I wanted to start off with the second portion of the week’s discussion of streaming/esports. I thought the whole idea of the spectatorship chapter was interesting, especially since it was based around one of my favorite game series, Counterstrike. I would not agree with the points made in class about the hype moments being the sole driver for the rise of esports in general. There is a lot more to this, one has to consider the fact that the community around the game are really passionate about the games, even though the hype moments are great it’s not the glue of the industry. Streaming and esports rise can go hand and hand because some of the earliest forms of streaming were related to lan events. Even though Twitch was the platform that rose when streaming became popular the only reason Twitch was able to thrive was because of the following it had before it became Twitch, it was previously known as Justin TV.

Moving on the some past/current day issues of the aforementioned “titty streamer problem”, the problem with this topic is that some people on the platform (Twitch) are actually being the so called “titty streamer”, but the issue is now that other women on the platform are being harassed solely based on the fact that they are a women on a men dominated media. We went into some detail about the gap between top male and female streamers and the video was shown about it, from my extensive experience within the Twitch community I feel that the way they are measuring the gap between the top male and female streamers are wrong. They are not taking into account sponsorships, donations, etc: they are only focusing on sub money from being partnered (the only way to get a sub button is to  have 100 followers and around 5 concurrent viewers within your streams then you can apply for partnership and then you can get sub money, which is usually at first split 50/50 between you and Twitch). The problems with that is there are some influencers on Twitch that to their metric make nothing, but are crazy successful an example of that until recently is a person named “itssliker” (or sliker) who was way past the requirements for partnership, and never got it till now. Also aside from that the way the topic streamers brand themselves is much different from the top male and female streamers. You can’t blame Twitch if someone who happened to be a guy branded themselves better than a women on the platform, it’s not a question of male or female there it’s how they make the best of their content and brand.

 I’m not going to say there are no sextist themes within the Twitch community completely. The problem with Twitch addressing this issue is that they are doing the right things for the wrong reason. They are making some changes for the sake of public relations. Twitch is focusing only on the top of the food chain to make sure there is peace with the sponsors. The change is a great move in the right direction, don’t get me wrong, but it needs to be equally distributed to all if they really cared for the people on their platform.