stream.me/ twitch

So I decided on Monday that I was done with stream me. I was sick of putting up with its current shortcomings. Like the staff no longer being quick and active. The staff is borderline unresponsive to anything that isn't related to payments on the site. Another huge factor that is quite obvious is crisco. I don't think i need to go into detail so I'll just stop at a name drop. The largest factor is the contest. Now i'm not gonna lie, I probably wouldn't have even came to stream me if it wasn't for the money. BUT, there are (were) other good things about it. But the money was still the main focus. Now obviously it makes sense that I don't make much on stream me any more, I have a tiny "community" and my frequent dropping off the face of the earth doesn't help. But regardless, I feel that the stream me contest has changed in ways the make it even more corrupt and biased than before. So the 1st and most obvious flaw in the current contest is sparkles. Sparkles were a problem back before November 2017. But they were nerfed to be worth nothing. But they've now added this thing called bonus sparkles that make them worth double, effectively making sparkle boosting a thing again. Now actually I have as much as a problem with this as others do. If you were to sparkle for sparkle with another streamer that's fine. But using bots or alts to do it is not. Another very large problem that most aren't taking about is the spam filter. Back in January stream me implemented a spam filter for contest points. This is a good idea, but the way the algorithm works is extremely poor. The new algorithm works by dropping the points for multiple chat messages from the same user after a certain point. (example https://i.imgur.com/5DqYw2i.png ) This is bad because it doesn't care about the time between each message like a good filter would, instead all this does is hurt smaller streams even more. Now I get that there should be some reward for having a larger viewer base. But that is already in place, there are point multiplier bonuses for having 10, 100, 1000, having a new account and so on. The 3rd main issue with the contest is multistreams. I've been saying it since fucking day 1. Multistreams are a massive MASSIVE problem. They allow people that get 0 viewers, 0 real chatters to get tons of points. People will get in a clique, turn their main chat in sub only and then everyone types in the multi giving tons and tons of points to people for literally just being in it. So if stream me is changing the contest to move towards larger audiences then why the hell is this still a thing.

Now that all my problems with stream me are out there lets talk about twitch. I've been on twitch for a long ass time, and even though i've been on stream me for the past year thanks to restream.io a can stream on both, so i've still been on there. So it goes without saying but twitch affiliate is utter garbage. But its even worse than I thought before. So what I heard and personally disliked about affiliate is how its a sham and it only makes money for twitch, hurts the smaller streams even more, drives a bigger wedge between partners and small streamers. But this is about how it would be for me personally. The main reason I want to go back to twitch is to get away from stream me and to show a form of protest to stream me. But I've looked into the specific details of affiliate. So here is the specifics. You have to make $100 in bits yearly to maintain affiliate, which considering my small follower base is difficult to meet to say the least. But here is the big one for me. In order to cancel your affiliate status you must pay a $25 fine. This wouldn't be too bad for anyone that isn't 17 and broke with no job, but it is for me. I'm trying to make a measly $100 for dreamhack so 25 out of that is a lot. Since I want to do twitch for at least this month and then maybe consider going back to stream me, activating affiliate would not only be a waste of time but a waste of money if I plan on going back.

So as you can see I have extremely mixed opinions on this. On one hand I'm sick of stream me and I want of the hell hole that causes me so much stress. But on the other hand twitch doesn't make anything better and the money from stream me, while minor is still better than what twitch can offer me. So here is a strawpoll to vote in. https://www.strawpoll.me/15630540