There are a lot of people who would love to quit their day job and pursue Twitch streaming as a full-time career. The biggest problem with this today is that with so many people attempting to climb to the top of the mountain, only a few will succeed and, in general, the top spots are almost exclusively reserved for those who devote all of their spare time to the platform.
Twitch has been chastised for what is seen as a complete lack of disapproval of people who clearly engage in ‘unhealthily’ long streaming sessions.
Many are aware that this is a major issue for many users. Even high-profile streamers have expressed a desire to post a video or go live every day in order to maintain their presence and provide content to their fans. The fear is that if they miss even one single day, their support (follows/subs, etc.) will deteriorate, affecting their influence on the platform and, by extension, their financial return.
While this isn’t entirely Twitch’s fault, the main criticism stems from the fact that they don’t appear to discourage this type of behavior.
Twitch has responded by stating that it promotes many mental health resources on its website in response to this criticism. The former is certainly true in terms of providing resources for users who are experiencing mental health issues, but rather than being promoted, users had to go out of their way to find it. Simply put, it isn’t being promoted on their front page, and it probably should be.
Without a doubt, this is a difficult problem to solve, and many can understand why people want to make an impact on the platform and believe that the only way to do so, and achieve some success, is to devote nearly all of their spare time to it. More importantly, this is regardless of whether or not they actually want to do it!
For the time being, however, many people believe that they can all agree that this is an imperfect problem with no clear solution and that many people can’t really criticize Twitch because they don’t know what they could do to improve the situation other than impose time limits, which would likely enrage the majority of the community.