Twitch sucks!

Big rainbow capitalism in June, but worried about "Brands align their ads with content that reflects their brand values." dollars the rest of the year.

Sorry my existence does not align with brand values. That must be really rough for you Twitch.

I guess we have reached a social austerity phase of oligarchy.

The two genders, white cishet male and political.

I explained the concept of there being the two genders of "cis-male" and "political" to one of my professors at a religious university and he was actually interested to hear me out on it because he had never thought of it in that paradigm. I'm absolutely not saying that everyone can be convinced, but some people can be nudged in the right direction if you have a good rapport with them.
- Most of the time, people change their minds when they see the source as coming from their in-group. If your professor respected you, they're more likely to listen to you. If they see you as some damn hippy out-group, it doesn't matter how many facts or studies or testimonies you have.
  It's kind of a fundamental problem with humanity.
Interesting take, considering the extreme power women have. Women make up the majority of household spending, women in younger generations are making more money than men, and women are now less vulnerable to job loss.
If you're wondering where the sudden rightward drift is coming from, it's younger men feeling hopeless and powerless to change it, for the above reasons and much more. The idea that the split is exclusively cishet male/political is wild and borderline irresponsible. While true in some states and circles, it's wealthy white women/political in others, and cishet men don't get included at all.
- I understand how you feel, and you’re not totally wrong - society is changing and shifting power away from men towards historically marginalised groups.
  The hopelessness and pain that men is feeling is coming from capitalism, though. It’s corporations stealing your future.
  The thing is that men held almost all of the power historically, and a small shift away from men doesn’t mean that women have extreme power now. Don’t let yourself be scammed by the rich and wealthy into fighting their battles for them.
  You need to recognise your true enemy.

I looked at the rules and it says:

Labeling not required:

Streams containing informational or educational content that aim to share knowledge in a neutral, fact-based manner, rather than engaging in any kind of advocacy for an issue or candidate. For example, sharing the history of how votes in the US presidential election are counted to determine the next President, or merely encouraging individuals to vote or register to vote.

So saying for example Trump is a homophobic fascist should be allowed

Just because it's true doesn't mean it's not advocacy.
Propagandizing and "sharing knowledge in a neutral, fact-based manner" aren't mutually exclusive. The atomic unit of propaganda isn't lies, it's emphasis.
- Propaganda and sharing knowledge in a neutral, fact-based manner are absolutely mutually exclusive.
  Propaganda is biased by definition.
As the op points put, it's going to be used as a reporting harassment. If it requires human intervention to decide, they might have bots or automatic actions based on number of reports.

Yeah, that's why the Fediverse is preferable to centralised social media. Use PeerTube for streaming, not YouTube or Twitch.

Is there a Fediverse option for livestreams?
- Owncast https://owncast.online/
- There's also PeerTube which supports live streams and even supports distributing a sizable portion of the load via P2P. Clients can seed your stream and distribute it themselves, lightening the load on your server. I've used it a few times, it's very neat and it works well. Only con is the latency (it's around 2 minutes like old school twitch)
Use PeerTube for streaming, not YouTube or Twitch.
Even though the vast majority of streamers do stream for 0 viewers, the idea is that they will get a viewer eventually.

Bezos going all-in on the fascists

Let me be the first to say that it is amazing that Twitch is even still alive and honestly if they got kicked off of Amazon Web Services, they’d be done for.

Their moderation is historically the worst of almost any platform I’ve ever seen. It seems like every six months or so I hear about something heinous that their moderation teams have done.

Off the top of my head I remember the hot tub controversy, the female nipple thing, the tasteful or artistic nudity thing, the extremely inconsistent ban times for large vs small creators, the awful VOD mute controversies, the VOD deleting, forced ads being mishandled, covering for Dr Disrespect, and general sexism that isn’t even consistent.

Twitch is a dumpster fire on their mod team. All the dang time. One week someone will accidentally show porn on stream and get a 3 day ban, the next week my favorite streamer will show a glimpse of a bare ass from a mod in a game for 0.5 seconds and receive the same 3 day ban. That actually happened. How is it that you have soft core porn on your website and yet you’re banning people for showing too much cheek for a handful of frames?

if they got kicked off of Amazon Web Services, they’d be done for.
You know that Amazon bought Twitch many years ago, right? And they still own it.
- I do know that, Amazon could kick them off at any time. Just because Amazon owns the service does not mean that they view it as valuable to use their AWS resources on it. Normally it makes sense to lower costs to do so but if the service isn’t seen as valuable or missteps their admin actions, they could easily end up on the side of the road.
  They also exist in this weird space currently where their existence is justified by getting Prime subscriptions up (Prime members get perks on the platform). Now I don’t have their numbers but streaming is ungodly expensive even for Amazon. So I doubt twitch is rolling in a huge pile of cash for them and I doubt they have the Prime numbers to back it up.
  Leading to my conclusion that Amazon could say “sink or swim” and kick them off AWS or just sell the company outright since another company would just use AWS anyway and they might make more money that route in fees.
The same is true of every free video streaming service. They are not viable stand-alone businesses. They can only ever operate at a loss. Therefore their main use is as a propagandists tool, to control and shape narratives.
- It depends what you mean. If you’re saying any live streaming service like Twitch, yes I agree. If you’re just saying video streaming services in general I’d disagree.

As someone who has watched less than an hour of anything on twitch, I guess I'm going to change my avoidance of the site from passive to active.

And for my part, I will continue to have never used it.
- And one fine morning, the other sites you visit regularly will apply a policy that has become the norm elsewhere.
Yeah, I'm switching my Twitch viewing from Twitch.com w/ my ad-blocker active, to the Grayjay app, which also blocks ads. And I don't even watch ads, only VODs from one streamer, and only a couple times/month.
I was going to do that anyway, but I'll do it with a bit more feeling. And for pride month, I'll completely avoid the site.

Jeff Bezos must really think (and want) Trump is going to get his dictator for life wish. Preemptively caving to the right this often and visibly.

Is there anywhere left on the internet that's uncensored? I miss the golden age.

Yep, but most of them get filled with people who can't shut the fuck up about politics or conspiracy theories.
- And blatant hatred.
here*
Well, Rumble, Kick, and 4chan still exist. They are much more hands off for moderation. But I wouldn't recommend them as nice places to explore. Moderation has its benefits too.
Compared to Twitch, Youtube is less involved in censoring based on message but much more reactive for DMCA stuff and demonetization.
And other people have pointed out that Lemmy and the fediverse in general have moderation that is entirely dependent on your instance.
- YouTube might not take videos down as their method of censorship, but they do threaten to demonitize any video that dares to say "dick" or "dead", which has the same effect.

Ugh. Can someone make another video game streaming service that doesn't allow influencers? I don't even care if it was popular. I just want twitch of old back.

Edit: Sorry guys. I'm looking for something that is impossible to have. There will never again be an emerging esports scene. Unless it completely dies, I guess.

https://owncast.online
One lgbtq+ streamer I know dual streams to owncast
The directory is a list of live owncast streams.
Also, you should be able to chat on owncast streams with fediverse accounts, but the last time I tried, I wasn't able to log log in with my lemmy account.
- What about moderation or controls over the directory? I don't want to host a stream and be published next to nazis. Is anyone keeping them out? I do see a sort of lip-service "no tolerance" statement with no details about what fits that criteria and no claims of active moderation; without those two things it's toothless and the whole place is at risk of nazi bar syndrome.
- Eyyy fellow Kiri enjoyer 🥰
What do you actually have in mind? Are you using the word "influencer" in some narrow way? Every streamer influences their viewers so my reading of your comment is that you are asking for a streaming service that doesn't allow streaming. Obviously you don't mean that, so I'm curious what do you mean.
- Influencer, to me, is a very specific type of streamer. Oh, young whippersnapper, early on twitch was more focused on esports. That's not to say there wasn't variety streamers that had a following based mostly on their personality's. That was growing along side esports except youtube was had dominated that content with lets plays and pewdiepie. For a long time LoL tournaments were the number one draw. There were others, too, and you could find and join those communities pretty easily.
  Please, don't go off on how those things still exist. I'm not blind. It's just it's the whole platform is not geared toward that kind of content anymore.
Peertube is a federated option, and while it's primarily meant as a decentralized replacement for YouTube, many instances include the ability to stream live. https://video.infosec.exchange is the instance I use, but you might benefit from using a larger instance or one that shares an administrative staff with any other ActivityPub-connected things you use (e.g. lemmy.world).
Kick and Rumble?
There's some shitty people there. But if you try to babyproof an online service it will eventually fail and people start writing exactly what you wrote.

you're telling me the website currently going through antisemitism allegations is not a very good website?

What an odd thing to happen.

TBF, that's not a very good litmus test since anyone protesting the Palestinian genocide has been accused of the same, which we all know is utter bullshit.
- Didn't you know, criticism of the Israeli government is tantamount to advocating for a genocide of Jewish people. It's binary, no way anyone can have an opinion that exists between a spectrum of the two. I mean someone criticizing a government and not it's people is just absurd.
  (/S, incase anyone doubts my sarcasm)
- Fair, but it looks bad when they seem to be promoting a side and silencing another as a platform. They disabled email signups for accounts from Israel for over a year. Yes, this also affected Palestinians, but it was in reaction to Oct. 7, an event that Israeli users would certainly want to bring attention to for fostering sympathy. The stated reason was to prevent graphic material from being posted, but this hadn't been implemented for Ukraine or other wartorn areas.
  They also endorse streamers that are very overtly pro-palestine. Some of them did an "Arab" to "Loves Sabra" tier list of other people on stage at Twitchcon. Twitch later deleted the vod/clips of it.

Can anyone verify that UserVoice is trustworthy?

Define trustworthy? It is a twitch affiliated website but you have to trust twitch to begin with.
https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/933812-safety/suggestions/49038707-remove-sensitive-social-issues-bullet-point
- As far as I can tell, UserVoice is a third party used for data collection. To sign the petition you have to agree to terms of a company "not owned by Twitch".
  I just want to make sure I'm not just giving my information to a third party to sell in the name of hoping to sway this issue. Especially if Twitch isn't seriously considering the petition.

While I disagree with the bullet point, this is meant for streams that are exclusively that content, the actual guideline is this:

Why is this the first I’m hearing of this?

Probably because it is a new 'change'.
- Honestly thought I'd see this at the top of reddit and tech news sites, a d that there'd be a big backlash over this.

LGBTQ behind a content warning? That's like putting black people behind a content warning.

Don't give them any ideas

Currently the top of the suggestions forum. By a lot.

- Clancy as in Dan Clancy, CEO of Twitch, likely did have a hand in it. Not that the user's makes any sense, given this decision also negatively impacts Hasan

I mean, they're not wrong. It is a sensitive social issue. There's a more than average chance of a lgbtq+ discussion ending with heated arguments and angry words to the point where mod intervention is needed. They don't want that, because they're afraid it'll cost money.

"Hey everyone, I'm a trans gamer wh-"
:gets flagged, demonitzed, and mass reported:
Yes, some people are that sensitive. No, I did not just exaggerate. I would never wish for your identity to be boiled down to a "sensitive societal issue". It should be a non-issue. They are wrong for doing this.
Sounds more like a problem of failing to moderate bigotry, not a social issues problem. The existence of LGBTQ+ people who stream is not a social issue; assholes demanding they go away is
- That is exactly what a "social issue" is. Bigotry, racism, sexism, all "social issues". They're not political issues, or economic issues or environmental issues. No, they're social issues. Issues where people with differing social values cannot come to an immediate agreement. A social issues.
  Moderating these issues are a notorious problem for all social media platforms. It's been a topic of debate,even political debate for years now. Mostly about racism and cyber bullying, but lgbtq+ discrimination can go here as well.
Saudis also use twitch a lot in an indirect way - lots of sportswashing investments including esports which includes twitch deals. LGBTQ+ is pretty controversial as far as global politics are concerned. It seems like people in the West often forget there's only a handful of countries that don't immediately jail or kill you for these things worldwide.
- I'm not gonna contest that there's an unfortunate number of countries where it's illegal to be LGBTQ+. However it's not "just a handful" where it's legal, stop talking out of your ass.
  Go look for yourself if you want to see where it's actually illegal. Not on my short list of vacation spots. https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-criminalisation/