Even if you are not especially into gaming, moreover, even if you are a boomer learning how to use the internet, you probably know how big Twitch has become by now.

Everybody’s on Twitch these days. It’s not like it wasn’t big before, but corona did its thing (and for once it was a great thing), funneling hundreds of thousands of gamers (and enthusiasts!) towards the streaming service. But, as far as entering mainstream goes, it became completely obvious that Twitch is going to become a serious rival to YouTube, once huge stars like Neymar and even US representative Alexandria Ocasio –Cortez, became the names associated with it.

All of the Sides of Twitch, The Biggest Streaming Service In the World

The fact that Twitch, on the other hand, is a vital part of the gaming community is a well-established fact. And while watching from the outside to a casual observer who is sometimes popping in to watch a stream or two, it may seem as just another streaming service, it’s very far from it.

Twitch has its own rules, and with time it became a reference point for so many different aspects of the industry. Big money is made on Twitch, of course, but obviously, as in any other business, users (or let’s better call them “targeted audience” for making this point) determine the type of content, as well as the overall direction the product (in this case the streaming service) is going to take.

The Fake, The Bad and The Ugly

And in 2021 it’s safe to say that Twitch has become a high-school drama on steroids and that in itself is probably an understatement. People (often teenagers, but not at all exclusively) accusing each other left and right, things getting really ugly, a whole lot of sexual misconduct and abuse, a whole lot of lying and plainly making stuff up, racist slurs, death threats – you name it, Twitch has it.

For an outsider, once more, it’s probably especially nonsensical: if you are not a careful observer of all the Twitch drama, just try and type it into Google – you won’t look far in the past to see it in its full glory – the latest shebang between Bob7 (age: 25), Destiny (age: 32) and Kaceytron (age: 30), for example, shows you everything you need (and don’t want) to know. A bunch of people cross-blaming each other for sexual misconduct in several degrees of severity in a saga that doesn’t seem like it’s going to end. And more importantly, that doesn’t seem like it’s going to end up in any kind of resolution.

Almost exclusively in these kinds of dramas, everybody always condemns how all of “that” (whatever the matter is at that point) should’ve “never gone public”, and instead kept private, but obviously, the “publicity” of it is in fact used to literally gain publicity and stir some drama for what other than – additional views. Just like in mainstream reality shows, for example, we’ll never know how much of it true and how much is staged, but if all of those accusations thrown around in Twitch dramas are true, then they shouldn’t be just a matter of internet discussion on who’s right and who’s wrong – their severity should place many people in jail.

Twitch Not Doing Much About It

The problem with that “reality part” of the service is, of course, the fact that transgressions really do happen, and when they happen, and when things go too far, nothing serious is being done about it. The community has reached out to Twitch many times, demanding that offenders are punished and stopped, but they have done little to no moves in the past to try and change their reputation of being a “hotbed for sexual abuse”, as they’ve been called in the media. Their latest action was in response to a Medium article published in June 2020 where Jessica JessyQuil Richey compiled allegations against more than 60 streamers for sexual abuse. Twitch didn’t clean everything they should’ve (one of their main partners and streamers was accused, but nothing happened to him) in this case, but they did ban a bunch of streamers and issued a new policy on conduct, which is supposed to go into effect January 22^nd. That means we’ll soon know if their moderating and overall control of the situation is finally going to improve or the space will continue to be one of the darkest places on the internet when it comes to harassment.

Twitch’s model though, however morally questionable it may be, seems to be working very well for them, since it just keeps breaking record after record: mid-January Spanish Fortnite streamer TheGrefg broke the record of 2 million live viewers. The previous record-holder was the infamous Ninja, who had 635,000 concurrences on an individual stream in March 2018. Also, to put things into perspective for you some more: from July to September of 2020, Twitch had more than 4,7 billion hours watched, while YouTube had 1,7 billion. In the end they’ve gathered over 17 billion hours watched in the whole last year, which was an 83% rise from 2019.

As you can see, there are many variables in this, and that’s nothing strange when you take into consideration the size of the Twitch beast. Let’s hope new regulations bring some positive changes so we can all enjoy ugliness-free and drama-free streams in the future.

While we wait for that to happen, don’t forget to visit our Pick6 and choose your favorite free to play game today.