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Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

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251–260 of 320 posts

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between "playing the game" and playing the game. I can sit at a chess board and move pieces around and say that chess takes no focus because I chose not to focus

Is there thought? How do you know his skills are not due to a few hours (tens of hours, hundreds of hours) of intense training of a few basic rules, and the rest is just freeroaming like it is for every other player?

Because there are other players on the other side of the game. They will be at comparable levels of "intense training of a few basic rules" (due to ELO based matchmaking) and they will be trying as hard as they can to beat him.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#252
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a case of gruelling, it's more that streaming is the social outcast version of acting. You have to interact with people to act else it doesn't work. Streaming can be entirely solo, even at the top end 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 terr…

> Twitch in particular is terrible for organic growth Might be in part because the search function is so bad. I tried to use twitch to discover DJ slash electronic music streams, and had a really hard time finding what I wanted, though I could sometimes find them using other keywords.

They're doing better with tags and recommended streams now but yeah I think it's a combination of bad search and kingmaker directories

If you're big, you get bigger. If you're small, you'll never (rarely) be seen by someone browsing

They'll sprinkle some AI on it eventually

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#255
post #46

Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms. Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since…

It is not zero sum. People only switch to these new sources of entertainment because they get more value from it

What do you mean it's not zero sum

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#256
post #46

Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms. Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since…

The economy is not a zero sum game.

Elaborate

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these twitter gamers and celebs are smarter than mainstream athletes lotto winners in terms of higher IQ , and thus are better at personal finance and budgeting

Why would this group of people have higher IQs than mainstream athletes? Why would higher IQ lead to better personal finance and budgeting? I’d think you childhood/background and your current environment would be the biggest factors. Some mainstream athletes may feel the need to flex. So they may spend extra money. There’s also generally certain rituals or going with the crowd that means spending more money. It feels…

All highly paid celebrities without managers, including many streamers, are effectively running marketing and PR campaigns for million-dollar brands. It's quite believable to me that the job would select for higher intelligence, or at least better cash flow management, than being an athlete who plays a team sport.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#258
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really imply that playing the same game over and over again (with some variables but still) is the same as solving programming problems? The game is literally designed to hook you in and make you play one more and one more. You absolutely can autopilot through a game and still win. Don't get me wrong, the guy has a lot of dedication for sure. But playing League all day is really not like coding all day, I don'…

This comment shows a remarkable disregard for the level of skill required to compete at the highest level. You don't encounter a lot of autopiloting at the highest level of competition. The people you compete against are trying as hard as they possibly can to beat you, and it takes a tremendous amount of focus and ingenuity to outplay them and win. You gloss over the details of that monumental task with reductive phr…

Your response is really not adequate to what I wrote above, you seem to be projecting some past experiences that you had with people not giving you credit on me and it feels like a very unfortunate and provocative stance.

If I wanted to respond in the same tone, I could say: "The guy is not a pro player, he doesn't compete at the highest level, he just grinds solo queue for 10 hours per day on Adderall. He got this way because he had a mixture of talent and addiction susceptibility. He got addicted to the dopamine hits that the free to play game was meticulously designed to deliver in a pattern that makes the player unable to stop even if he hates it and feels miserable."

But I will say this: I think you're misinterpreting my comment as scorn when in reality it's my perspective based on my experiences with coding and playing this game. I know both, so I believe that my opinion is valuable and I decided to share it.

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#259
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which kind of demonstrates exactly my point. I would never build a business that needs somebodies permission to exist.

Every single business needs permission to exist, not only because you need approval from the government to open one.

You can't be comparing Twitch to the government. Those are not even remotely the same thing

Re: Up all night with a Twitch millionaire

#260
post #46

Imo we should be lauding this brand new sector and the folks that made it in it. Twitch/YouTube/TikTok literally created a new kind of millionaire. Are we just upset we're also not uber rich for playing video games all day? It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms. Merely from an economic standpoint, it's interesting to see who these new industries are displacing (since…

> It's the same with crypto, OnlyFans, and so on. It was the same in '99 with the dot coms.

Please don’t lump content creators in with crypto and dot bombs. The folks creating content on streaming platforms are providing entertainment and putting in real time doing a job. Equating them to what were/are more or less Ponzi schemes isn’t fair to them at all.

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