If people want to sexualize themselves for money that's their business, the problem is they keep trying to find loopholes in the conduct policy to transform a site about videogames that children frequent into something sexual.
They mention the tools that allow you to filter channels on their website. They make it really easy to block channels that are recommended to you. Why not extend that functionality to the entire site so you can just click 2-3 times and get rid of any channel for any reason forever? The answer is simple: Money.
As long as the content on Twitch isn't sexual, I don't think it matters to Twitch (or advertisers) if it's serving as lead-gen for something that is sexual. Content produced as lead-gen can be valuable for its own sake.
(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)
It is though and that's why ads were banned and that's why Twitch wrote this blog post. There's no nudity, but the entire point of her stream is for her to show off her body in exchange for money.
>(See also: every YouTuber who provides some professional service for a living, and films themselves doing that service as a way to make people interested in employing them, such that their channel doubles as a professional portfolio of their work.)
This is valid thing for people in many professions, but Onlyfans and patreon are used as a kind of a loophole for Twitch's policy on pornography. There are also some former/current adult film actresses that did/do actual hardcore pornography for a living and they aren't allowed to shill pornhub on their channel page because it violates terms of service. Some of them keep their clothes on because they go to twitch to make non-sexual content and don't even want anyone hinting that they are aware of their background in adult film, but some of them are indeed on twitch because its just another outlet for them to sell sexualized content.
Also a reminder that I'm not judging people that want to sell sexualized content of themselves. There are communities for that. If show HN was 90% muscley dudes in g strings writing things about their latest tech project on their inner thighs it would diminish the quality of the community as a whole. There are lots of people that are OK with porn existing that don't want the primary places they hang out on the Internet to become known as places where people go primarily to masturbate.
They just don't do it for sexual comment. If the creator is female.
udysof got a one day ban for his hot tub stream.
They're banning people for off-site behavior.
And we were talking about children.
This is kinda hilarious though some brand managers must really be squirming when they are tying to sell advert spend for furniture or something on the twitch beach boob cam.
Who do you think the biggest customers of AWS's media-streaming IaaS infrastructure offerings are? People who need to move terabytes per second of live video over the Internet, but for some reason cannot make an Enterprise partnership with one of the public-facing media-hosting services (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, etc.) There's really only one industry matching that description.
I'd even bet that those infrastructure services already share a common backbone with Twitch. So this offering already basically exists. It's just white-labelled, rather than Twitch-branded.
I mean, that was my point: that Amazon prefers the optics of not being a partner to these companies, even though, technologically (not financially), there's no difference between what they're doing right now, and what they'd be doing if they ran a "Twitch for porn." Which is why they're just fine with being twice-removed partners to these companies, through vertical integrators.
Amazon are fine with e.g. Heroku and other PaaSes repackaging their IaaS services into convenient vertical-specific packages. Amazon don't want to run Heroku; they just want to eat 90% of Heroku's margins. Which essentially gets them all the upside of running Heroku anyway, without the risks of actually going into the PaaS vertical, marketing to small customers, etc.
The same logic applies with porn production: Amazon would much rather not create "Twitch for porn", but rather allow someone else to use AWS to create a "Twitch for porn", and then have that service pay AWS exorbitant egress-bandwidth fees. All the same benefit of owning such a company themselves, with none of the hard work, and better yet, none of the tarnish.
But also, keep in mind: if 80% of the customers for an infrastructure service are using it for a use-case in the X vertical, then that service is effectively a service-provider in the X vertical, whether it wants to be or not. Even if AWS isn't explicitly running a "Twitch for porn", if 80% of e.g. Kinesis Streams infra is being allocated to transcoding porn, then you'd better believe that the devs for Kinesis Streams, and the ops staff that run it, both know what their service is usually used for — and likely have spent time tuning their service to cope with the particular needs of that workload. To do otherwise would be irresponsible!
These are the same things.
Which might actually be a viable niche. There are a lot more explicit websites out there than softcore ones.
"They're opening a porn site?"
"No no, its a separate site for softcore...err sexually suggestive material"
It isn't a win either way, and they'd be entering established markets that already have entrenched businesses and wouldn't have the 'walk through' traffic the video games sections of twitch provide.
If they want to be a game streaming site, why allow player video at all? Pare it back to what it was actually for.
I love the weird twitch content BTW, so I wouldn't want to pare down for the sake of risque entertainers
I generally don’t enjoy Twitch because of the nakedness (no pun intended)of the business side. Twitch has every aspect of adult cam sites except explicit content and streamers obviously react and are incentives to interact when people toss them dollars but it makes for a poor viewing experience to me. But they are certainly continuing to fumble on where they’re choosing to draw lines on what is or isn’t explicit.