#if this posts again in like 2 hours with a horrible audio glitch at the end blame tumblr

[skizz-that-man]

Imp and Skizz talk about kissing each other

[pkgam]

What Happened to Twitch?

Twitch used to be a pretty good website. I had really high hopes that it would be a competitor to Youtube. It is a live stream platform that was ahead of Youtube as Youtube took a while to do live stuff. It has videos as well such as of past streams or people streaming videos they made for viewing later, viewer interaction features, solid streamers, no audible magic, good mods/staff, etc... Now the issues with the site are virtually endless. Let me give you a rundown of various things I have experienced and I have heard others experiencing which you may or may not have experienced because it’s as if that issues are not even account-specific.

Lately when logging in, every time, they prompt be to get a 6-digit code from my Email to continue to login because they “don’t recognize” my device. Yeah, you know how on every other website that has verification things like this, it’ll keep track of what devices you logged in from so you don’t have to keep verifying? No matter what, it doesn’t do that for me and a bunch of others. It seems to work fine for others though. So it’s user-specific. I have even tried logging in from one PC, then logging into another off the same internet while STILL being logged in to that PC and it’ll ask me to verify on both. It should at least be able to tell it’s from the same IP, but nope.

Try reporting the glitches and problems to Twitch as well. You’ll get nowhere. A recent experience I had with them was I tried to resolve that 6-digit verification thing for months. I explain it, get what looks like a generic copy/paste or automated response that does not address the issue, I respond back saying that wasn’t it and explain it again, then get NO response back, but do get a response back with a survey on how they did. Needless to say I was not satisfied and explained it in a civil way. No response back from them for that either. They used to handle stuff like that so well way back. Like, I remember when The Speed Gamers migrated from Ustream back to Twitch that they were having layout trouble during one of their charity streams in that what they wanted to incorporate on their page couldn’t be done, so they messaged Twitch staff about it and they tweaked the page so they could. Stuff like that was amazing! I don’t see things like that happen anymore.

When finally being able to log in, I’ve noticed that oftentimes my status is set to “offline” when I always have it set to “online”. Alternately I have seen friend’s statuses going to idle despite them being active on the site. So that status part of the site is entirely borked.  Moving on to other topics...

I think users knew when they implemented Audible Magic (basically Content ID for Twitch, automatically hitting videos) and played it off as a benefit to streamers so they can remove copyrighted music in their videos that it was going to go downhill. Remember that a lot of people went from Youtube to Twitch (Or Justin.tv) BECAUSE they were tired of Youtube’s horrible automated systems. Add automation in the mix and, well... it indeed went downhill.

Twitch is clearly inconsistent in their moderation now too. There was this one girl who frustratedly threw her cat behind her on stream and nothing came of it. But on the other hand, there was a girl who got banned for apparent dog yelps off camera with her being there, stating the ban was for animal abuse. Story: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/twitch-streamer-furious-over-animal-abuse-ban-amid-alinity-controversy-1296710 Many’ more examples like that out there on various topics.

Also, ever since they implemented automatic moderation of words in chat, there has been a ridiculous amount of people punished for innocent things (you can briefly read what they post before it gets removed from view or use a browser extension to reveal them) because it can’t tell context. At least streamers can turn that off, but it was set to on by default which caused a lot of issues. Still’ does when people have it on as not everyone turned it off.

Streams have been getting very bad audio glitches for me in that they will get more and more distorted until I pause then play the stream. On top of that, the chat will stop scrolling with new messages at times, forcing me to scroll it down manually. With both of these, it’s like having to maintain two fronts while trying to interact. Not fun.

Speaking of trying to interact, ever since they implemented that stream delay of like 20 seconds to cheap on the servers, it has not been the same anyway. They eventually implemented a “low latency” thing which yields faster delivery at the cost of possibly buffering a lot, but it’s still longer than the 2-3 seconds it used to be. Just imagine trying to converse with someone face to face and they respond 20 seconds later first. It’s the most awkward thing to keep track of. (Smashcast doesn’t have that. Just’ saying...) It can be even worse if the stream player itself gets an error and you have to refresh, which does happen fairly often. Making you possibly miss the point the streamer talked to you. Trying to sort it out then just stalls the whole thing because they have to readdress you if you mention it to them which backlogs them responding to others and etc...

For the videos on demand (VOD) themselves, playback is often glitchy as errors happen midway through, they don’t play at all and seeking to a certain part is often very difficult as it doesn’t go where you click. Heck, I heard from others that sometimes you can’t even PAUSE a VOD as that functionality is glitched out. But pausing works fine for me. Why is that? Who knows.

Live streams aren’t much better as they have their own issues. I often get errors and have to refresh the page to get it to run again. Even when not getting an error, I noticed that I’m served a slightly-slower stream than others seem to get. So I have to pause then unpause the video every so often to get it to jump back ahead to the closest point I can see. Part of me wonders if the error and slightly slower stream are related, but don’t hold me to that. I have a good internet connection too.

Twitch streams also get deleted nowadays unless set up to into highlights. Given that many weren’t aware this happened before it was too late (you only had 14 days to save them if not a turbo/prime member and 60 if you are), a TON of content got lost. People argued that it’s to save money because of the hosting costs of video data being large. So rather than streams just being automatically turned into highlights as a precautionary measure, they just let them get wiped because they didn’t care. I’m not entirely sure about that “because” you can save streams to highlights as mentioned. So it’s just going to fill back up again since people now know of it, if not already has filled back up.

Twitch also got rid of PMs so past conversations you might have wanted to look back on or had to catch up on as a backlog were lost. You can do the same sort of thing in whispers if a person allows it in their settings, but what’s the point of getting rid of PMs?... Text is text regardless of where it’s located. This was one of those sorts of changes that I can’t figure out. I “thought” maybe they wanted to unify a private place to talk since both existed at once time, but why not just move the conversation to the other or not have both at the same time to begin with?

Another thing they get rid of for no reason is email notifications to streams you follow. They “say” if you don’t watch a stream for a while they’ll turn off email alerts to it. Which makes sense to not fill up someone’s inbox. Imagine for instance they stream 30 days straight and you don’t go to any of them as sort of a break. That’s 30 emails that are useless to you. Except it doesn’t work. Even streams I watched regular like Bob Ross got email alerts disabled. You can tell that they keep track of when you click an Email link to someone’s stream too because in the URL you’ll notice it recognizes you came from the Email. So there’s no excuse. Oh and there’s no way to toggle that automated disabling of alerts to off as far as I’m aware. So you just have to deal with it. At least they do seem to be consistent about telling you when it does turn off email alerts, but get ready to enter that 6-digit login code just to fix the alerts regardless if the person is streaming or not.

After the Amazon buyout, eventually they started pushing Twitch Prime as well, basically another paid subscription thing like Turbo, only with Amazon benefits added on it. But all the things they push as “prime loot” are complete garbage. Stuff like Raid: Shadow Legends which is hardly a “game”. What made them even think a community of gamers would be into that? Well, maybe they did realize that, but did it anyway as a business partnership for the moolah.

I get the feeling that business partnerships are what’s going on with all the Valorant stuff popping up as well. Only with streamers being able to take advantage of it. For example: People found out to try the game, they need to watch any Valorant stream with drops enabled for a for 2 hours. That lead to people going to streams just for that invite. Many people. Artificial-inflation amounts of people that encourage people to stream it for said numbers and Twitch recommending channels playing it like mad to people, lol! So yeah, I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t a business partnership.

You can find many more examples out there of people may or may not having a bug for things, but this should be enough to explain that Twitch is a complete mess. Every single aspect of it. It’s in a state like Youtube where everything is broke and they are ignoring users who message them telling about bugs (which they claim they encourage people to do and they listen to) or maybe are just unwilling to fix any of them even if they know about them. Who knows because they don’t communicate like they used to.

Your thoughts?

Thanks for reading and have a good one!