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Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

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Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#111

Post by FredPret »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #104
FredPret wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A statement like “too much wealth in population group x” can only come from someone with utopian ideas about how society “ought” to be structured, especially since population group x seems to be the source of this wealth. What moral system informed these utopian ideas? Why does everyone have an obligation to subscribe to it? If the rest of the world wants to hand arbitrary taxation power to some bureaucrats in pursui…

What alternative is there to utopian ideas? Status quo? It's not working for most people anymore. I'm not saying we should radically change society, but if Jeff Bezos and Amazon aren't paying taxes, there is something wrong and it should be fixed.

It IS working for most people. Beautifully so. Just look at some graphs showing essentially any economic metric from almost any nation for the past 100 or even 20 years. Chances are, it’s not only heading in the right direction, but at an exponential rate.

Regarding ideals: they’re usually great to have personally, but not so great anymore if others have to pay for your grand visions.

Regarding Bezos and Amazon: of course they have to pay tax, everyone should. But my sense is that taxes are far higher than they need to be - there’s an entire class of unionized middle-class bureacrats and government suppliers that add uncertain value at best.

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#112

Post by walshemj »

Thiez wrote: post #64
bityard wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no freedom without privacy, full stop.

Surely that depends. If there was a database where you could lookup the eye color of anybody, would freedom be significantly impacted? I imagine that publishing everybodies income would not have a significant impact on freedom even if some people would prefer to keep that data private.

Depends if you have the right Aryan eye color when the ethnic cleansing squads come round or not.

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#113

Post by skeletron »

yellow_lead wrote: post #38

The torrent is here if anyone wants to take a peek (for research / meta data purposes only of course) magnet:?xt=urn:btih:N5BLZ6XECNEHHARHJOVQAS4W7TWRXCSI&dn=twitch-leaks-part-one&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.stealth.si%3A80%2Fannounce

Thank you for sharing, was looking for this.

If anyone needs to only download and not seed the torrent at all (to avoid potential copyright infringement action), there's a patch for libtorrent available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160625100706/citylight.thinkba....

I'm using this with the latest stable libtorrent and rtorrent releases and it's working great so far. Getting around 100 MB/s download rate from the swarm.

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#114

Post by winternett »

jollybean wrote: post #106
winternett wrote: post #102

Yet somehow the majority of streamers on the platform make absolutely nothing... Wealth inequality is underlying in "creator fund" money making as well. The algorithms are skewed towards people that are already rich, popular, and/or well connected. The few people that make it up the ladder from humble beginnings might well be people who were let in to cover the real underpinnings of non-transparent creator economies.…

This is really an upside down take. 1) The skill/ability curve is going to look really consistent with the earnings curve, just like in anything, similar to sports. 2) 'Creators fund' is marginal - having a few extra dollars for a microphone is not going to bring in more viewers for a stream. Far from 'false economy' it's probably something akin to very efficient. If there is inefficiency, it's about who is highlight…

People at the top of the pay scale are being paid an obscene amount of money for similar quality work that goes unpaid in many cases. From that they can hire teams of others to push their brand further. In order to compete, others need to go into debt just to be able to keep up.

In order to admit that the highest paid streamers fairly made it to their current levels of obscene payment, it would be a lot more believable if there wasn't such a huge disparity in pay (from my perspective).

I work with analytics, and understand them well. Twitch creates their own non-transparent algorithm that evaluates metrics and determines pay for contributors based on those factors. Twitch is in complete control over the rules for who gets paid and how much they are paid.

In a fair creator economy yes, some would get rich and some would go unpaid, but the gap would not be that huge.

Technically most of the contributing creators should be paid and promoted by the platform equally, and accurate metrics would determine who stays on top, but these days creators are not treated equally based on the data I've seen thus far. The inequality reflects on our current societal problems as well.

The gap between top and bottom creators is massive based on data from Twitch, tons of people are technically working for free over many years in hopes of being discovered.

The level of labor and efforts in being a platform user and a creator are very high, the problem is when success is only an illusion. Even as an unpaid creator, if the platform only promotes it's top creators, their profits surge while no one off the radar gets discovered, and thus the unequal profit cycle is upheld without anyone knowing the truth of skewed reality.

Algorithms frequently reflect bias on all social media now because they are developed by companies and people that often have bias (towards making profit, or for political purposes, etc.).

Even very talented creators don't stand a chance of being recognized or paid for their work because of that bias that drives profit on massive social media platforms because they are too often profit-driven machines.

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#115

Post by vladTheInhaler »

FredPret wrote: post #97
i_haz_rabies wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It implies that there's way, way too much wealth in the top 10% if the bottom 90% is only supplying 29% of the tax revenue. I don't think too many people, at least in other developed countries, are looking at the United States and thinking "wow, I wish my country was more like the United States." Usually such comparisons are made to the Scandinavian countries.

A statement like “too much wealth in population group x” can only come from someone with utopian ideas about how society “ought” to be structured, especially since population group x seems to be the source of this wealth. What moral system informed these utopian ideas? Why does everyone have an obligation to subscribe to it? If the rest of the world wants to hand arbitrary taxation power to some bureaucrats in pursui…

> population group x seems to be the source of this wealth

Here's a fun thought experiment - if Jeff Bezos (actually Andy Jassy nowadays, but that just proves my point further) suddenly vanished, how many orders would fail to be delivered tomorrow as a result? Literally none. Now suppose everybody else working at Amazon disappeared instead. What happens? The company ceases to meaningfully exist. So who really created that wealth?

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#116

Post by Someone1234 »

wongarsu wrote: post #110
Someone1234 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright may be violated by uploading (rather than downloading), but even then Twitch would need to show that you caused them monetary damages and sue you in a civil court. I'm not sure what "at a baseline" means. If you know of other specific legal violations then name them, so we can discuss it.

With torrents, every downloader is also uploading data, that's the point of torrents. You could theoretically configure your client with an upload cap of 0, but good luck proofing in court that you did that.

> With torrents, every downloader is also uploading data, that's the point of torrents.

That's inaccurate. You can configure if you're providing upload capacity, but other peers can penalize you for that.

> good luck proofing in court that you did that.

That isn't how the legal system works. They have to prove you uploaded since that is the infringement at the core of their suite. The emphasis is on them to prove both infringement, responsibility, and monetary damages.

Which brings us back to my earlier point which so far hasn't been answered: They have to show damages to successfully sue you in a civil court. How do they show damages here?

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#117

Post by actusual »

jordigh wrote: post #50
mywittyname wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer to keep my finances private, thanks. No good can come from nosey-ass family members, scammers, sales people, etc knowing this kind of information. It doesn't fight against tax evasion or anything, because the wealthy of the world will have yet another incentive to mask their income / assets through any of the number of mechanisms currently available. If you want pay transparency to fight pay inequality, th…

> If you want pay transparency to fight pay inequality, then anonymized pay based on role / job title should suffice. It does not suffice. We mostly do have this data in the US and wealth inequality keeps deepening. The only purpose of the salary taboo is to keep rich people rich.

> The only purpose of the salary taboo is to keep rich people rich.

While it is part of the motivation, calling it the only purpose is just hilariously wrong, completely lacks any nuance/empathy, and a single case of something existing outside of the "only purpose" statement proves it wrong immediately.

My brother ex-communicated my dad because he wouldn't stop hounding him for money. My brother became wealthy at a young age, and made the unfortunate mistake of divulging his finances to my narcissistic father. My father made terrible financial decisions in his life and subsists entirely on social security. He also bragged routinely about cheating on my mom, who got the courage to pull us out of that situation when we were kids. Any extra money I have would go to my mom, not my piece of crap dad.

I can't imagine how terrible it would be if he simply knew how much money I make.

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#118

Post by FredPret »

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #115
FredPret wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A statement like “too much wealth in population group x” can only come from someone with utopian ideas about how society “ought” to be structured, especially since population group x seems to be the source of this wealth. What moral system informed these utopian ideas? Why does everyone have an obligation to subscribe to it? If the rest of the world wants to hand arbitrary taxation power to some bureaucrats in pursui…

> population group x seems to be the source of this wealth Here's a fun thought experiment - if Jeff Bezos (actually Andy Jassy nowadays, but that just proves my point further) suddenly vanished, how many orders would fail to be delivered tomorrow as a result? Literally none. Now suppose everybody else working at Amazon disappeared instead. What happens? The company ceases to meaningfully exist. So who really created…

Actually, the answer to your question is 100% of packages will be missing.

Jeff Bezos (and I’m no fan) the hungry entrepreneur only went through the massive life disruption of starting a company because of the possibility that he might one day become Jeff Bezos the (m/b)illionaire.

Take that juicy end state away and suddenly you’ll have nobody willing to go through the decades of hell it takes to create these big companies.

Resulting in no jobs and no packages.

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#119

Post by dlisboa »

janandonly wrote: post #2

I lament the fact that we need hacks like these to know who makes how much money. In countries like Norway, that kind of data is publicly available. It makes for less second-guessing and less suspiciousness. It always struck me as weird that the American Dream can best be lived in Scandinavia

> In countries like Norway, that kind of data is publicly available. It makes for less second-guessing and less suspiciousness.

It might work in Norway where there is basically zero violent crime, but in many parts of the world outing yourself as a millionaire is a great way to get yourself or your family kidnapped.

Re: Twitch Hack of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

#120

Post by actusual »

ravitation wrote: post #56
janandonly wrote: post #2

I lament the fact that we need hacks like these to know who makes how much money. In countries like Norway, that kind of data is publicly available. It makes for less second-guessing and less suspiciousness. It always struck me as weird that the American Dream can best be lived in Scandinavia

You're getting a bunch of replies about different interpretations of the "American Dream" - interpretations that are not at all consistent with either the mainstream concept or the historical one. Typically the "American Dream" has been centrally about freedom of opportunity, independent of social class or circumstances of birth, and the resulting possibility for upward social mobility through hard work (e.g. America…

Who would be in first here?

As an aside (mostly to add some perspective around Scandinavian comments), my Swedish friend moved to America and became a citizen exactly for this version of the American dream. As far as he's concerned, it's FAR more difficult to become wealthy in Sweden.

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