I’ve been reminded, once again, to just stop having faith in society. Humans, for the most part, are vile, easily manipulated, disgusting creatures that respond best when they are made angry or horny. Social media and all the other people making money off of this are 100% proof that humanity is in a desperate state, one from Nietzsche’s worst nightmares.
Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself and my wife, and for all the right reasons. After three years and 20k followers, and dozens of radically changed lives (and the messages of gratitude saying so) Twitch feels like a person prostituting themselves to troll hornt incels is a better “partner” than me only because I haven’t maintained a 75 viewers per stream arbitrary benchmark. They don’t care about my content, they don’t care that I stream 8 hours a day on average, and much of that is to be able to voice questions and frustrations from people at work and applying for tech jobs during our coworking sessions. Nope, Twitch does not quality, only quantity, specifically of dollars. That’s nothing surprising, however, that is all that any of these companies really care about. Hell, I might as well become a pornographer, I’d do better.
I know, I know. Don’t get mad, get busy. My own mantra. In this case I would have to create my own streaming service entirely. And you know what, why the hell not. I’m certainly technically capable of doing it. I certainly have the hardware and expertise. I would even give Twitch a good run for their money if I got the right funding, and for what, just so that another money-grubbing POS board could force me to promote streamers selling their farts more than those putting free education out their for everyone?
Who am I kidding? Society has already demonstrated how terrible it is by how it treats those who willingly watch over and help our children learn. Even in 2023 teachers are viewed as the devil, as godless fecks hell-bent on forcing the minds of their idiot children to learn something against their will.
Again, society sucks! And, you know what, I’m beginning to realize that it is never going to get better. Humans have been like this for 10s of thousands of years. It’s all the exact same thing over and over again just in different forms.
Mandela said that the best weapon against all this is education. But what if you can’t even get people to read anything but what comes across their zero-attention-space social media feeds? What if all the extensive psychological resources the world has sell out to Facebook to manipulate children into spending as much of their parents money as possible. Why? Because those adults have also given up. It’s all a big fuck fest, and the person who fucks over the other first wins. That’s 2023.
I’m very close to playing this game. I know I would be pretty damn good at it. I could become a millionaire quite easily once I remove my ethics. I could work for a company that pays be more than a half-million and just ignore how they are destroying the world. I got mine, right? Wrong.
I just can’t. I will go to my fucking grave before I sell out to that level. But what about working for a company that pays me twice what I already make? Hummm. We’ll see. One of the most entertaining ways to fuck-over Twitch would be to change jobs and make triple any Twitch employee’s salary and then host my own conventions, self-funded for the most part, right across the street from Twitch’s conventions and not pay them a penny. I do enjoy the business relationship Twitch and I have, but they continue to abuse and abuse it. It’s only a matter of time before they fail. They have way too much technical debt not to have another hungry startup, or Mastadon-like FOSS offering completely destroy them. And frankly, I would dance on their grave at this point given all the disrespect they have shown me.
Twitch is doomed to failure. They may have brought forth the personal broadcasting revolution, but their are way too many powers that be that do now want to bow down to Twitch for their livelihoods to stay dormant. Huge streamers have already left Twitch and are doing their own stand-alone streaming services. This will only continue as personal broadcasting continues to increase. It’s really too bad YouTube has been so fucking asleep at the wheel during all of this. No, the thing that will take them all down with be self-sovereignty, where people build stand-alone communities that are loosely coupled, like Mastadon. I predict Twitch has about six years before it disappears entirely as we know it. There are already smart engineers working tirelessly to replace Twitch with a suitable FOSS alternative.