Hey everyone!
As some of you know from my latest posts I've gotten into streaming recently on Twitch. I don't really have a big following on any other social media platforms, I've only been active on what I considered the best one before Steemit to be - Reddit but the only thing you can brag about there are your karma points. No followers, no income, nothing really but an imaginary number next to your name proving your activity on the platform.
So when I started streaming, it was for the sole purpose of engaging with my Steemit followers more and showing them what I do on the platform on a daily basis when curating. I've been having some Viewer Curation Streams but also been doing some gaming and just hanging around. A big reason to why I wanted to become more active in the streaming scene was cause I've always enjoyed watching streamers on Twitch and I saw it as a up and coming platform combined with how big esports are becoming in general.
Twitch is one of the leading platforms in streaming and there are people all over the world using it. It started with just gaming content and has lately evolved into a lot more like creative content and streamers just streaming about their life in the "IRL" section. Even though they probably generate a lot of revenue being the leading platform I couldn't help but notice a lot of problems and greed involved - much like any other centralized platforms that depend on ad revenue are.
First time I noticed how the blockchain technology could get a big advantage over the centralized platforms was through donations. Most streamers that stream full-time depend on donations, I sort of see it like the tipping system in the U.S where the workers depend on their tips on top of the pay to make a living. What did viewers have to their disposal to use to tip streamers? Paypal. Paypal takes a big fee from the donations, the smaller the donation might be the bigger the cut making it almost impossible to tip streamers lower amounts than a dollar at a time.
This was of course annoying for the streamers and for the tippers and Twitch was aware of it. Their solution to at least make sure the streamers get the full amount of the tips sent to them was to create their own token they call "bits". Now instead of the streamers having to live with the cut that Paypal took from donations, the tippers pay the cut upfront instead when purchasing bits to donate. Even though the streamers were now happy, the tippers were the ones having to pay unnecessary fees for donating to their favorite streamers. Instead of Paypal taking that cut, Twitch's solution to this was them taking the cut instead...
Here comes decentralized streaming combined with Steem that would make tipping cost nothing and is why I got excited when I saw the Announcement post of Dlive earlier. I've been talking about this for quite some time with a few Steemians and I'm glad someone is taking the opportunity to create something like this. Streaming is a growing industry and being able to tip the streamers with the full amount plus being able to make posting rewards on Steem will be revolutionary and will pass the competitors by storm, in my opinion.
Some errors I've noticed myself on Twitch lately
With all the money they are making as one of the leading platforms you'd think there would at least not be so many bugs on the UI and considering how long they have been running so far, even though I just started streaming here are some bugs I've noticed.
On my profile page I have this image that I entered way before I started streaming, it has a link under it that is supposed to go directly to my Steemit profile. Not only can I now not remove this image and the text under it, but I can't add another panel and the link sends users here instead when clicking on it.
They have this feature where if your stream is offline and viewers go to your page, they can instead see a stream that you are "hosting", I added a few channels to it at one point but noticed the order it hosted them in was wrong often and when I tried to remove a channel, it still keeps hosting it daily.
My current hosting list:
Who it is hosting right now:
Of course these are not big issues but for a site that has been running for 6 years you'd expect them not to have these amateur bugs.
My biggest issue with it though is the growing amount of greed portrayed by it. I stumbled upon this video recently that explains how they are taking it even another step further.
Warning though the language is pretty NSFW in the video. This video was uploaded recently by a famous youtuber called penguinz0 a.k.a Critical
Cheers to the future of decentralizing everything! :)
