Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#301

Post by softwaredoug » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:51 AM UTC

matrix_overload wrote: post #73

madcadmium wrote: post #3

The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 5…

There's also the coordination overhead of trying to do all this, without stepping on each others toes, which is substantial.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#302

Post by xwolfi » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:51 AM UTC

genmud wrote: post #268

timr wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about "Google scale", but you definitely need to be able to peer to get the costs under control. That requires a certain level of investment (on the order of millions of dollars in hardware/datacenter costs), plus the human relationships to get the peering agreements done. Twitch absolutely had that in place, so it's not really fair to compare it to a hobby project and conclude the business model doesn't…

I feel like free peering is a thing of the past. Verizon/Comcast killed it by forcing people to pay for peering relations about a decade ago.

Verizon/Comcast don't even exist here, and I live between India and China, almost half of humanity. Are you talking in hyper-local terms ?

Peering exist everywhere, and at scale you have to pay, yes.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#303

Post by InSteady » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:52 AM UTC

bentcorner wrote: post #200

everforward wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow the space, so if I use the wrong amounts or titles, someone please correct me. For streamers with even a moderate following, they'll be in some status with Twitch to earn money off Twitch's ads. Don't recall if it's Affiliate or Partner or what, but the follower counts were surprisingly small to qualify for ad revenue. Twitch pays out $3.50 per 1k ad views to those creators, so Twitch is paying…

Doesn't this imply that Twitch needs to cut payouts then? In the long run it seems like streaming as a career that is solely funded by the platform is dead. Streamers will need alternative sources of revenue (patreon, OF, etc) to keep things going.

That's already how it is among the SC2 twitch streamer community (and no doubt true for BW and other games with small but dedicated audiences).

Mid-tier streamers get the majority of their money from direct donations (which display a notification live on stream) and twitch 'subscriptions' the viewers buy for $5, split roughly 50/50 between streamer and twitch (usually to unlock access to their VoDs or other perks). Which really isn't the same as passive ad revenue from the platform, as users aren't exactly incentivized to give this money directly to twitch.

The successful ones actively solicit or otherwise encourage subs and donations, and those who struggle with this have generally moved on from the platform or away from streaming as a career. Many of them also have patreon for extra perks, plus a youtube channel with a more curated selection of videos (which I've heard pays better for the time investment, since the content is mostly already created for twitch streaming or sometimes other sources).

At this moment I'm watching a guy whose monetization strategy is a roulette wheel program with challenges and dumb stuff for him to do that gets rolled whenever a viewer donates above a certain threshold. As I am posting a viewer literally just hit "play 100 games" (obviously very low percentage roll, first time I've seen it) and the streamer is pleading with chat for them to let him play the 100 games over the weekend instead of right now. Pretty entertaining, and a funny coincidence to illustrate my point as I'm typing this.

Another guy who is a caster (like a sports announcer for e-sports tournaments) hosts tournaments via donations, ie every donation has a portion go to the prizepool and tournament costs. He has relationships with all the top pro-gamers in the scene and gets great line-ups for relatively small offered prizepools by being a community figure and also being a great organizer and scheduler, etc to accommodate the pro players to make it effortless for them to participate.

It's been this way for many years for streamers trying to make a living with 1-2k average viewers and below, typically working 40ish hours per week if I had to guess (not counting practice and any professional obligations with e-sports, sponsors, etc).

Anyway, I love professional SC2 even though I haven't played for years, and I spend way too much time on twitch.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#304

Post by coffeebeqn » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:53 AM UTC

boneitis wrote: post #299

cavisne wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they run on online casino money, the founders own Stake.com

I'm finding it curious that everybody here seems to be overlooking this. --- (I think the thread is too deep and preventing me from replying directly to child post) I posted here[0] a link to a video with pretty good commentary, speculating on and critiquing their strategy. To paraphrase it, they are not necessarily banking on operational costs being dwarfed by casino revenue in and of itself... but that Kick will yi…

Thanks for the context - that is a great revenue source if morally dubious

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#305

Post by soared » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:53 AM UTC

whatyesaid wrote: post #225

madcadmium wrote: post #3

The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%

You're overestimating things like Twitter and Twitch. The reason these layoffs can occur is that these products are solidified, you can't really improve them much, there's not much real work there. And Twitter apparently had 20 million lines of microservices so it's not like their engineers were doing a good job, despite it being a legacy codebase, all they shipped for 10 years was 1 major redesign and Spaces + NFTs…

The consumer facing product is closer to solidified, but advertising, moderation, etc features need to change over time.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#306

Post by TMWNN » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:54 AM UTC

seoulmetro wrote: post #51

fivre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that has nothing to do with staffing. Korea has a uniquely hostile ISP market where service providers want to charge foreign services ridiculous amounts (versus peering agreements in most markets) for access to Korean consumer networks

Korea has a philosophy of local conglomerates first and foreign companies only existing if they prop the local conglomerate up. It's a very good strategy as the Korean market is lucrative and the Korean companies have opportunities to spread worldwide. (they just suck at it) Twitch got sent a foreigner-tax and didn't pay it, that's all. Korea already has a thriving version of Twitch called AfreecaTV. (edit: Oh it's n…

>Korea has a philosophy of local conglomerates first and foreign companies only existing if they prop the local conglomerate up.

I don't doubt that there is some degree of domestic favoratism—it would be surprising if there weren't any—but Korea was for years the last bastion of Internet Explorer because of government requirements, as opposed to Chrome, Firefox, or some special Korea-reskinned Chromium. iPhone has lots of market share despite Samsung.[1] Relevant to this discussion, Korean players going back to Starcraft a quarter century ago were and are well known for competing in and livestreaming mostly non Korean-developed videogames.

[1] Yes, I know about Apple being a Samsung customer

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#307

Post by Fabricio20 » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:56 AM UTC

jpalawaga wrote: post #285

ayberk wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised a bit given how hostile Twitch has become to users. Completely irrelevant ads, ads playing at worst times (who the hell thought it'd be a good idea to show an ad before the actual stream??), apps abandoned(at least apple tv app). I literally stopped watching some streamers because of Twitch itself. This is in-line with Amazon's departure from "customer obsession" overall. I can't wait for bigger tou…

Ads are controlled by the streamers. They can do prerolls if they desire, or you can at least control whether or not if they're running by rollings ads mid-stream. And apple tv app isn't abandoned, I use it every day. that being said, you're not compeltely off-base, some streamers are now simulcasting on youtube , presumable to mitigate some of this.

This is not entirely true, at least not anymore. Twitch forces ads every two hours? or so nowadays (some predefined amount of time), even if the streamer has ads disabled entirely. I believe it's either that or preroll ads? Don't quote me on this but I've seen it happen and explained like that by more than one streamer.

Prerolls in particular are super annoying to the point that I've moved on to twitch turbo, even though I have a subscription to the vast majority of the creators I watch regularly. Just opening a stream of some other creator to see quickly what is going on and just getting slammed with a 30s+ AD is not a good experience.

In fairness to twitch though, they do cover all the bandwidth usage from all these streamers, including the ones which don't even qualify for partnership and ad revenue. I'm just glad they offer the option to pay to get rid of these things.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#308

Post by huytersd » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:57 AM UTC

benwilber0 wrote: post #170

kenhwang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for a major streaming company and with several other major streaming companies (including Twitch); I'd like to think I have a pretty good understanding of streaming costs. > Youtube (very profitable) The "very" part is probably not true, and that's with Google's massive advertising empire behind it. There's a good reason why Google is going so hard at anti-adblocker initiatives. You can't run a profitable…

Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any kind of scale without being an ISP or Google-scale peer. Not to mention the enormous amount of DMCAs when people are trying to stream live sports, Pay-per-view, etc. It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also f…

I’m sure something like this already exists but can’t there be a distributed streaming platform that pays people fractions of a penny for hosting (all/part) of a video like bitorrent. I’m sure there’s some cryptocurrency equivalent. Or even better some combination of CDNs and distributed bitorrent like streaming. At the very least, it should atleast ease the burden of massive central hosting.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#309

Post by hibikir » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:58 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #78

asdfasdflkj211 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.

Not many people realise this. Engineers build stuff. When your product is feature complete, you can get rid of most of them. Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.

No growing company has a feature-complete product, as just load increases can make a product go from fine to inoperable. Sometimes it's not even more users, but more historical data: Something that used ot parse through 3 months of history is probably going to be unhappy with 5 years.

In big tech, having services without anyone having a semblance of maintenance responsibilities tends to lead to relatively quick failures. Even in boring enterprise companies, handing out maintenance to a 3rd party is still going to cost you, and is likely going to lower quality. I've seen way too many companies that ended up rewriting things after leaving a system mostly unmaintained for 5 years made it sop being fit to purpose.

If there's a lesson of software from the last decade is that undermaintained services become zombified software, and can eat your company's brains. That's why a place like google often would rather shut something down than claim it's finished.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#310

Post by huytersd » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 2:59 AM UTC

golly_ned wrote: post #143

huytersd wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re an eng and not using ChatGPT/copilot you’re going to get left behind pretty soon.

It's unsettling how many times GPT 4.5 has been wrong about something that I can easily see and point out and often verify by finding documentation or testing. I don't know how many times I've asked a question and told the wrong thing.

That’s too bad for you. I’d say for general corporate development, the output is directly usable 90%+ of the time.