Every time Amazon has layoffs, remember that all Jeff had to do was give away an insignificant portion of his wealth and save the employees and the company.
They expected pandemic like growth to continue. Instead they made an absurd amount of money and are going to tone it down, socialise a bit of losses to realign the graph to something they can bullshit investors with.
(I was one of Unity's 1800, so I know the feeling).
No no, It just means the market is shifting, people are now un-interested in streaming. It has utterly nothing to do with Twitch being run into the ground by the out of touch decrees of management.
Anyway, more firings for the workers and fluffier golden parachutes for company nobility.
Certainly a lot of once beloved online products are reaching late stage enshittification all together. Seems like the Internet is mostly that now, and you have to look hard for anything else.
Twitch is run like a private equity acquisition. The rates they are forced to pay their parent company, Amazon, are above market value. Twitch's services will get worse and worse for both streamers and viewers until all the equity is sucked dry. Late stage capitalism y'all.
I heard from a bigger streamer. But I started believing it because feeds degrade lot more than YT. I constantly get connection issues more than any other streaming site.
I'm vested in some of these smaller streamers, so I don't want them to lose their income. It feels like twitch is exploiting this sentiment because I'm not alone.
(Sub)Companies like Twitch also have the added mess of being increasingly unmonetizable.
Everyone and their mother loves to mash "enshittification" into their keyboards and grin. But almost all of that is because those companies have been operating at a loss or near loss for years and need to actually find a way to monetize. And the "easy" routes like advertisements and subscription models tend to be rejected with entire communities and industries built around bypassing that.
Like, on reddit, people were actively paying third party randos to bypass the ads on reddit. And on twitch, people lose their minds over getting an ad during a streamer's sponsored stream that is a giant ad for a different company.
50? Idk the biggest techbro firms NEVER made any money ever. Fucking Spotify is yet to be profitable. Who exactly are they planning to sell more service to?
You operate on the assumption that just because a company isn't claiming profits it's not growing in value, that is just not how the game is played anymore.
Now, sure, the game they're playing, "Go into debt to buy everything in sight and claim you're operating at a loss despite increasing the value of your holdings exponentially" was literally outlawed for being a major factor in the collapse that lead to the Great Depression, but they've surely learned from that, right?
Not shocked at all. Things have gone way downhill since I started with the platform. Time was, I'd start up a stream, a dev would come and hang out and actively chat while they worked. Occasionally they'd ask about my opinion about things that were being developed. It felt like actual, meaningful stuff... That was back when it was still Justin.tv and just a little bit after twitch.tv released. When I stopped streaming regularly a couple years ago, even getting a straight answer from a rep on simple questions was like pulling teeth. Then I'd have times where I'd get several different and conflicting responses for simple stuff like if what we were planning for an event would be kosher. Even arranging for some site coverage felt like begging the mob for a favor. "Alright, we'll get you front page, but it'll be at 4am, and only for an hour!"
I interviewed there once. They had permanent massage rooms set up and staffed full time. The people in the place were 80% gaming neckbeards, 10% a mix of regular people, and 10% hot nerd gamer babe types they’d hired as eye candy to run around in skimpy outfits. It was so obvious and pretty embarrassing.