Louis @LouisVr_ - Twitter Profile

Hi, I'm Lich. I've been streaming professionally for nearly 5 years. I was KICK's first KCIP-partnered VR streamer, I've been a die-hard advocate since its inception, and I have bled green for nearly 3 years now. I was initially attracted to KICK after constant battles with unfair and biased Twitch moderation. KICK had a good sell at the time: a platform whose mission was to give creators more freedom less policing, and all of the subscription support. It was a strong enough incentive for me to leave Twitch altogether. And for two years, it was wonderful! The combination of a 95/5 sub split and KCIP hourly partner pay made KICK a much more stable venture than the shaky ground of Twitch, which could rug-pull your livelihood for no reason at any moment with zero recourse. But this arrangement depends on a thriving stream ecosystem, and thus stability —without it, the sub split and KCIP are effectively meaningless in the long term. For two years, this wasn't a problem. KICK was flourishing, people were abandoning Twitch for KICK's statement of purpose, and their reputation for less policing of content and more freedom was honestly well-founded. But the first crack appeared when KICK allowed its partners to multistream. That should have been the last nail in the coffin for Twitch, as on an even playing field obviously creators would prefer KICK subs over twitch subs, but Twitch quickly answered by updating their TOS shortly after to bar multistreamers from displaying or acknowledging KICK chat. My category started losing concurrent viewership across the board around this time, and the reason should be obvious: why would a viewer stay on KICK when the people they're watching only interact to Twitch chat? They might as well be watching a YouTube VOD at that point. So now for the first time KICK is leeching viewers to Twitch for nearly an entire year now, and the damage is already done. The people who chat are gone to Twitch, the ones who stayed are lurkers. You've audience captured lurking... The cracks have really started to fracture this month, as moderation and restrictions have unfortunately become the new normal. In three years of streaming on KICK, I had only accrued three warnings from KICK support (one per year). I don't know what puritan technocracy has corrupted and supplanted KICK's leadership, but in the last two weeks, I've received a warning every day—and sometimes two. All the while, I've watched other KICK streamers getting banned for the same content, some of them while multistreaming on Twitch! Read that last sentence again: people are multistreaming in the VR category just fine on Twitch, yet getting warned and banned for the same content on KICK. What happened? Now Twitch is the less restrictive platform!? The promise of KICK was supposed to be freedom but they act like freedom of speech is the only liberty and point of the graph that represents it. VR content creators and viewers are now leaving the category in droves—and why would they stay? The statement of purpose —the very reason KICK was created— no longer seems important to KICK. I see Twitch chatters mogging and ridiculing KICK every time a multistreamer gets a @KICKsupport warning because the content they're streaming to purple is against green's TOS. It's a joke that everyone sees the absurdity of, and the optics are terrible. And if Twitch is less restrictive than KICK, then KICK doesn't really have a reason to exist (unless you want to go all-in on "freedom of speech" and political streamers, good luck with that one when you eventually have to incorporate ads and most of the market share is held by Rumble anyways). We may as well wait for Mixer 3 or go stream on YouTube. KCIP pay and the 95/5 split are awesome, but if my category dies, then it's just a Faustian pact is it not?— because if viewership trends downwards because viewers want to see the content that ironically only Twitch is allowing, then we're faced with the inevitable math that says 95% of zero is zero. So I'm dusting off my twitch account, and in the absence of MAJOR course correction by either @StakeEddie or @Trainwreckstv , the platform is going to rot, and i'll see you guys next week on Twitch.