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Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

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

#311

Post by seoulmetro »

llm_nerd wrote: post #298
seoulmetro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This sort of comment always seems to be made based on the idea that Twitch was 1430 employees all writing HTML or something. In reality it's a company that operates around the world across an enormous number of jurisdictions, dealing with governments and censorship and laws and regulations. That has a significant legal operation, a significant moderation operation, and deals with payments to many streamers, again in…

Yeah no one thinks Twitch employees are writing HTML. Especially not on a programmers forum...

I took into account it's worldwide stage.

>The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable.

Not really. Contract work exists for new market capture.

>narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled.

Not misled at all. It's very much a reality. It only upsets those who are part of waste.

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

#312

Post by seoulmetro »

golly_ned wrote: post #140
seoulmetro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What makes you think the workload at Twitch must be minimal?

What makes me think this? Well to start, the app does not change, it's core product is old and it is a piece of finished product to do a very physical thing. All this said, they have way too many people for this.

It ain't rocket science to know why tech hires (and fires) too many people.

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

#313

Post by seoulmetro »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #249
seoulmetro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (they just suck at it) That's the counter-argument. As they don't have competition from global products, they can deliver worse products and don't have the need to improve. This can be seen in many markets with import restrictions/tarifs.

No, they really just suck at it as a culture. Tech in Korea is terrible and startups are even worse. The culture may be set by this big players though, that's for sure. It's not about competition leading to this. This is just a "grab" based on the great success of international market trade from Korean companies like Samsung, LG, etc. The same way Facebook and others call Chinese tech terrorism, they earned the privilege locally to hinder competition.

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

#314

Post by MrFoof »

saghm wrote: post #277
MrFoof wrote: post #257

I honestly wonder how the softcore content works out in terms of impacting Twitch's balance sheet. I'm not interested in it, but I'm not against it. Yet I genuinely question how it works in Twitch's favor in any material way. Basically, I look at the softcore streams as those streamers using Twitch as a platform to provide additional content for no meaningful capital cost to the themselves (the streamers, not Twitch)…

> So where is Twitch making real money in that? If you're telling me through subs and bits, you're out of your mind, because that's peanuts compared to what those gals are getting from their OnlyFans, merch, other donation platforms, etc. I don't really understand this logic. The fact that they make more money somewhere else means that they should have to somehow give that money to Twitch as well? If Twitch isn't set…

My point wasn't that Twitch should be given the money for no reason, but that Twitch is foolish for not finding ways to be the platform in which people want to pay the money through, instead of the third-party platforms.

Donations is a great example. Look at how much large streamers get from third-party donation sites, versus what streamers get from subscriptions and bits. It is wildly unbalanced in favor of third-party sites. That's on Twitch, for failing to figure out how to better incentivize viewers to pay via Twitch, as opposed to those viewers going to a third-party platform to pay instead.

That's my real point. Twitch has monetization options, but they pale in comparison to third parties, ergo that's where a lot of a streamer's (not talking just softcore streamers, but in general) revenue comes from -- third parties, and not Twitch. Twitch desperately needs to figure out how to provide more competitive and appealing options to both viewers and its platform streamers, lest it continue to lose out on revenue by simply being a vastly inferior option to everywhere else.

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

#315

Post by seoulmetro »

TMWNN wrote: post #306
seoulmetro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

What does this have to do with my comment? This just sounds like you wrote a bunch of funny Korean computer history facts.

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

#316

Post by autoexec »

EamonnMR wrote: post #189
golergka wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the pirate websites? There's hundreds of them all around the world, some supported with ads, others with subscriptions. How do they manage the bandwidth problems?

For them, content is free.

99% of the content is free for twitch and youtube too.

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

#317

Post by dev_tty01 »

Sorry to hear about the job losses, but what's a Twitch?

I am being facetious of course, but I honestly haven't heard of anyone using Twitch in quite a while. Maybe I'm just out of touch, but it doesn't seem to have much mind share anymore. Hope they all find better positions soon.

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

#319

Post by llm_nerd »

seoulmetro wrote: post #311
llm_nerd wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of comment always seems to be made based on the idea that Twitch was 1430 employees all writing HTML or something. In reality it's a company that operates around the world across an enormous number of jurisdictions, dealing with governments and censorship and laws and regulations. That has a significant legal operation, a significant moderation operation, and deals with payments to many streamers, again in…

Yeah no one thinks Twitch employees are writing HTML. Especially not on a programmers forum... I took into account it's worldwide stage. >The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable. Not really. Contract work exists for new market capture. >narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled. Not misled at all. It's very much a reality. It only upsets those who are part of waste.

>It only upsets those who are part of waste.

Who do you think is "upset"? Does that make you feel more confident in your positions by projecting emotions on people who disagree than you?

Twitch has seen their revenues fall by 2/3rds so they're cutting heads. But their staffing levels are not remotely out of bounds for the scale of the operation.

As an aside, the fallback that "oh and also all that other stuff can just be done by contract employees" is you ceding that your original comment was just noisy nonsense.

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

#320

Post by philwelch »

ta8645 wrote: post #217
philwelch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis…. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related. It seems incomplete to complain about this without also noting that Twitch (along with almost every other social media platform) has increasingly turned into a lead generation platform for OnlyFans. The rules keep changing because the OnlyFans streamers wil…

Which suggests that a less prudish content policy at Twitch might have kept OnlyFans from ever being created in the first place. They literally drove those consumers away to other platforms, squandering their early and dominant position in the market.

Camgirl sites already existed before Twitch, let alone OF. It’s hard to see how turning Twitch into another camgirl site would have been a better strategy than creating a streaming platform for watching people play video games, which was an entirely new niche. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to complain when platforms that were never meant for porn get relentlessly spammed by camgirls.
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