@@IzzyIkigai It is. I joined a start up. Everyone there came from a very corporate background. I didn't. I tried my best to do what I believed was right and what I liked to do. They continually took that power away from me, and when I voiced my concerns about my voice in the company dwindling they simply took more of it away and blamed me for not being productive enough. While there are companies with that passion behind them, at the end of the day, a job is a job. These companies want subservience. They do not want people who have opinions or ideas. I think where we went wrong in the world are two things: we democratized income; we over specialized. The high barrier of entry to everything has made it very difficult for people to explore passions sustainably, and democratized income - meaning stocks and investors - means that even in the beginning a company has to focus more on people who give large sums of money as opposed to the users. The only way out of this is to give power back to the common man. We're heading in that direction, but it takes a lot of things including cultural change.
Man that Moonlight story is crushing, Twitch mobile is so garbage I get legit mad when I'm trying to use it. Thanks for sharing and thanks for actually caring
Thanks Theo for sharing this and for your transparency. It sucks when companies don't put their users as a priority. And it's disheartening as an employee who cares and does everything they can in their power to change the culture/situation or provide solutions but still get push back. Unfortunately, not only Twitch, but a lot of companies are like this. I experienced it myself at my first software engineering position and it sucked.
Thanks for sharing your experience Theo. It’s clear you really cared and still do. Hope this gives you some relief and maybe helps others deal with what’s going on.
With the all the drama that’s been unfolding at Twitch today you hit the nail on the head with this video Theo. Although the more perspectives I hear about what’s happening at Twitch,the more it sounds like plain old corporate greed, and complacency.
Been here since justin and livestream, teamliquid and IdrA. I’ve been a partner coming on 10 years - I’ve still NEVER had a personal chat with anyone from Twitch. Even as a partner of such a long time, I go through tedious support tickets, got denied for the 70/30 years ago when creators of similar sizes got accepted. As a creator on twitch, you really do feel completely disconnected from the platform and it’s crazy that even though they at least 50% of our income, we still don’t have better ways of being in contact with them than a regular user. Thanks for this Theo, this must’ve been really hard but the honesty is really appreciated. It’s good to know this as a creator on Twitch, so that creators can see it as just a platform and jump ship with no bad feelings if better opportunities come our way.
ahhh, the good ole days. Team Liquid started my web dev journey. From a viewer perspective, the feeling of the "brickwall" does permeate to us. Regularly see creators I like get treated like trash. I personally want Twitch to either fail or change for the better. But staying the way it is... that cannot be good for anyone.
This was hard to listen to. I'm so sad to hear that this is the culture inside Twitch. This just reinforces to me why I don't like FANG anymore. I worked contract at one of them and it was a terrible experience. This tells me it's just as bad other places.
But what is "better"? Did Theo have the requirements for the mobile app? Did his hackathon team talk to the mobile PMs? Was Moonlight tested with other non-technical users?
@@SBG_Arseny Theo did, which is why he pushed hard enough to get an HR warning. The fact that he was passionate enough to die on that hill was the major premise of the story…
@@Vim_Tim He got a contact from HR because the mobile team complained to HR after the company had a hackathon. t's not that he pushed, it's that the PMs didn't want to readjust their plans after someone else told them to update.
What do you think is more likely: Theo was immediately referred to HR after presenting his hackathon prototype as an interesting idea, or that he was constantly pestering a team he never worked with to push a full rewrite to a different technology?
Thanks for sharing, sounds tough. I got burned out at my last job for a similar reason, all about business and requirements with zero care for the end user. Many actions in the app would take one or two minutes (simple stuff like saving a document or displaying a few small tables) and management was happy because we used the required data store software (>99.9% of the time was spend here) they bought and „it works.“ After getting that feedback I started looking for a new job. I feel sorry for all the users that are forced to work with that software daily.
Thanks for sharing, we really do need more passionate people like you in our industry. Sadly this kind of thing happens with lots and lots of companies. I guess that's what happens when "business focused" people takes control. They just care more about their market share than the actual product or users.
When company politics kills velocity and customer happiness. 😢 Great companies should embrace fresh and/or radical ideas and always remain experimenting. Love your insight about Twitch having to be run by creators again. Love the real talk and "unfilteredness" of this video. Thanks for sharing. 🙏🏿 As a baby streamer, I haven't been able to log into the platform from my Linux box ever (over 4 months for me now). No support, no answers. No one seems to care. Must be so hard to watch all this unfold when you care this deeply. Hope your peeps still at Twitch land on their feet whatever happens next. 🤞🏿
i can hear in your voice and see in your eyes the pain it's so obvious how much passion you had such wasted talent hope you don't get in trouble for making this video and thank you for having the courage for speaking out now a twitch staff member ( well a ex staff member now ) has spoken out maybe more people will start to see twitch for what it is
Extremely sad to see this video, as twitch is a platform that I truly enjoyed for many reasons. I can hear the truth in your voice. Working for twitch is still a goal of mine for the personal experience. If I ever get hired, I’ll be sure to continue your mission, no matter the cost because I believe in everything you’re saying. Some day, I hope to create a powerful platform for creators as well. I know that I won’t waiver on that mission.
I remember when twitch hired djWheat in 2011 and he was meant to be the guy in charge of the creator experience because he was a SC2 creator/host/producer. I don't know what happened after that. All I saw were more ways of monetizing the platform and creators complaining especially when pre-roll ads were added
I feel like this is the same at most bigger product companies. As soon as you start hearing "impact" and the company is big enough for you to not know what everyone is working on day-to-day, it often creates a hostile environment of separated silos where every individual or team is trying to promote their own thing to higher ups as much as possible. This is not beneficial to the company nor the users, but apparently that's hard to see for board members. There are some good articles explaining this way better than I can, e.g. about why Google has/had so many different chat apps and I believe one about Amazon as well.
It's incredibly painful to see a company you like working for make decisions that are just wrong. I've been in this position. The only thing you can do is hope for the best and leave
Ah yes, it has always been this way. I remember coming in and being asked to put together weekly notes highlighting what happened in the community over the previous week for the leadership of the marketing org. I would be in meetings and when what I was saying was different from our leadership, I was told that my opinion wasn't requested until I finally magically got "laid off" at the order of our Senior Vice President and asked to sign a 2 year NDA in my last conversation with HR in order to keep my sign-on bonus and to not have to pay back relocation fees. Unfortunately, this has always been happening at Twitch - the toxicity of some became the toxicity of most, and it was absolutely heartbreaking. Many of us internally that were communty-focused called it "fighting the good fight", and when one of us ended up leaving the company, we'd always wish everyone the best fighting the good fight. Twitch created something amazing at the hands of people like us who cared deeply about the community and as the years have gone by, those people don't end up staying with the company which has caused this cascading effect of awful decisions which causes irreparable damage to the community as a whole.
I'm a former twitch partner. I remember going to twitch con 2019 and talking to staff. It was very clear they did not care at all about the service or community and it was just a pay check to them.
It's so insanely hard for a company to maintain its culture and passion through hypergrowth. The culture gets diluted, and the passion gets stifled by middle managers playing politics for their next reorg or promotion to director or what have you. It's not surprising to see twitch go through this. Many other tech companies have had this problem. but twitch is uniquely hurt by this because of how much of it's original traction was built around passion for the creator.
I've been thinking for a while about this problem of companies not caring about users and only caring about competition. It's actually understandable for companies that are profit based, cuz if they kept caring about customers that wouldn't be very profitable for them unless there was competition. This makes me think that the only way to make customers' experience matter is competition, otherwise there would be no sufficient drive for companies to care, passion may be, but I think it's hard for a big company to rely on that, unless leaders really try to P.S: I felt that carelessness with Google as well, in products like RUclips and google maps...
I hope you recovered well fron your burn out and it helped you going forward. You have done a great work with your YT channel. At first I did not like your rant but I have noticed that you really have worked with it and become a fantastic content JS creater. You have my full respect 🙏
Thanks for sharing, this clearly came from the heart. Had a thought on the mobile app bit. I mean this in the politest way possible, but have you considered the problem may not have been what you built, but instead how you presented it? Regardless of how good it was, soft skills are critical and there is a huge difference between saying "we had an idea for something to try" and, "our mobile app sucks, this one is better". Devaluing the work of your coworkers to promote your own is generally not a great look. Not saying that is what happened, but just sharing food for thought.
Theo has told this story several times now and these are my same thoughts every time it's brought up. Theo has categorized the project as a proposed React Native rewrite in the past. This wasn't startup Twitch where they could afford to rewrite a major app in a completely different technology. If Twitch didn't care about innovation & ideas at all, they wouldn't have hosted a hackathon in the first place.
This video along with your other work is a testament to why some of the best product teams consist of engineers and designers who use the types of products that they’re building on a regular basis
I watched leadership crumble at one place and I got laid off, and I watched one company exploit me hard until they fired me. Both are not fun to experience. But it's still on the higher ups. But boots, coats, and parachutes of gold are the silent motto. The top brass never has to pay a dime. They just have a minor setback they handoff to each employee.
What went wrong is what always goes wrong if you’re not careful: managers who lack all the talent and/or only care about appearances and following guidelines or things they read in some book. Managers who actually only care about the money, the prestige and the power, who use the company for their own survival. When they walk in and take over, a bunch of the same indifferent people get hired, pushing away the talented people who care. The way they stole Theo’s project is very typical for such a situation. Didn’t know big companies also could be victim of that: now I know they can😃 And also interesting: HR is every managers bitch!!!
Thank you for the micro-rant. Your story is a great example of corporate taking over the company purpose and running it into the ground. Suits are competitor-centric and money-driven, not customer-centric or experience-driven.
It's totally understandable to be pissed about having your ass handed to you talking about the mobile team, but that's just the feeling that you should push through and say: "hey, what can I learn from this and what can I integrate into my own code" like the competition is against deadlines and bugs, managers and scrum masters (maybe), not other developers or at least it shouldn't be.
hugs man I stream every day on twitch 1695 days in a row it keep me going each day i hope it dose not die as keep me going i built a commuty over 15 years of streaming I join Justin tv then move twitch it was gone. I disable it do this every day or do nonthing with my life i gave up do youtube as just too hard to keep up with the site so i found my place on twitch this make me so sad :(
As a Twitch streamer (since 2018) I feel this, but i had NO idea it was THIS bad in corporate world. i know a bunch of people who work for twitch so i'm hoping all of their jobs are safe. From what i've seen with twitch is that they don't dedicate enough resources to get things done in a timely manner unless there's outside pressure. I think the company may operate better from fewer projects going at the same time and building a proper timeline and rolling stuff out faster. Infighting is never good and amazon is probably putting a TON of pressure on the executives at twitch to do the impossible now in regards to profits/revenue generation. That kind of stuff will most certainly suck the life out of a company. It's sad and i hope that they shift soon. I have seen a LOT of good happen on twitch in terms of growth but it has always felt too little too late. I love guest star but i had no idea you were working on something similar. Not cool. Though i saw several other platforms doing similar ventures. I also see twitch's new features being a lot of what feels like 'scouting' or adopting 3rd party software/tools to first party.
When I was younger, I watched so many good video games get destroyed by a similar force - business people don't know or care how to make good software. They don't know or care what people want, they only care about making money. I loved twitch from 2013-2018 - but that twitch no longer exists so I don't use it much anymore. I think we need to figure out how to kill this process and it isn't really obvious because there are so many points of failure. Maybe a more open source system where users and developers could decide through voting (a more governmental system) would produce better results than letting greedy business people decide for everyone? The biggest thing is stopping the hell no's, the ideas ~95% of everyone knows is a horrible idea and even offended at the thought.
Awwh, I'd like to see and use your improved version of Twitch mobile. I lost my laptop last month so I've only been using twitch mobile app to watch and stream. I've accustomed to my mobile life but even to this day, the base twitch mobile sucks major ass. I can't use it. 😢 I'm able to have a pleasant experience on mobile only after getting a mod for it. It sucks to hear that Twitch don't care about their users. I hope for the best for you. ❤
Holyfuck political REASONS in office again... This is the reason why I am fully remote and have been for the last 5 years... I quit office jobs because I suffered DEEPLY from this kind of problem
This seems like the dev version of "never meet your heroes." Instead "never develop for a company who makes a product you love." It seems your expectations were misaligned with their corporate views. I don't think that's means anyone did anything wrong, just that you clearly loved the end product and they were running a business. Some times those two things just don't mesh. Best to part ways and move on (like you did!)
They were aligned when I joined. They weren’t when I left. Usually “corporate values” Are ways to make more money, sadly twitch is only finding ways to lose cash.
@@theorants I've been there and as your video shows, it's PAINFUL when something you love loses it's direction! (Or you grow apart over time.) It's a symptom of bad leadership that directions and goals diverged without team buy-in. Unfortunately, corporate America is more driven by making shareholders money than making products their users love. For anyone that finds themselves in a similar situation, it's worth fighting the good fight as long as you can. At the end of the day, however, it's healthy to realize that you can't win the battle on your own and recognize when it's time to move on for your own sanity.
@4:47... I can't believe working with such egos. If someone built something 10x better than me I'd be impressed and literally look up their code and try to learn from that.
If you work as a team and can't give up pride for better options or learning from other teams , then you are not fit to be on a team or a leader. That's ridiculous. I would have been glad to see another team contribute an idea or even better a running demo. Rip og twitch
Honestly I stopped caring several years ago. In my eyes it died over the course of the year after the Amazon takeover. Eventually everyone that was C suite who was a creator left or got replaced by some Amazon suit. It was all downhill from there. Twitch has been in this weird slump forever where Amazon doesn't know what to do with it and none of the creators gets paid a livable wage unless they're the 0.01% who managed to find success elsewhere and leveraged that over to Twitch. If they just made an automated ad service that allowed content creators & advertisers to find each other they could easily see as much success as Facebook & RUclips did doing that. Instead it's constantly changing policy, going back on policy, breaking things, adding things nobody asked for while ignoring things people have been begging to have for literal years, and the constant empty ass virtue signaling, all while hammering out ad deals one by one and forcing viewers to watch the same dozen ads 30 times a day. And they even manage to do all this while offering one of the lowest CPMs of any platform on the internet. Personally I think the reason RUclips has shied away from live content is because they fear the lack of control but with AI becoming more & more a part of our lives everyday I think we might see that change. They've slowly but surely been adding more & more Twitch like features the last few years. The second they can use AI to censor live content or DMCA something they're going to put the final nail in the coffin for Twitch.
I've tried to watch twitch on mobile like a dozen times. You're right, it's real bad. It's unusable. I only use RUclips to watch videos and streams, cause I only watch videos and streams on my phone and my phone isn't powerful enough to run other media sites on the browser. And you _have_ to run them on the browser cause the apps are so horribly made. I love my PC, I game a lot on it, but I just don't find it comfortable to watch media on it. Why do I only use RUclips? Cause it's hands down the best experience, and has no real competition in the mobile space. It's not perfect at all, and I've tried alternatives, but they're just not on par with the user experience you get on YT. If someone made a feature rich and *well optimized* app I would absolutely move over, but to my knowledge it just doesn't exist, and I'd rather put up with YT's BS than with clunky UI, constant audio cuts and slow load times. It is what it is. Hopefully at some point a real competitor rises. If anyone knows of one, feel free to suggest! Just remember it has to be on mobile, feature complete and well optimized cause otherwise neither I nor half the people in my country will ever run it.
Do you think a new more community focused live streaming site could compete against twitch. It seems like now is a ripe opportunity for David to defeat Goliath (RUclips, twitch, Facebook). Better ux, passionate leadership, improved tooling, new payment models.
For those of us who are casually engaged with twitch, is there a brief summary of what was the before vs after creator experience which led to this dead version of twitch?
I think more and more people are waking up to the idea that livestreaming in general is just incredibly mediocre content in which lonely individuals are its main demographic. It is akin to reality television, but with a healthy dose of parasocial interactions mixed into it, which makes it all that more appealing to our super fragmented society (22% of millennials report having 0 close friends). The circle of creators in livestreaming are sycophantic (and sometimes downright elitist) in nature, and have been known exploit their users to gain more clout and money, usually by parasocial means, without repercussion. Twitch steps further away from gaming as its central focus with every passing day, as people look to celebrate the creator more than the video games themselves or its surrounding culture. The main takeaway I get from Twitch and livestreaming in general is that it mostly serves to numb the viewer and not enlighten or even entertain them in any meaningful way. I do think there is such a thing as too much of a good thing (that being entertainment), and that the world would be better off without Twitch or any other livestreaming platforms. One thing is certain: there is going to be a lot of grumpy people who wake up from their Twitch coma at 35 years old and having accomplished nothing due to the intoxicatingly addictive nature of how entertainment functions nowadays.
Im not a creator rather a viewer, I don’t understand what’s the problem with twitch ? It seems that it’s evolving (slowly yes) but still. I don’t know really what we are talking about ? The only thing I don’t like about twitch is the god damn video player, it’s so bad compared to RUclips in all forms. I hope they are making a new one
Let me tell you another company that was called dead and was never going to come back. Apple 1995. Just look at their stock price in 1995. Even when Steve Jobs came back the hate was real. Steve was just a figure head, he couldn't really make the company come back. Apple was months if not weeks from bankruptcy right before Steve came back. But obviously he proved all the critics wrong. Can Twitch turn things around? Sure, with the right leader. But it will be tough. For one, Steve didn't have to answer to a parent company, just the board(which he put together himself when he came back) and two, Apple had been profitable before mismanagement. From whats being said, Twitch has never been profitable. Twitch to be saved from this spiral will need a passionate charismatic leader who has a crazy plan that everyone around them will say it will never work and at the same time be able to convince the parent leadership that not only will it work, but it will be profitable. Steve Jobs created Apple, that was his dog in the fight. Is there a person right now who's sitting in some MBA class who's thinking different on how Twitch can come back? Or will Twitch be yet another company to fade into the landscape.......
What the fuck? The mobile team got offended because someone made something better than them in a hackathon and got HR to send a warning? Screw them, honestly, the moment you put your ego before putting value you're done. (I wouldn't want to work there at the very least)
I understand this video, but how can you call it a corpse when it’s thriving as the top 1 streaming website for the things mentioned in this video? Gaming, irl, other events, etc. how come twitch is over????
That’s that don’t care if I’m ever employed again type of honesty. Respect.
Possibly my new favorite comment ever
I feel like it's more of a future employer filter. This kind of honesty and being upset about corporate anti-collaboration.
@@IzzyIkigai It is. I joined a start up. Everyone there came from a very corporate background. I didn't.
I tried my best to do what I believed was right and what I liked to do. They continually took that power away from me, and when I voiced my concerns about my voice in the company dwindling they simply took more of it away and blamed me for not being productive enough.
While there are companies with that passion behind them, at the end of the day, a job is a job. These companies want subservience. They do not want people who have opinions or ideas.
I think where we went wrong in the world are two things: we democratized income; we over specialized.
The high barrier of entry to everything has made it very difficult for people to explore passions sustainably, and democratized income - meaning stocks and investors - means that even in the beginning a company has to focus more on people who give large sums of money as opposed to the users.
The only way out of this is to give power back to the common man. We're heading in that direction, but it takes a lot of things including cultural change.
Man that Moonlight story is crushing, Twitch mobile is so garbage I get legit mad when I'm trying to use it.
Thanks for sharing and thanks for actually caring
Thanks Theo for sharing this and for your transparency. It sucks when companies don't put their users as a priority. And it's disheartening as an employee who cares and does everything they can in their power to change the culture/situation or provide solutions but still get push back. Unfortunately, not only Twitch, but a lot of companies are like this. I experienced it myself at my first software engineering position and it sucked.
Thanks for sharing your experience Theo. It’s clear you really cared and still do. Hope this gives you some relief and maybe helps others deal with what’s going on.
With the all the drama that’s been unfolding at Twitch today you hit the nail on the head with this video Theo. Although the more perspectives I hear about what’s happening at Twitch,the more it sounds like plain old corporate greed, and complacency.
Been here since justin and livestream, teamliquid and IdrA. I’ve been a partner coming on 10 years - I’ve still NEVER had a personal chat with anyone from Twitch. Even as a partner of such a long time, I go through tedious support tickets, got denied for the 70/30 years ago when creators of similar sizes got accepted.
As a creator on twitch, you really do feel completely disconnected from the platform and it’s crazy that even though they at least 50% of our income, we still don’t have better ways of being in contact with them than a regular user.
Thanks for this Theo, this must’ve been really hard but the honesty is really appreciated. It’s good to know this as a creator on Twitch, so that creators can see it as just a platform and jump ship with no bad feelings if better opportunities come our way.
ahhh, the good ole days. Team Liquid started my web dev journey. From a viewer perspective, the feeling of the "brickwall" does permeate to us. Regularly see creators I like get treated like trash.
I personally want Twitch to either fail or change for the better. But staying the way it is... that cannot be good for anyone.
Thats 🥜🥜
This was hard to listen to. I'm so sad to hear that this is the culture inside Twitch. This just reinforces to me why I don't like FANG anymore. I worked contract at one of them and it was a terrible experience. This tells me it's just as bad other places.
Everyone learns these hard lessons about the corporate world the hard way at some point 😔
Now emmet is open ai ceo.
"nobody knows what creators need until, they're a goddamn creator" ❤🔥❤🔥 i could feel that pain in your voice @theorants
I can hear the pain in your voice. Sad that this happened keep strong Theo we love you ❤ -Tropic
damn, an HR warning for creating a better app than the shipped one.
But what is "better"? Did Theo have the requirements for the mobile app? Did his hackathon team talk to the mobile PMs? Was Moonlight tested with other non-technical users?
@@Vim_Tim who cares
@@SBG_Arseny Theo did, which is why he pushed hard enough to get an HR warning. The fact that he was passionate enough to die on that hill was the major premise of the story…
@@Vim_Tim He got a contact from HR because the mobile team complained to HR after the company had a hackathon. t's not that he pushed, it's that the PMs didn't want to readjust their plans after someone else told them to update.
ROFL LOL ROFL an HR warning?!
That's absolute insanity.
What do you think is more likely: Theo was immediately referred to HR after presenting his hackathon prototype as an interesting idea, or that he was constantly pestering a team he never worked with to push a full rewrite to a different technology?
Thanks for sharing, sounds tough. I got burned out at my last job for a similar reason, all about business and requirements with zero care for the end user. Many actions in the app would take one or two minutes (simple stuff like saving a document or displaying a few small tables) and management was happy because we used the required data store software (>99.9% of the time was spend here) they bought and „it works.“ After getting that feedback I started looking for a new job. I feel sorry for all the users that are forced to work with that software daily.
Thanks for sharing, we really do need more passionate people like you in our industry.
Sadly this kind of thing happens with lots and lots of companies.
I guess that's what happens when "business focused" people takes control.
They just care more about their market share than the actual product or users.
What a video! Props to you for laying it all out
They can break your heart, but they can't steal your passion. Love your work Theo
Worked in Trust & Safety for 3 years, but was Partner 6 years prior. Tried my best to strive for creators, but the big man never cared.
You are tried your best brother.. Don't feel bad.. these things were beyond your control. :)
When company politics kills velocity and customer happiness. 😢 Great companies should embrace fresh and/or radical ideas and always remain experimenting. Love your insight about Twitch having to be run by creators again. Love the real talk and "unfilteredness" of this video. Thanks for sharing. 🙏🏿
As a baby streamer, I haven't been able to log into the platform from my Linux box ever (over 4 months for me now). No support, no answers. No one seems to care.
Must be so hard to watch all this unfold when you care this deeply. Hope your peeps still at Twitch land on their feet whatever happens next. 🤞🏿
Such a sad situation :((( love your perspective Theo
Damn the mobile team had such a huge ego AND HR backed them up? Yeah I'd be out the door before my chair stopped spinning
i can hear in your voice and see in your eyes the pain it's so obvious how much passion you had such wasted talent hope you don't get in trouble for making this video and thank you for having the courage for speaking out now a twitch staff member ( well a ex staff member now ) has spoken out maybe more people will start to see twitch for what it is
Extremely sad to see this video, as twitch is a platform that I truly enjoyed for many reasons.
I can hear the truth in your voice.
Working for twitch is still a goal of mine for the personal experience. If I ever get hired, I’ll be sure to continue your mission, no matter the cost because I believe in everything you’re saying.
Some day, I hope to create a powerful platform for creators as well. I know that I won’t waiver on that mission.
I remember when twitch hired djWheat in 2011 and he was meant to be the guy in charge of the creator experience because he was a SC2 creator/host/producer. I don't know what happened after that. All I saw were more ways of monetizing the platform and creators complaining especially when pre-roll ads were added
I this is an example of what generally happens when the revenue for a company is ad-driven, and their customers are not those who use the platform.
Thank you for posting this video. Some very relevant lessons to be learned here.
I feel like this is the same at most bigger product companies. As soon as you start hearing "impact" and the company is big enough for you to not know what everyone is working on day-to-day, it often creates a hostile environment of separated silos where every individual or team is trying to promote their own thing to higher ups as much as possible. This is not beneficial to the company nor the users, but apparently that's hard to see for board members. There are some good articles explaining this way better than I can, e.g. about why Google has/had so many different chat apps and I believe one about Amazon as well.
It's incredibly painful to see a company you like working for make decisions that are just wrong. I've been in this position. The only thing you can do is hope for the best and leave
Same.
Ah yes, it has always been this way. I remember coming in and being asked to put together weekly notes highlighting what happened in the community over the previous week for the leadership of the marketing org. I would be in meetings and when what I was saying was different from our leadership, I was told that my opinion wasn't requested until I finally magically got "laid off" at the order of our Senior Vice President and asked to sign a 2 year NDA in my last conversation with HR in order to keep my sign-on bonus and to not have to pay back relocation fees.
Unfortunately, this has always been happening at Twitch - the toxicity of some became the toxicity of most, and it was absolutely heartbreaking. Many of us internally that were communty-focused called it "fighting the good fight", and when one of us ended up leaving the company, we'd always wish everyone the best fighting the good fight. Twitch created something amazing at the hands of people like us who cared deeply about the community and as the years have gone by, those people don't end up staying with the company which has caused this cascading effect of awful decisions which causes irreparable damage to the community as a whole.
Wow
08:13 Reminds me of why Blizzard only hired game developers that were also avid gamers.
I'm a former twitch partner. I remember going to twitch con 2019 and talking to staff. It was very clear they did not care at all about the service or community and it was just a pay check to them.
As it should. If you care they’ll still lay you off in 1 second
@@ajnart_ Well them not caring only made that layoff happen sooner, hope they have a backup plan like us streamers have had to prepare for!
It's so insanely hard for a company to maintain its culture and passion through hypergrowth. The culture gets diluted, and the passion gets stifled by middle managers playing politics for their next reorg or promotion to director or what have you. It's not surprising to see twitch go through this. Many other tech companies have had this problem. but twitch is uniquely hurt by this because of how much of it's original traction was built around passion for the creator.
I've been thinking for a while about this problem of companies not caring about users and only caring about competition. It's actually understandable for companies that are profit based, cuz if they kept caring about customers that wouldn't be very profitable for them unless there was competition. This makes me think that the only way to make customers' experience matter is competition, otherwise there would be no sufficient drive for companies to care, passion may be, but I think it's hard for a big company to rely on that, unless leaders really try to
P.S: I felt that carelessness with Google as well, in products like RUclips and google maps...
I hope you recovered well fron your burn out and it helped you going forward. You have done a great work with your YT channel. At first I did not like your rant but I have noticed that you really have worked with it and become a fantastic content JS creater. You have my full respect 🙏
Thanks for sharing, this clearly came from the heart. Had a thought on the mobile app bit. I mean this in the politest way possible, but have you considered the problem may not have been what you built, but instead how you presented it? Regardless of how good it was, soft skills are critical and there is a huge difference between saying "we had an idea for something to try" and, "our mobile app sucks, this one is better". Devaluing the work of your coworkers to promote your own is generally not a great look. Not saying that is what happened, but just sharing food for thought.
Theo has told this story several times now and these are my same thoughts every time it's brought up. Theo has categorized the project as a proposed React Native rewrite in the past. This wasn't startup Twitch where they could afford to rewrite a major app in a completely different technology. If Twitch didn't care about innovation & ideas at all, they wouldn't have hosted a hackathon in the first place.
@@Vim_Tim agreed 100%.
#respect man. Thank you for sharing this and I hope you post many more videos on any topic.
This video along with your other work is a testament to why some of the best product teams consist of engineers and designers who use the types of products that they’re building on a regular basis
i loved this, ty for sharing
I watched leadership crumble at one place and I got laid off, and I watched one company exploit me hard until they fired me.
Both are not fun to experience.
But it's still on the higher ups. But boots, coats, and parachutes of gold are the silent motto.
The top brass never has to pay a dime. They just have a minor setback they handoff to each employee.
I was waiting for the metaphoric removal of the jacket
Every company all become like that because money comes from a small group of people who just don’t care most of the other companies they invested
What went wrong is what always goes wrong if you’re not careful: managers who lack all the talent and/or only care about appearances and following guidelines or things they read in some book. Managers who actually only care about the money, the prestige and the power, who use the company for their own survival. When they walk in and take over, a bunch of the same indifferent people get hired, pushing away the talented people who care. The way they stole Theo’s project is very typical for such a situation. Didn’t know big companies also could be victim of that: now I know they can😃 And also interesting: HR is every managers bitch!!!
Appreciate the video, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the micro-rant. Your story is a great example of corporate taking over the company purpose and running it into the ground. Suits are competitor-centric and money-driven, not customer-centric or experience-driven.
It's totally understandable to be pissed about having your ass handed to you talking about the mobile team, but that's just the feeling that you should push through and say: "hey, what can I learn from this and what can I integrate into my own code" like the competition is against deadlines and bugs, managers and scrum masters (maybe), not other developers or at least it shouldn't be.
That HR warning is insane
It is, IF this is the full story. The positioning/pitch would be the source of a HR warning, not the technical execution & success of the prototype.
heart fucking breaking
so poetic
RUclips live needs that passion twitch started with. Livestream is wide open for the taking rn
Hoodie? Moustache? is this Primegen?
hugs man I stream every day on twitch 1695 days in a row it keep me going each day i hope it dose not die as keep me going i built a commuty over 15 years of streaming I join Justin tv then move twitch it was gone. I disable it do this every day or do nonthing with my life i gave up do youtube as just too hard to keep up with the site so i found my place on twitch this make me so sad :(
As a Twitch streamer (since 2018) I feel this, but i had NO idea it was THIS bad in corporate world. i know a bunch of people who work for twitch so i'm hoping all of their jobs are safe.
From what i've seen with twitch is that they don't dedicate enough resources to get things done in a timely manner unless there's outside pressure. I think the company may operate better from fewer projects going at the same time and building a proper timeline and rolling stuff out faster. Infighting is never good and amazon is probably putting a TON of pressure on the executives at twitch to do the impossible now in regards to profits/revenue generation. That kind of stuff will most certainly suck the life out of a company. It's sad and i hope that they shift soon.
I have seen a LOT of good happen on twitch in terms of growth but it has always felt too little too late. I love guest star but i had no idea you were working on something similar. Not cool. Though i saw several other platforms doing similar ventures. I also see twitch's new features being a lot of what feels like 'scouting' or adopting 3rd party software/tools to first party.
this hurt to watch.
They went from a passion project to a corporate alternative to tv. Soulless and only with caring about the money.
When I was younger, I watched so many good video games get destroyed by a similar force - business people don't know or care how to make good software. They don't know or care what people want, they only care about making money. I loved twitch from 2013-2018 - but that twitch no longer exists so I don't use it much anymore. I think we need to figure out how to kill this process and it isn't really obvious because there are so many points of failure. Maybe a more open source system where users and developers could decide through voting (a more governmental system) would produce better results than letting greedy business people decide for everyone? The biggest thing is stopping the hell no's, the ideas ~95% of everyone knows is a horrible idea and even offended at the thought.
Amen Brother
Deep feels. 😢
I have so many regrets signing Twitch Affiliate now!
Awwh, I'd like to see and use your improved version of Twitch mobile. I lost my laptop last month so I've only been using twitch mobile app to watch and stream. I've accustomed to my mobile life but even to this day, the base twitch mobile sucks major ass. I can't use it. 😢 I'm able to have a pleasant experience on mobile only after getting a mod for it.
It sucks to hear that Twitch don't care about their users. I hope for the best for you. ❤
Holyfuck political REASONS in office again... This is the reason why I am fully remote and have been for the last 5 years... I quit office jobs because I suffered DEEPLY from this kind of problem
When you scold some and reward others and allow some to do anything they want! Your time is limited
What do you think of Dan Clancy?
This seems like the dev version of "never meet your heroes." Instead "never develop for a company who makes a product you love." It seems your expectations were misaligned with their corporate views. I don't think that's means anyone did anything wrong, just that you clearly loved the end product and they were running a business. Some times those two things just don't mesh. Best to part ways and move on (like you did!)
They were aligned when I joined. They weren’t when I left. Usually “corporate values” Are ways to make more money, sadly twitch is only finding ways to lose cash.
@@theorants I've been there and as your video shows, it's PAINFUL when something you love loses it's direction! (Or you grow apart over time.) It's a symptom of bad leadership that directions and goals diverged without team buy-in.
Unfortunately, corporate America is more driven by making shareholders money than making products their users love.
For anyone that finds themselves in a similar situation, it's worth fighting the good fight as long as you can. At the end of the day, however, it's healthy to realize that you can't win the battle on your own and recognize when it's time to move on for your own sanity.
It's a sad situation because twitch still attracts amazing creators and other platforms don''t have the same community vibe going.
@4:47... I can't believe working with such egos. If someone built something 10x better than me I'd be impressed and literally look up their code and try to learn from that.
If you work as a team and can't give up pride for better options or learning from other teams , then you are not fit to be on a team or a leader. That's ridiculous. I would have been glad to see another team contribute an idea or even better a running demo. Rip og twitch
Honestly I stopped caring several years ago. In my eyes it died over the course of the year after the Amazon takeover. Eventually everyone that was C suite who was a creator left or got replaced by some Amazon suit. It was all downhill from there. Twitch has been in this weird slump forever where Amazon doesn't know what to do with it and none of the creators gets paid a livable wage unless they're the 0.01% who managed to find success elsewhere and leveraged that over to Twitch. If they just made an automated ad service that allowed content creators & advertisers to find each other they could easily see as much success as Facebook & RUclips did doing that. Instead it's constantly changing policy, going back on policy, breaking things, adding things nobody asked for while ignoring things people have been begging to have for literal years, and the constant empty ass virtue signaling, all while hammering out ad deals one by one and forcing viewers to watch the same dozen ads 30 times a day. And they even manage to do all this while offering one of the lowest CPMs of any platform on the internet. Personally I think the reason RUclips has shied away from live content is because they fear the lack of control but with AI becoming more & more a part of our lives everyday I think we might see that change. They've slowly but surely been adding more & more Twitch like features the last few years. The second they can use AI to censor live content or DMCA something they're going to put the final nail in the coffin for Twitch.
I've tried to watch twitch on mobile like a dozen times. You're right, it's real bad. It's unusable.
I only use RUclips to watch videos and streams, cause I only watch videos and streams on my phone and my phone isn't powerful enough to run other media sites on the browser. And you _have_ to run them on the browser cause the apps are so horribly made.
I love my PC, I game a lot on it, but I just don't find it comfortable to watch media on it.
Why do I only use RUclips? Cause it's hands down the best experience, and has no real competition in the mobile space.
It's not perfect at all, and I've tried alternatives, but they're just not on par with the user experience you get on YT.
If someone made a feature rich and *well optimized* app I would absolutely move over, but to my knowledge it just doesn't exist, and I'd rather put up with YT's BS than with clunky UI, constant audio cuts and slow load times.
It is what it is. Hopefully at some point a real competitor rises.
If anyone knows of one, feel free to suggest!
Just remember it has to be on mobile, feature complete and well optimized cause otherwise neither I nor half the people in my country will ever run it.
Random fact. The shirt theo is wearing has a pattern. They look similar to a boss and Elite mobs in genshin impact.
I'm always running around with my kid. The only way I can use twitch is through mobile. Which is why I don't use twitch.
I‘d really love some context. Why is it dead NOW?
They doubled down on more ads and lower cut for subs. I believe it went from 70(creator)/30 to 50/50 idk if there are other reasons
Do you think a new more community focused live streaming site could compete against twitch. It seems like now is a ripe opportunity for David to defeat Goliath (RUclips, twitch, Facebook). Better ux, passionate leadership, improved tooling, new payment models.
For those of us who are casually engaged with twitch, is there a brief summary of what was the before vs after creator experience which led to this dead version of twitch?
I think more and more people are waking up to the idea that livestreaming in general is just incredibly mediocre content in which lonely individuals are its main demographic. It is akin to reality television, but with a healthy dose of parasocial interactions mixed into it, which makes it all that more appealing to our super fragmented society (22% of millennials report having 0 close friends). The circle of creators in livestreaming are sycophantic (and sometimes downright elitist) in nature, and have been known exploit their users to gain more clout and money, usually by parasocial means, without repercussion. Twitch steps further away from gaming as its central focus with every passing day, as people look to celebrate the creator more than the video games themselves or its surrounding culture. The main takeaway I get from Twitch and livestreaming in general is that it mostly serves to numb the viewer and not enlighten or even entertain them in any meaningful way. I do think there is such a thing as too much of a good thing (that being entertainment), and that the world would be better off without Twitch or any other livestreaming platforms. One thing is certain: there is going to be a lot of grumpy people who wake up from their Twitch coma at 35 years old and having accomplished nothing due to the intoxicatingly addictive nature of how entertainment functions nowadays.
Sounds like you had a typical corporate job.
This too shall pass :/
Can you recommend a streaming service that isn't Twitch or RUclips?
Hey Theo. Would you ever, if given the chance, run Twitch yourself?
This message brought to you by the company that cares - Ping.
"I didn't leave Twitch, I left a corpse."
WOAH
Being a Twitch user,I can feel that Twitch is being worse and worse before you just confirmed it.Pretty sad about it.
holy shit what a toxic place , instead of trying to improve they tell you they are angry wtf
Bruh, it's Amazon what do you expect? Empassioned romantics dedicated to art and craft? lol
Twitch takes 50% of the content creators paycut - RUclips takes only 30% of the content creators paycut - No brainer here
Im not a creator rather a viewer, I don’t understand what’s the problem with twitch ? It seems that it’s evolving (slowly yes) but still. I don’t know really what we are talking about ? The only thing I don’t like about twitch is the god damn video player, it’s so bad compared to RUclips in all forms. I hope they are making a new one
mobile team could have taking the hint like boss and invite you to talk instead
All thanks to Amazon
Based
🎭
Let me tell you another company that was called dead and was never going to come back. Apple 1995. Just look at their stock price in 1995. Even when Steve Jobs came back the hate was real. Steve was just a figure head, he couldn't really make the company come back. Apple was months if not weeks from bankruptcy right before Steve came back. But obviously he proved all the critics wrong. Can Twitch turn things around? Sure, with the right leader. But it will be tough. For one, Steve didn't have to answer to a parent company, just the board(which he put together himself when he came back) and two, Apple had been profitable before mismanagement. From whats being said, Twitch has never been profitable. Twitch to be saved from this spiral will need a passionate charismatic leader who has a crazy plan that everyone around them will say it will never work and at the same time be able to convince the parent leadership that not only will it work, but it will be profitable. Steve Jobs created Apple, that was his dog in the fight. Is there a person right now who's sitting in some MBA class who's thinking different on how Twitch can come back? Or will Twitch be yet another company to fade into the landscape.......
We shall see.
Innovate or die
This is important thanks for sharing this
What the fuck? The mobile team got offended because someone made something better than them in a hackathon and got HR to send a warning? Screw them, honestly, the moment you put your ego before putting value you're done. (I wouldn't want to work there at the very least)
Exactly.
wow.... thanks for all you did.
cheer up bro , it'll work out
lol. twitch is trash.
Don't diss twitch and wear their hoodie. . .just saying.
its his hoodie. thats how private property works.
would be hilarious if you started crying mid-video
I understand this video, but how can you call it a corpse when it’s thriving as the top 1 streaming website for the things mentioned in this video? Gaming, irl, other events, etc. how come twitch is over????
For now my god use your brain. Have you heard the news about twitch lately?