Twitch Studies

[rynling]

The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17569520/twitch-streamers-zero-viewers-motivation-community

The rise of popular (and profitable) influencers on platforms like YouTube and Twitch has also made the idea of being an online influencer aspirational. Some parents note that their children pretend to unbox toys to a nonexistent audience, and teachers report that their students often say they want to pursue YouTubing as a career. But when seemingly everyone wants to record footage or live stream, who ends up watching the content?

Starting a career on platforms like Twitch often means spending some time broadcasting to absolutely no one. Discoverability is an issue: when you log into Twitch, the most visible people are those who already have a large following. While there are tools to find lesser-known streamers, most people starting out without built-in audiences from other platforms or supportive friends and family end up staring at a big, fat zero on their viewership counter. This lonely live stream purgatory can last anywhere from a few days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, depending on your luck. According to people who have gone through it, lacking an audience is one of the most demoralizing things you can experience online.

I found this article by searching for the title, which I saw in a screencap photo in a Kotaku article about a professor who taught a session of his class about Twitch on Twitch.

Although I sometimes fantasize that I'm recording myself when I do 100% completion speedruns of Zelda games, I have to admit that I never got into Twitch. I understand the appeal, but like... Okay, how do I put this.

So much of being considered cool in high school and college is about sharing communal experiences. You can't just watch a movie and talk about it, you have to watch it with your friends and share inside jokes that mainly take the form of repeating the lines from the movie that everyone in your friend group laughed at. I enjoy spending time with people, but I have trouble relaxing enough to passively consume content in the company of a group. Doing something like quietly watching a television show or sports game has always felt like having to sit through an awful and boring lecture.

What I'm trying to say is that Twitch isn't for me. I'm not suggesting that Twitch isn't worth reading about and writing about and teaching an entire college class about; but, to me, it's really nothing more than how teenagers and people in their early twenties have always spent time with their peer groups.

The primary difference, I guess, is that people aspire to do this professionally. In fact, some of my own students are already well on their way to making a career out of streaming or Let's Play videos.

Anyway, I was thinking about teaching a class through Twitch (or possibly Discord) myself, but I ultimately decided against it. I understand the drive to hold class sessions via videoconferencing, but I also don't think it's entirely fair to assume that everyone will have access both to a good internet connection and to a quiet space where they can be alone, especially not during an arbitrarily set time, and not while they're back with their families. See also:

‘Zoombombing’: When Video Conferences Go Wrong
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/style/zoombombing-zoom-trolling.html

Comments

[lassarina]

This is interesting because I was trying to set up Twitch to do the exact opposite of what most people seem to want from it. I had been playing through FFXV with a local friend, and now that we're under shelter-in-place, I can't. She lives alone, and doesn't have a PS4, so we couldn't use its innate streaming capabilities for her to watch, so I set up a Twitch channel so she could watch and then we got on video chat so we could yell about how Gladio needs to take his jacket off together. And although I had both voice and video turned off on Twitch, it gave me huge anxiety every time my watcher count went up; go away, this is only for her.