The actors I knew mainly focused on craft and collaboration with teams. If they dealt with the audience at all, it was in very controlled bursts in the minutes after a performance. So it seems to me that streaming is much more socially demanding.

This argument is flawed because 1) many streamers do exactly that, and 2) just because a streamer is not interesting when he's not playing a game doesn't mean that all the value is coming from the game. A juggler is not interesting without balls, does that mean it's the balls providing 90% of the value?

Given that:

* many streamers spend a substantial amount of their time just sitting and chatting with viewers, no game being played.

* if it was the game providing the value, you could just show a recorded playthrough without a streamer there to interact with the viewers, but this is not very popular.

* many streamers can play any game at all and draw a large viewership, but there are no games that any person can just start streaming and easily draw a large viewership

It seems fairly clear to me that the streamer contributes much more value to a livestream than the game being played.

Well, that's disputable. Most content-sources are delivered externally, in form of games and stuff they can react too. It's not like they sit there and think up something fresh by themselves for 8 hours a day. Though, yes, they have some naturally skill in socializing which they hone over time. But still I would not say it goes beyond the skill of any other natural socializer which exists in any community.

> Most of them own youtube channels as well, which requires additional time to process, edit, and mix videos, depending on what they're doing with it.

Which is most of the time not done by them. Usually they pay people for this. And to be fair, Videos of streamers are usually not really masterpieces either. They are optimized versions of their streaming-content. A good youtube-creator has significant more skill there. They occasionally also create far higher quality of content than most streamers.

> It's an incredibly demanding gig, that, at the very least, requires a pretty insane schedule, or being really passionate about the job.

How many streamers do you actually know? Well scheduled is not really what I would call most streams I've seen.

> Maybe some streamers get help in production and orchestrating their stream, but for most it's more than a full-time job commitment.

If you are a fulltime-streamer, earning money, then they pretty much all get help to some degree.

> Those average Joes you mentioned? They get 1-2 viewers, who are usually their closest friends.

Not really. They are many dedicated hardworking people with similar skill-levels even on the lowest levels. Success in streaming depends far more on luck than skill. Though, luck is also a skill in some way, so hard to say...

But the skills I was talking about are not the ones you are getting naturally but being alive or just doing stuff long enough to acquire them. Obviously if you stream long enough you get a bunch of skills and knowledge automatically, which any non-streamer is missing yet. But that is nothing special.

Special is stuff not everyone has or can acquire on it's own. Like a professional who went through a long professional training, reaching a level of quality a normal selfmade-streamer never can reach. Or someone which a career outside of streaming. There are more and more people like that hitting the platforms. Many entertainers with decade-long careers came in the pandemia to twitch and youtube, searching for new playgrounds and displaying skills which leaves any big established streamer in the dust.

My views are not that of my employer.

that won't happen because the entire value proposition is in the personal connection to the streamer. (the modern derogatory term is 'parasocial relationship').

just like nobody watches chess computers or starcraft bots play nobody is going to watch bots play games. in fact to stay on the topic of the thread, people are making millions on onlyfans because they realized chatting with their viewers is much more valuable than generic pornography.

For some, Twitch is to playing games as talk shows are to conversation with friends. It gives people a fraction of the mental reward of social interaction without any of the effort or risk of actual social interaction.

It's like a junk food snack for the social center of your brain. I definitely see the appeal and find myself getting sucked into that way of satisfying my need for human contact sometimes, but it ultimately always leaves me unsatisfied in the long run.

For others, I think Twitch is just watching a TV show that happens to be a game. They just want to passively experience the narrative of the game without the effort of playing. Or perhaps they want the meta-narrative of watching the player interact with the game.

I went to a presentation by a couple of streamers at an event a few months ago, aimed at people wanting to learn a little more about it or get into it themselves. They referred to the people in the chat as 'chat' but warned never to use that word in the stream, instead have a cute name for it. One always called them her "besties" which helps give the impression they are friends. But they aren't, they're the audience, they're people she doesn't know and doesn't want to, and they're the income source either directly or through being paid to promote stuff to them.

I came away feeling the whole thing was weirdly dirty.

I know that there are a lot of streamers who aren't in it for the money, who hang out and watch each other's streams for fun and game together on the side. That's by nature going to have a very limited audience and that's fine, often these folks do know eachc other and it's genuinely social. And I know there are the superstars who people watch like tv because they make entertaining content. But there seems to be this middle ground of para-social streaming that's not quite either of those other things and just feels wrong.

I do not think most twitch streamers are trying to be professionals. I think most streamers are just trying to add more fun into their game time. In game theory everyone's main objective is the same, in this case measured in either revenue or viewers. In the twitch world most streamers are trying to maximize fun instead of viewers or revenue.

(Disclosure: I stream relatively obscure games, and know many other streamers in both megapopular and obscure games.)

I've never heard of any streamers like this, but if any do exist, they are effectively no different than people who stream for profit because the intermediate goal of maximizing viewership is the same.

I'm trying to take your word that you don't mean to disparage, but I don't see another interpretation for what you've said. You suggested that I'm not aware of basic Twitch functionality (when I clearly am), then claimed that I must not have knowledge of the subject because the streamers I work with "by definition" don't have super fans (even though they clearly do), then claimed I said super fans don't even exist (though I never so much as remotely hinted it), then repeated the claim that I don't work with anyone who has super fans (even after explicitly telling you they do).

All of those things (and some that I left out) are disparaging, and the entire premise of your commentary has been that your perspective as a viewer can be applied to the entirety of the content creation industry as an absolute and indisputable fact, but that my perspective as a viewer, streamer and consultant strictly applies to a unique subset of streamers whom I've personally worked with -- because apparently I exclusively find the extremely rare streamers and whales who aren't part of "the vast majority" involved in an "exploitative" industrial complex, even though that would be a statistical impossibility. So, when you sa"nothing I've talked to is about my personal experience vs your professional experience," that's patently untrue. It's the basis for everything you've said.

> Simply having a 100 gift sub button in the UI, well hidden and never mentioned otherwise, is still extremely hard to justify as anything but exploitative.

At the end of the day, you're attempting to perpetuate the completely false notion that "the vast majority" of large donors are "dysfunctional" and being "exploited." You witness people donate large amounts and for some reason automatically assume exploitation, but you have no actual evidence or justification for that assumption other than it seeming like a lot of money to you, personally. Unless you're a professional psychologist who analyzed these people, you don't get to declare that "the vast majority" of any population are mentally unwell or being exploited -- especially when your only knowledge of the situation is that you saw strangers push buttons on a website. That's not situational knowledge of anything.

In reality, there are magnitudes more large donors who contribute to be supportive and out of appreciation for the streamers time and talents. Some fans will spend 100+ hours per month watching a particular streamer, so if they can afford to donate $1,000, that works out to paying $10/hr for entertainment, which is less than many hobbies. Yet, I don't see you making claims that people who spend lots of money on other forms of entertainment are exploited -- just this particular industry, and for reasons you haven't actually articulated.

And that's all still ignoring the fact that your perceived observations do not apply to the content creation industry as a whole, or even the majority of it. When I tell you that what you're describing can't be applied to the nearly 1,000 whales I've personally communicated with over the past few years, it makes no sense for you to double down on a blanket generalization that "the vast majority" of streamers are exploitative and large donors are being exploited, because even basic math doesn't back your argument.

> On the contrary these things are extremely visible and advertised.

You listed the basic concept of subscriptions and rewards as evidence for nefarious activity and exploitation. That's rather silly, and I'm not going to engage with it.

> Also the conversation was never about all "donors", from the beginning it was about "the vast majority of Super Fans are not buying courses or supporting the development of content". Disagree or not with the statement it never made claims every single

Please stop making pedantic nitpicks. I've literally quoted "the vast majority" a dozen times in these comments, and you're choosing to pick a single instance where I generally referred to them as donors for the sake of brevity within a long sentence, which itself is inside a paragraph specifically about super fans and even started with the words "super fans." You know exactly what I was referencing, and that you continue to turn these false nitpicks into full arguments is both exhausting and starting to resemble gaslighting.

Finally the more successful streamers are very enjoyable to watch. They engage with their audiences and treat them with respect. Compared to some of the smaller or no audience streamers who don't communicate or are just rude to their audience when they have one.

It is entertainment, it also is background noise for me when I am working.

Oh, hey, I sort of fit into this group, since I stream with a VTuber (virtual avatar) persona and play niche indie games. Sometimes a friend or two drops by and we chat, other times someone new drops by and says hi, but there are also those times where I spend an hour or two playing a game alone and talking into the void, expressing my thoughts, maybe getting a clip with something notable in the process to link to friends later, or maybe upload the full video somewhere later.

I'd say it's not that dissimilar from working on my own personal programming projects or even some of the blog posts that I might end up writing off and deleting, since nobody is going to see the majority of those either - if they turn out good and someone does, then great, but if not then it's still a nice experience, that's also mostly free of any expectations.

As for related things, streaming lets you practice expressing your thoughts better and speak more clearly (which is especially relevant if English isn't your first language, at a point where you can use it well enough, but your pronunciation just needs more practice). It also lets you figure out how to have decent audio/video quality and create content - something that has also helped me in meetings and while working on a programming video series.

Not convinced that's 100%

e.g. I've watched streamers keep ~50 people entertained on a stream for 3+ hours.

Monologuing that long and still have people listening seems like there is definitely "something" there even if not easily transferable to an office job or whatever.

Nobody is forcing you to be live 12 hours a day. Most of the super effort no reward streamers would benefit by cutting the live hours and working more on marketing anyway. Twitch in particular is terrible for organic growth

Not to imply any negativity in this comment if it reads that way, just shite at words. I've dabbled in streaming and realised I need to build up the audience first otherwise it's a massive timesink

Sentences like that show me how far removed my twitch experience is from others. Middle of the road, 1-2k viewers. The biggest thing I watch has 200 something viewers, sometimes with a raid(s) we reach 300-500.

Recently, I watched CohCarnage (because he had early access to an alpha releasing the next day), and he had a few thousand viewers. Chat was just a constant stream of letters. Impossible to have a conversation or even keep up with what’s going on. I disabled the chat a few minutes in, I do not get the appeal of mega streams.

Streaming is a business with the goal of getting people who walk into your (virtual) shop to give you their (subscription) money, just like every other business that has ever existed. The product being sold is the streamer’s personality and ability to entertain.

If your business model involves insulting those people, I don’t think it’s really sensible or a good sign for the long term sustainability of that business to declare them weak minded when they predictably find that being insulted is not something they’d like to pay for.

Then again, I’m not a streamer. Maybe they know something I don’t.