesn't care about what you think is good for society, Big Content cares about what gets clicks and views.

Twitch already has emerging dating shows and panel / discussion shows, political debates, and even pseudo live-therapy. These shows aren't created top down by Twitch, they are simply programs users are creating.

These things are drawing growing numbers of viewers and so Twitch is wisely funding them.

Twitch itself was an off-spring created when Justin.TV noticed the popularity of video game streams on their platform so they spun out Twitch. Today Twitch is the entirety.

It wouldn't be incredibly surprising if something similar happened to Twitch as happened to Justin.TV, who knows.

I think it shows incredible foresight that they are able to ride these waves rather than fight them.

The takeaway they've gotten from reality TV is that it made a lot of money

This may surprise the normies, but dating stuff on twitch already exists and is extraordinarily popular, for very low production costs.

TV dating shows and reality TV involve many dozens of writers, camera/production people, ect, ect, ect

But this online psuedo-reality show content just involves a host and ~10 contestants in a zoom call. And these shows get a LOT of viewers for the cost. its 20k and above concurrent viewers.

So, with this kind of content, you have a very good cost to viewership ratio.

Why is it garbage? It's just entertainment. Same way reading random crap on HN is entertainment :)

Agreed. People think it is important to them. It may even impart information they can use to better themselves, not that it necessarily must. It’s entertainment primarily by virtue of usage if not of intent, as in the case of HN.

> Same way reading random crap on HN is entertainment :)

At least the random crap on HN is intellectually stimulating.

It's really unfair to clump all of entertainment together. Is watching reality TV same as discussing tech medium? Even if you boil "entertainment" down to "gives you fun points" one clearly gives you something more than that.

I think reading HN and watching reality TV are a lot closer than you think. The obvious difference is that you apparently have contempt for one and not the other. But I challenge the idea that you're being enriched any more by posting on HN.

Maybe you learn some new things here and there the same way someone who watches a lot of Elimidate might pick up some social skills/awareness.

But notice how convenient it is to attribute bad qualities to the thing you don't even enjoy in the first place, and positive qualities to the thing you do enjoy.

Yes absolutely. Discussing what's your favorite tech stack to me sounds like discussing what's your favorite shoes

No one cares besides you. And in the end it probably doesn't matter which one you pick from a purely logical point of view :)

Completely disagree with you here. If you want to be a good engineer you must be aware of the current market and trends.

If anything I'd even argue that reality TV takes away a lot of humanities from you like social skills and social perceptions.

If you want to be a good socialite and marketing professional, you need to know what's trendy and who's influencing the general population. Same idea

It's completely absurd to think that watching reality tv would give you any social or marketing skills — if anything I'd argue it's the complete opposite.

> Is watching reality TV same as discussing tech medium?

Honestly, in a lot of cases, yeah. I'm never going to use the vast majority of what I read about on HN, it's simply not in my sphere of work - it's fairly pure entertainment.

> So they learned nothing about the dismal effects of reality TV's on culture and content creators?

no, in the hetero case at least, they probably learned alot from being able to monetize a ridiculous desparate-M:attractive-F ratio from things like tinder

Have you seen the rest of Twitchs content? Most of it already is entertaining "garbage". It's just low-quality self-made-content, which is ok, because for high quality-cotent we have netflix and similar services. Low-quality content has it's place, and twitch is simply accepting this.

I knew Chuck Woolery was responsible for society’s ills.

Your comment reeks of a sour ego. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is below you.