On June 6, 2011, a website was created that would change many people’s lives for many different reasons. Twitch was the first live streaming website ever created. Streamers would create accounts and play video games for people to watch live; this allowed users to see the streamers playing in real time. Twitch even became a viable source of income due to subscribers, donations, and advertisers. Twitch allowed people to make a career playing video games.

Through the platform, viewers used a chat to interact with the streamer, creating a community within each game being played. Viewers could donate money or subscribe to a streamer to get unique chat emotes that were only available to subscribers.

At first, Twitch had on average 3.2 million view users per month in 2011, according to Brian Dean of Backlinko. The nascent company had loads of users and people streaming, which was millions of dollars from streamers and chatters. 

Then things changed. 

Staff and guidelines became stricter, as well as staff showing bias on how they would ban streamers for tame things that other streamers would do in a much worse manner who were not banned. Twitch as a company has also been making wholesale changes to the website regarding things like budget cuts and how much money streamers make as a whole.

Twitch started to diversify from gaming from 2017-19. The site went from people playing video games to simply being able to stream anything you wanted. People would record themselves and narrate to their chat or do things like sleeping streams where people donate sounds to keep the streamer awake, or they would just walk around town with their phone. Anyone could do it–really. 

Then naturally, controversy arose.

A lot of female streamers started doing “Hot Tub Streams,” which is exactly what it sounds like. These would somewhat go past Twitch’s eyes and past their guidelines as well. The only problem was people would be banned for very miniscule reasons, like a man accidentally showing a harmless body part for half a second on stream. He was then banned for a week, as this went against the nudity guideline. A popular female streamer soon after, accidentally showed innapropiate images after a chat member told her to look it up.  She was, however, not issued a ban. Clear favoritism was in place.

“I feel like the 75/25 split for Twitch is a greedy move, as they’re taking more from small creators,” says Woozy, a Twitch streamer.

 “I understand that the money can be used to keep the platform afloat but they could introduce programs like TikTok’s creator’s program which allows smaller creators to grow even though they make less money.” 

To give more context, Twitch recently has been taking 75 percent of the streamer’s money, instead of the 50/50 they were taking previously. This caused many many streamers to leave Twitch and migrate to other sites like YouTube and Kick.

“Twitch has changed to the point where I don’t even use it anymore,” Woozy says when asked about Twitch. “I watch streams on YouTube mostly now as everyone I watched on Twitch has moved to the more fair platform. Twitch is dying, and they refuse to fix it as of now.”