Twitch is not having a good past few days.
Ever since the "A Day Off Twitch" boycott that several Twitch streamers conducted to protest senseless verbal abuse against members of minorities, the streaming platform has consistently lost user traffic, reports Kotaku. The boycott was in direct response to harassment campaigns called "hate raids," which has plagued a lot of content creators there lately.
Twitch experienced a roughly 22% decrease in peak concurrent traffic during the day of the protest. The number, which came from the website Twitch Tracker, corresponds to a drop to 3.5 million peak concurrent viewers from an average of 4.5 million.
Furthermore, over 10,000 content creators on the streaming platform rallied behind "A Day Off Twitch, causing the total number of Twitch streamers to go down as a result.
Another data tracking website, this time GameSight Analytics, offered more insight into the decreased traffic on Twitch. On Aug. 25, a total of 897,745 channels were broadcasting, resulting in 2.4 million hours streamed and around 65 million hours of view time. By the time of the Twitch boycott, that dropped to 834,107 channels, 2.2 million hours streamed, and 54.8 million hours of view time.
The aforementioned Twitch boycott took the spotlight this week with a streamer named Raven (real name withdrawn) posting a video on her Twitter account of racist hate speech flooding her chat during a broadcast. She was then joined by fellow streamers Lucia Everblack and ShineyPen, who themselves have also been victimized by these hate raids.
Is Twitch Doing Something To Curb the Hate Raids?
According to the company's recent tweets regarding the incident, they are. They went on the social media platform to state that they're developing channel-level ban evasion detection solutions, alongside account improvements "for months." But Twitch also said that they have to deal with "motivated bad actors" finding ways around their solutions, which is why they can't share further details about the work they've been doing so far:
No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for. This is not the community we want on Twitch, and we want you to know we are working hard to make Twitch a safer place for creators. https://t.co/fDbw62e5LW
— Twitch (@Twitch) August 20, 2021
Streamers, however, still feel like Twitch isn't doing enough to decisively crackdown on the propagation of hate speech on the platform. And this has likely resulted in some high-profile content creators jumping ship to YouTube Gaming.
Twitch Streamers Leaving
The latest popular Twitch streamer to make a move was Tim Bettar, better known as TimTheTatMan. His move followed the departure of another highly popular streamer, Ben "DrLuop" Lupo.
Bettar's departure from Twitch didn't explicitly tag the "A Day Off Twitch" movement as a catalyst. Instead, he revealed in an interview that his move was mainly driven by the desire to spend more time with his wife and young son. This is more or less the same reason that Lupo stated.
Either way, the departure of these high-profile content creators from the platform creates a real problem for Twitch and possibly strengthening its direct competition in YouTube Gaming. If more content creators leave, this will convince more fans to leave and further decrease Twitch viewership.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by RJ Pierce
