- Hi guys, what's going on?
Today we are going to
talk about five things
that Twitch absolutely hates.
So why is it important?
Well, Twitch is a pretty
angry place sometimes.
I'm sure you've been to different forums
all around the internet,
especially on Reddit.
Reddit is so angry.
But it's important not to
fall into the same traps
that most people do when
they're surfing Twitch.
If you can avoid being angry,
you're gonna lead a happier life.
We're not going to be talking about
the normal things that everybody hates,
like bad audio, bad video,
not talking to your community.
All right, "So dude that I barely know,
"what makes you an authority to talk
"about things that people hate?"
Well, my name is Skullstream,
I've been partnered on Twitch
for about two years now,
coming up.
I've been full time for one year
so I have a lot of experience
in the Twitch arena.
Four years worth of time on Twitch
is a lifetime in meeting angry people.
And the funny part about a
lot of this misplaced anger
is that most of it's avoidable.
So I'm not gonna wishy-washy
about it anymore,
let's dive right into it.
The first thing that makes
people really angry on Twitch
is almost universal,
and it's universal because we all share
the same experience with this emotion.
That emotion is entitlement.
What does entitlement sound like?
It sounds like well,
"I really deserve more views,"
or "it's took me 40 hours to do
"and people should really see it,"
and "I did this, so I deserve this."
I'll stop you right there,
you don't deserve anything.
You guys might think that's
a pretty harsh view to take
but let me explain.
You guys ever heard of Edgar Allen Poe?
Have you ever heard of Vincent van Gogh?
These were two leaders in their time,
both in the field of
writing art respectively
who didn't gain fame
until after they had died.
They had dedicated their
lives to these pursuits
and they hadn't become
famous or appreciated
until after they were already dead.
There's a reason why the
trope of starving artists
has been that way for
historical centuries.
Sometimes you make stuff,
sometimes it's really good
but sometimes nobody sees
it and it's a travesty
and maybe these people do deserve it.
But here's the thing,
everybody out there is creating content,
especially the people on Twitch.
Most people on Twitch have
dabbled in being a streamer.
Most people on Twitch have also dabbled
in creating content on Twitter,
or creating content on Instagram or TikTok
or any other platform.
So when somebody comes
out and they're like,
"I really deserve more views,"
why?
Everybody around you is
creating just like you are,
except they're not complaining about it.
So when a person expresses entitlement,
it is a specifically
disgusting emotion to see
because we're all creating,
do all of us deserve views?
That's not for us to decide,
that's for our audience to decide.
Take a look at YouTube's
2018 Rewind video.
It's the most disliked
video in YouTube history.
And it's not for lack
of production quality
that went into it, or
lack of fame of the people
that participated in the video.
It is strictly because
people just hated it.
They just hated it.
We don't know why,
but did it deserve to be
the most disliked video
in YouTube history?
YouTube with over a
hundred million viewers,
can you honestly say that
it didn't deserve more hype?
No, as content creators,
we don't get to determine
the value of the work that we create.
The value of what we create
is determined by our audience.
In the case of YouTube, they
found that value pretty low
whereas maybe somebody
who takes a cat picture
that takes them seven seconds
to frame up the shot, take it
and then post it online to Twitter.
Maybe it gets a million likes.
We've all seen that happen before.
Does that mean that the
cat is more valuable
than this 2018 YouTube video
which probably took hundreds of thousands
of millions of dollars worth
of production money and time?
Yeah.
(laughs)
The audience decided they saw
more value in the cat picture
and that's actually the yardstick
we're all working against.
If we're not creating
content that's more valuable
to our audience and a picture of a cat,
we're probably doing it wrong.
like in subscribe if you
would rather be looking
at a picture of a cat.
Maybe some of us have gotten
a following along the way.
Maybe some of us have
figured out what we're doing.
Most of us probably haven't
and when we see other people
think they deserve views
when we've been through
that same struggle,
it's really hard to get
behind them and support them
because honestly the people
that are watching them,
giving them their time,
those are the people that
you should be thankful for.
Like they're not going
to get that time back.
You're not going to get
the time you spent here
watching this back and
all we can do as creators
is thank those people for
seeing us while we're alive
for seeing us while we're still alive.
Thank you for your time.
That last one took a really long time.
Let's move on to number two
and try and breeze through it.
Fake fucking people!
There's a website called
thescienceofpeople.com
and they conducted a study
involving 1036 respondents
and they asked a question.
The question they asked was,
what do you find the most annoying?
And they gave them four choices.
Which one do you think
is the most annoying?
Answer in the comments below.
Over 70% of the respondents
in this 1036 person survey
included that fake people
were the most annoying.
We hate make people.
We hate people that
look like they're trying
to sell us something.
People that are trying
to get us to do stuff.
Like and subscribe.
We hate it when people are
trying to manipulate us
for their own benefit.
And most of the big scandals on Twitch
have been perpetrated
by people that are fake.
Fake viewership is a big deal on Twitch.
Fake gossip is a big deal on Twitch.
Faked ailments are a big deal on Twitch.
There was a dude that was in a wheelchair
for years on Twitch.
And people found out later
he could actually walk!
And Twitch is a really personal place
to hang out with people too,
like you get to know
your favorite streamers
the streamers interact with you,
you become friends with them.
And the reason this one
is so personal to people
is that when you have an image of somebody
that you've developed
over a long period of time
and all of a sudden they're
no longer this person,
it's really jarring and you
feel like you've been lied to.
It'd be like finding out that Mr. Rogers
was really an asshole.
And in streaming it's really
hard to avoid this too
because the landscape
that streaming has set up
over the last few years,
people are trying to convince us
that we should be friends with everybody.
We should network with everybody.
If we give enough to everybody,
eventually they'll give back to us.
And if we become involved
and do this and do that
and do these hundred things,
people will become involved
and return the favor to us
and that's just not true.
You can bend over backwards
and you can be the biggest servant
to the most amount of
people possible on Twitch
and that's no guarantee that
you're going to see traction
in the growth of your channel.
The only thing you should be worried about
if you wanna grow your channel
on Twitch is being interested
in people that are
interested in your content.
"So Skull, how the fuck do I know somebody
"is interested in my content?"
It's actually not that hard.
Are people interacting with your content?
Are they commenting?
Are they talking to people in your chat?
Are they asking you questions
about whatever you're doing,
whatever you've been working on?
And can they tell somebody
what you've been up to
for the past month?
I'd argue if somebody doesn't know
what you've been doing for a month,
well they're probably not that
interested in your content.
So don't be fake,
surround yourself with genuine people,
be a genuine person
and worry about people that
are interested in your content
and you can never go wrong.
This one might be my favorite
and this one's definitely
the most public of all of
these different things.
Rules!
Twitch loves them, right?
Or does Twitch hate them?
Twitch and any Twitch drama site
trying to be a
platform-specific version of TMZ
has a real love affair with rules
and TOS, terms of service of Twitch.,
what you're allowed to do and
what you're not allowed to do.
And there's a lot of people out there
that are way obsessed
with what you're allowed
to do on Twitch or not.
And not for nothing,
if people followed my
advice from the last tip
and just stayed interested
with their content
and people that were
interested with their content,
this whole thing wouldn't
even be a problem,
but we're going to address it anyway
just because it happens all the time.
It's actually become amusing to me.
Let me open with this,
there's a lot of content on Twitch
that is intentionally provocative.
There's also a lot of content on YouTube
that's intentionally provocative.
You know taking a camera
into a public restroom,
tossing cats,
(laughs)
taking a camera into a public restroom,
tossing cats, poking dead bodies.
These are things that
we're well acquainted with.
Now, the thing is in almost all
the cases of provocativeness
on Twitch for provocative
(mumbles)
In almost all provocative cases on Twitch,
it's almost always intentional.
It's not people that don't
know what they're doing
and it's almost never an accident.
These are people that do these things
to engage a very specific
set of responses.
And the set of responses
that they're trying to engage
are viral responses,
getting people to talk about them
and it's always the same group of people
that get involved with this.
So group number one are the rule bearers.
They are the people that are
the keepers of what the TOS
says they can and can't do.
They're like legal experts,
like they wrote the Constitution
of the United States
and their next calling in life
was to enforce the terms
of service of Twitch.
And you can usually tell these
guys from everybody else,
they usually sound something like this,
(clears throat)
"Twitch is a gaming website,"
which hasn't been a gaming
website for a long time now
or just a gaming website
for a long time now.
Prior to Twitch existing,
it was actually Justin TV
which was famous for just
having cameras on all the time.
There were TV shows on it,
there was all sorts of
real life stuff on it.
And for a time, Twitch
tried to restrict itself
to video gaming content only.
It has since reverted back
to basically allowing everything on it.
So the argument that
Twitch is a gaming site
is almost completely invalid.
"There's not suppose
to be porn on Twitch,"
Twitch actually does a
pretty good job of enforcing
not having pornography,
barring that Ninja scandal.
Twitch usually does a
pretty good job of enforcing
not having pornography on the website.
Where it gets, I don't know,
where people find issue with it
is that it really love
talking about cleavage
too much, too little,
doesn't seem like anybody can satisfy
the Twitch usership across the board,
it's either too much, too
little, whatever the case!
People are always talking about boobs.
And I'm gonna save you guys a lot of time
especially the ones that
really wanna enforce
the terms of service.
Boobs are awesome!
And every conversation about the topic
is going to end the same.
Boobs are awesome, they
always will be awesome.
They're going to be awesome for forever.
If they make you angry,
well clearly, you're
not one of the billions?
Billions of people supporting
the adult entertainment industry.
The pervs!
Here's the people that
huge totally support
the adult entertainment industry.
Then we have the knights.
Now these don't have to be white Knights.
These are just people
that defend the streamer
no matter what the streamer does.
These are people who are,
if the streamer could
have murdered somebody,
they would defend that person's
right to murder somebody.
They are,
they should probably be committed.
Group number four, the crowd.
Now these are the people that
have torches and pitchforks
and they are ready to
fucking kill somebody, right?
It doesn't matter who, anybody
could have done anything.
These are people that are
just there for the riot.
They're the people that
don't even believe in a cause
and they come out to throw smoke bombs
and human fecal matter at the SWAT team.
They're people that watch Jerry Springer
in their free time.
Next group of people
are the jealous people.
The ones that say, "This person
shouldn't be doing this,"
but they're really thinking,
"I should be getting these views,
"this is interfering with my content,
"these people be stealing my views."
Are you oversexualizing your content?
Are you poking a dead body?
Are you habitually bringing cameras
into public restroom facilities?
Are you lying about whether
you can walk or not?
If your answer was no,
then I assume your
audience doesn't overlap
with the people that you're jealous of.
It doesn't really make
sense for you to be angry
that they're profiting
off of people you think
you could be profiting off of.
The next group, people that
just wanna watch the world burn.
This is me, like if there's a
good clusterfuck, I'm there!
Give me my binoculars,
give me a video camera.
Let me see these people go at it.
I won't be talking, but I'll
sure as heck be observing.
The next group of people are the Isms.
People that support a social
agenda or social cause
or speak out against the social
agenda or a social cause,
whether or not the event actually applies.
And these are people
that are gonna be citing
like legal precedents and legalese
and different court cases
and all these different things
that you're gonna forget
30 seconds after they spend 30 minutes
typing it out in the forum.
If you don't agree with them, beware!
They're coming at you.
On the last group, that just adds gasoline
onto this whole
conflagration are the press.
And I include the press
to be Twitch itself.
But Twitch's hands are kind of tied
because they have to
respond to a lot of these
provocative situations, Reddit forums,
other content creation
channels which cover drama,
like Twitch Fails things like that.
The press will add momentum
through all of these situations
and they'll add momentum
to anybody's argument.
For each group of people like this,
there's usually an associated press group
that exists where these people
can talk about their agenda
when these events come up.
So at the end of the day,
the funny thing is with all of this,
those are the groups that all participate.
It almost doesn't matter because
the likelihood of a person
getting permanently banned
for doing any of this stuff
on Twitch is very low.
The reason for that is
it's really hard for Twitch
to get new usership and by
banning somebody permanently
from their platform,
there's a good chance that
they're gonna have people
that won't come back.
And in marketing, earned
value is a huge deal.
Earned value is basically
your organic traffic.
People that are true fans
of whoever's involved
in one of these situations.
Twitch isn't going to risk alienating them
because earned value is
extremely hard to obtain.
Earned value is why
streamers are so valuable.
Earned value is why they're
approached by sponsors.
Earned value takes time, effort
and if Twitch could replicate
it themselves, they would.
But not everybody
understands how to do it.
The number of people that
have large followings
on the service are very, very limited.
So the likelihood of
Twitch ever permanently
getting rid of somebody who has taken time
to build up their following over years,
bringing them into the Twitch
ecosystem, is very small.
So Twitch probably isn't
gonna permanently ban anybody.
And actually several
streamer management groups
have weighed in saying
that as long as the scandal
is big enough, the scandal ends
up being what they call ROI
return on investment positive.
I.e., whatever publicity
they gain by engaging
in this bannable activity or
suspension-worthy activity,
actually increases their notoriety.
Now even if it's negative press,
it increases the amount of people
that are talking about them.
And what the Harvard
Business Review has found
is that even bad press
literally is good news.
In a study of book reviews,
they found that relatively unknown authors
who had received a negative
review on their book
actually had sales increase 45%,
versus if an author that
was already well-known
had a negative review on their book.
It only decreased sales a little bit.
So too long didn't read is,
there's no such thing as bad press.
To the people that see these situations
and people that get angry
at these different things,
you don't have to be angry.
And actually by being angry,
you're kind of playing into the whole plan
of doing provocative
content to begin with.
Provocative content succeeds
because people talk about it.
And if people that angry about it,
the best thing that they
can do is not talk about it.
The next thing that Twitch hates
gonna get all sciency on
you for a second here,
and it's low-arousal negative emotions.
"Arousal? Skull that sounds sexual,"
it's totally not, or I guess it can be.
(laughs)
A low-arousal emotion is an emotion
that causes a physical response.
And things like this,
like anger is definitely a
high-arousal negative emotion.
We can agree anger is negative,
we can also agree that anger usually
makes people take action.
And therefore, when people take action
they tend to talk about something more.
That's basically how this arousal works.
Does the arousal make them do something
or does it not make them do something?
We only consider one category
here to be bad content
because anger can be good content,
rage content can be funny,
disgust content can be funny.
"I saw this it was so disgusting,
"now I gotta make my friends suffer
"by sending it to them too."
Fear content is amazing, like this whole,
I used to play horror games and scream
and fear's not a positive emotion,
but it's really entertaining
to watch somebody go through it.
Stress, giddiness, excitement, happiness
those are all high arousal-emotions,
negative and positive.
They make good content.
Low-arousal, positive
emotions still work too.
Think of low-arousal emotions as like,
calmness, relaxation, serenity,
these are things that
might not necessarily
inspire somebody to go share,
but something like ASMR
definitely has an audience
on Twitch and people are
definitely interested in it.
There's definitely a need for it.
So what's the last group of emotions?
Low-arousal negative emotions.
These are emotions that
don't inspire any action,
don't make people want to do anything
and therefore nobody talks
about them On Twitch.
And we just talked about a subject
where not talking about somebody
is the worst thing that
you could do to them.
When you're in content creation
and people stop acknowledging you exist,
or people forget about you,
basically like you're dead to the world.
Being forgotten and not
talked about is way worse
than being reviled or hated
in the world of content creation.
So let's talk about
low-arousal negative emotion.
Sadness, boredom, tiredness.
You're gonna recognize these
as a lot of things that
channels at the bottom of a directory
actually exhibit on a daily basis.
We've all been to the chat
where people are sort of playing the game,
not talking to anybody,
and somebody comes in they say something
and it takes a person
30 seconds to respond,
That's boredom.
Sadness, sadness is okay once
in a while if it's fleeting
if you're trying to
connect with your audience,
but nobody wants it as their main export.
Everybody has struggles
and trials and tribulations
in their life.
In fact, our brains
actually seek out things
that are bothering us
so that we can fix them
or work on them.
Or what I'm trying to say
is everybody's got problems.
Why should anybody care about yours?
It would be far more productive
they care about theirs.
The last thing that
Twitch hates, everything!
"Everything Skull? "
Everything, Let me explain.
No matter what kind of
content you create in Twitch,
no matter what anybody does,
no matter what kind of
content we create on YouTube,
people are always going to hate it.
Maybe not the majority of people,
but certainly some people,
no matter what you do.
And if you don't believe me,
travel to the comment
section of any YouTube video
across the entire website.
There's billions of hours
worth of content out there
and there are always downvotes
even on really good content.
So what I'm trying to say is
there's always gonna somebody
that doesn't like what you do.
And you don't have to please everybody.
You shouldn't try to please everybody.
If the content I was
creating became a haven
for incels and racists and misogynists
then I wouldn't wanna be
known as that safe place
for those kinds of people.
It's okay to piss people off
as long as you're pissing
off the right kind of people.
"Why did we talk about
all of this just now?
"Why do I need to know everything
that Twitch hates Skull?"
So that you don't have to become
part of any of these
ongoing conversations.
You don't have to be angry
while you're on Twitch.
It's really easy to come
to Twitch and eventually
find something that puts you off
or something that makes you angry.
And being the kind of
streamer that produces
the sort of instructional content,
I do run into people that
are frequently frustrated.
And they think they're frustrated
because of external reasons
and they're really not.
So if you have a friend that's
angry, send them this video.
Show them that by being angry,
they're probably working
against themselves.
By being angry they're probably
feeding into the things
that are making them mad.
Give them the perspective
that there's over 56,000
live channels on Twitch.
There's Netflix, which
millions of people watch.
There's YouTube, which has
100 million different users.
There's more than enough content out there
where if somebody comes to your channel
and they don't like what you're offering,
they can go find whatever they want.
They don't have to tolerate
things that they hate.
So don't become part of the problem.
It's fun to shit on Twitch all the time,
but it really is a beautiful thing.
I've been on it for four years
and I've experienced my share
of frustrations for sure,
but it's still the best place
in the world to find people
who are interested in the
same things that we are.
Now I wouldn't have the
same group of friends
that I have today without Twitch,
especially as somebody
that's on the older side
of the gaming community.
There's no better place
for me to encounter people
that share my hobby.
Now I can't go to class and find somebody
that's also playing Doom.
I don't have class, I have Twitch.
That's where I connect with my friends.
So it's not perfect,
but it's pretty awesome.
If you like this video, if you
like the audio to this video,
I just made another one last week
that explains how to make
your microphone sound good,
any microphone sound good.
So go ahead and check that out.
And if you liked this video
or liked any of the content,
liked the message behind it,
please like and subscribe.
I'm trying to produce one video a week
and I see if I can increase
that going forward.
I am live on Twitch Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday
at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
So come by and say hi and yell
at me, pat me on the back,
whatever.
(laughs)
We can talk this out.
