Let’s Talk About Hot Tub Streams

My theory is there a couple of key problems that lead to this crummy moderation, but it essentially all stems from the fact these platforms are too huge to moderate effectively.

First, because they are so huge, they have limited customer support. It's very hard to get ahold of a human being at any of these companies, because users are not the customers.

Second, to offset the challenge of moderating at scale, they have a lot of automation. This leads to people getting moderated without nuance. We don't notice the false negatives or when it's working right, but there are many false positives (because the platform is huge) and news about them spreads rapidly. Then because there is no real avenue for customer support, people can't get it fixed.

Third, because there are no real repercussions, moderators play favourites. There is no real customer service channel so complaints against bad moderating go largely unheard. When you heard about a channel being unbanned almost immediately when larger channels stay banned and it never seems to be fixed, that's likely a human who has a bias towards one over another. People who have an in with the moderation team can get preferential treatment for sure.

This is all just a theory. These companies don't really have any incentive to investigate their moderation teams for this sort of behavior so they probably don't. And if they did investigate it, they certainly wouldn't tell anyone if they found evidence of it.

> I really don't get it. What is the joy

You're asking why one specific instance of Rule 34 exists. It's because all instances of Rule 34 exist, and this one just happens to have become popular on Twitch. Rule 34, while distressing, is unfortunately a very real aspect of the human race at scale; it essentially says that if you can imagine something, it will be found erotic by someone, no matter how much it is or isn't erotic to you. I think it was first invented in the time of Usenet, when people would create ever-more-specific newsgroup hierarchies, but I'm honestly not sure.

When we democratized content creation, we made it possible for niche fetishes to be discoverable, to form communities, and to financially support content creators. For example, "1800s-era bathing costumes" is absolutely a niche that some subset of humanity will pay money to see more of. There are much more specific, weird, and uncomfortable niches. (We're lucky that this one is so boring and dull, relatively speaking, because it's possible to discuss it without squick.)

It's not about "getting" why it's erotic to some and not others. That's between you and your own erotic desires or lack thereof for any given content. It's about the greater question of how and when society will come to terms with erotic content appearing in "general content" pools on platforms that co-mingle all user-created content without human curation. In this case, Twitch openly admits that they haven't solved that problem:

> This is not intended to be our long-term solution to improve brand targeting capabilities and increase personalization in our recommendations. It does, however, solve a few issues for all audiences in the near term.

But they do clearly understand that, even within the bounds of "no nudity or sex", it's still very possible for content to be erotic to some and uninteresting/offensive to others. I am very curious to see what their next steps will be after this temporary patch, because there's no way to categorize or exclude all Rule 34 content on any content platform where users can upload content without human review and classification, and I don't think that Twitch's short-term compromise today will be a viable long-term solution.