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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

#61
post #50

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

I think viewership peaked in 2021 and has been flat or down since then. [1][2][3] I know some of my friends watch Twitch less because the ad policy became toxic. [1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics [2] https://sullygnome.com/longtermstats [3] https://streamscharts.com/overview#:~:text=Twitch%20growth%2...

What happened to the ad policy?

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

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50% Keep in mind that execs will get bonuses for cutting costs but the real workers have additional work without a raise. The downward spiral seems almost inevitable - attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat.

The American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year is... "enshittification" https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshitt...

I wished they co-slanged it as "encrapification" because NPR did a report on it and did not mention the word on air. I think it's a valuable web-evolution term.

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

#63

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

> The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50% Keep in mind that execs will get bonuses for cutting costs but the real workers have additional work without a raise. The downward spiral seems almost inevitable - attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat.

The real workers? So the execs that literally run the company and give people the jobs are... what exactly?

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

#64

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

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.

I found it to be rather buggy personally, it constantly freezes and needs to be refreshed

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?

Sell your soul. You have to be capable of looking at people and erasing their humanity/removing your empathy.

How dare those people build a business and create jobs! They must have no humanity.

Geez.

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

#66
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More profits. Simple as that.

Even in late-stage capitalism, you do a 5-10% staff cut at most to trim the fat so-to-speak. A 35% cut indicates something with the business is fundamentally wrong. EDIT: I apologize for the completely unintentional derail.

[deleted]

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

#67
post #50

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

I think viewership peaked in 2021 and has been flat or down since then. [1][2][3] I know some of my friends watch Twitch less because the ad policy became toxic. [1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics [2] https://sullygnome.com/longtermstats [3] https://streamscharts.com/overview#:~:text=Twitch%20growth%2...

I personally switched to youtube* for the streams I watch, since twitch's ads can be really disruptive. Not to mention they used to be ad-free for prime members, while at the same time the ad rolls became longer and longer.

*I pay for youtube premium

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?

ask sam altman what he did - I still can't figure out how he went from "startup that went nowhere" to "hand out other people's money at YC until paulg fires him" to "CEO of openai".

Something called hard work?

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

#69

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.

I found it to be rather buggy personally, it constantly freezes and needs to be refreshed

You might need to reapply your thermal paste and reseat your cup hat sink.
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