Josh (00:00)
All right. Imagine this. You're watching your favorite creator go live and suddenly the chat explodes with donations, not because they're celebrating their creator's success, but because they're paying to watch them break down on camera. The more pain, the bigger the payout. Welcome to the dark economy of digital coliseums where human suffering has become the ultimate content strategy and the platforms hosting it are collecting their cut from every dollar of misery.
Tonight, we're going to ask the question that keeps creator advocates up at night when the audience becomes the predator and creators become the prey. Who's really responsible for drawing the line? And more importantly, where exactly should that line be drawn? Now, this is all comes up from the past couple of weeks since we had that incident over on kick in which ⁓ a French streamer.
was streaming or they were doing a a subathon or as a multi day stream event extravaganza. But the thing is, is that the person that was actually streaming was becoming or was the actual bearer of abuse. They were the victim of being abused on stream for bits and donations and subs and stuff like that. And
That was the reason I wanted to talk about this is that we see a lot more of what I shouldn't say we see a lot more of, but it's a kind of a growing underbelly of the live streaming economy where, in the IRL category, we have seen people ⁓ walk around with the Bluetooth speakers. So when people pay for TTS or
⁓ Text to speech, ⁓ sub bits and goals and subs and stuff like that. They'll put in or write down something for the AI voice to say out loud to the public while the person's walking around. And most of the time it is something that is very cringy. It's very probably mostly offensive, depending on the location, geography wise, or depending on a country that
it causes, you know, pain or embarrassment to a streamer. And that's kind of brought me to a point where it's like, are we really getting to a point where, like I said, it's kind of like the Colosseum of old, like the Roman Colosseum. You have the gladiators fighting out to the death, to the entertainment of thousands that are in attendance. And the bloodier and the most brutal ways
get more and more eyeballs and more clicks and stuff like that. So I want to take a look at a couple of things here. Most notably is that on a platform kick, when it first came out, it was mostly thought of as the Wild West of the live streaming platforms. ⁓ Twitch had, you know, it's it's bad people. I'm using air quotes here. But the thing is that it was
almost relatively tame in effect, where you had a couple of different people going around and IRL just causing some kind of sometimes being a nuisance to certain members of the public or just the public in general. But kick kind of pushed it up a notch where it was the reputation that if you were banned on YouTube or Twitch and you didn't have anywhere else to go.
you would go to to kick. And the thing is, is that we see this ramping up of, OK, we're being certain points of that embarrassing the streamer or being very disruptive to the public. It's kind of, you know, makes light of the general public as being pawns into these particular people's content.
You're right, St. Claine. Go ahead, show this. Yeah, Johnny Somali is a very good ⁓ example of this. That he was going around mostly in Japan and most notably in South Korea, just being a complete nuisance to the general public. And he did not care. I'm not putting words into his mouth or anything like that, but a general consistent...
consistency is that he viewed the general public as NPCs of a way to make himself become bigger, to gather more clout. And like he said, that he is probably going to be serving many years in a South Korean prison, because he's broken a lot of laws, he's broken a lot of ⁓ societal norms, especially in South Korea.
And he's not the only one. is, what's his name, Vitality. I believe that's his name. He is also another one that I think he's actually in holding of in a Filipino prison. So he is in the find out stage of his messing around.
Yeah, kick at the time. Yeah. ⁓ When I first went to kick, found a bunch of racist stuff. They have cleaned that up as best as possible. And you're exactly right. Kick has done a lot of good in the past. let's say past year of trying to shed their wild west reputation that anything goes. A lot of the creators there are that word there from the beginning.
are not happy because, ⁓ guess what? know, actions of your consequences of your actions are starting to come into play. But going back into the. What started all this off was the.
the French streamer. I'm not going to butcher his name, but ⁓ John Porma. I'll go ahead and see if I can translate this to English, because this is all from the French press and everything like that. So as the headline says, two weeks after the death of live streamer John Permanavi.
I'm sorry if I'm butchering a name. One of the perpetrators of the multiple violence filmed live on a platform told RTL that everything was agreed. Now, this person over on the left, that's the person actually, unfortunately, passed away on stream in his sleep.
It's not really known yet. I think they're still going through the autopsy and just just to double check and make sure everything is, you know, the eyes and the T's that these two men that were his supposed supposedly friends and co streamers, they didn't play any part in this man's death. So it says, I regret not having been a true friend. I didn't push him.
forced to go for a consultation to go see doctors. Regrets, Safin Hamadal, streamer implicated in the death of the person that died. Since day one, he's always been like this from the first day I knew him, he was like that. So for us, it was something unusual, normal. We didn't know he was sick, he said, saying he had no regrets about the abuse suffered by the person that died. unfortunately,
the person did die.
That's the thing is that we see more and more of these streamers pushing the limit to try and get more and more people to watch, to become more and more of I don't know if it's been termed, but, you know, IRL shock content. We saw that back in the 90s with the shock jocks of the radio or, you know, Howard Stern.
⁓ Opie and Anthony and all these other ⁓ shock jocks that there in the days that at the time they weren't there was just doing harmless pranks over the radio. I put harmless in quotes, but the thing is that, you know, they do have an effect on actual people. Excuse me that.
the things that they were saying or telling or doing to these people, they did have an actual effect because on the other side of the microphone or in the studio talking to them is another human being. The problem with I want to say a problem with, but IRL shock streamers is that, like I said, they view the general public as, you know, just NPCs in in their role play. They're not
important enough to care about. if somebody gets hurt, well, it's I didn't do it. They did it themselves. We saw that just recently. I don't have it pulled up here, but what's forget her name. She was recently on an actual Twitch kick stream. Their ice Poseidon had set up this like citywide scavenger hunt and.
her and a couple other people were walking around this park with paintball guns. Yeah, just, you know, normal things you do. You walk around in a public park with a paintball gun and she decided to fire off a couple of rounds at a woman that was running by that I believe she was working at the kiosk for kayak and canoe rental area and hitting her, I think in the leg or in the thigh.
And she was later not not the lady but the streamer was later arrested for ⁓ free exact charge but something like a salter or something that where they thought she had no remorse. She didn't care what was happening or happened to this poor woman walking by some minding her own business and getting shot with a paintball gun. And if you ever been shot by a paintball gun, I haven't but I know people who have.
It is, it hurts a hell of a lot, especially on bare skin. Because she was she was running by, she was in a swimsuit because she working on the water and that's what you do. But anyways, it's kind of the mentality of these people who have grown up and not seeing the ramifications of these streamers consequences. They think, oh,
Nothing bad is going to happen to me. It's just, you know, part of my content. It's meant to be funny. It's just a prank, bro. And we've seen that plenty of times. It's just a prank, bro. Kind of, you know, where one person was pranking, air quotes there, a ⁓ door dash delivery person to the point where they were like harassing him so much that the door dasher, you know, pulled out his gun and shot the guy and.
I don't mean to make the laugh, but it's like, you know, you don't understand what the people that you're harassing are going through. They could be on they're having the worst day in their life and you're just compounding on the issue that these people are having, especially in the US. We have no mental health facilities or mental health, should say, is like bottom of the barrel. We don't have we don't care about that.
in the US or if you do care about it, well, it's on your insurance and hopefully your insurance pays for it. But anyways, we don't have the capability to help people that are having mental health issues to the point where that if you're egging somebody on, you're just a prank that they turn around and shoot you sometimes might even kill you.
in your brain, it's like, what are you thinking just for, you know, a few likes on TikTok or, you know, the hope that your video goes viral? Is it that important to you that you get your 15 seconds of fame and that you might get shot or killed? No, it's not worth it. Now, the nature of IRL shot content is, you know,
Like I said, it's the mental health, but it's also the mental health on the streamers themselves. There have been plenty of cases where we have what's what's the name? Sneak-o has been the youths call it crashing out many times where. Just the stress and the pressure and it's just the external factors from not only the stream, but their life as well. It just causes them to
essentially just crash out and just completely throw away their lives of their live streaming career, their content creation career and
I have to put some of the blame on their chat community as well because their chat is pushing them to do more and more extreme stuff where they're just getting caught up into the mix of everything. like, chat is enjoying me doing this particular activity that is harmful to myself, but hey, chat is loving it. But the fact is that chat...
is the people in the stands in the Coliseum. They want to see you suffer as much as humanly possible, and they will cause you to have as much suffer and pain because, hey, here's five bucks. Here's another five dollars. Do a dance, stupid. It's just like the tat of these ⁓ IRL shot callers, creators is that they don't see
the force of the trees. They don't see the issue of what is dangerous precedent that starting to ramp up when your chat is telling you to do things and giving you money and you're becoming more and more wealthy. You don't see the side effects at that time. It's not until years later down the road if if you decide to call it quits or you see the error of what's going on here and say, hey, this is going to stop. can't my body.
can't do this anymore. And unfortunately for the French streamer, the actions of everything that was going on with him and his chat and his community, he eventually succumbed to his body giving out and passing away in his sleep. It's something that we're going to see probably more and more of this happening that
The IRL community is a great thing. There's there's many. I'm not saying that IRL itself is a bad thing. It's just a small minority, a small smidgen of people that are potentially giving this a bad name of IRL streamers are obnoxious, they're rude. They have no respect for anyone else except for themselves and most of the time, not even for themselves that.
after a little bit of time, it's going to be viewed as the platform as well. Is that what can Twitch, Kik, YouTube or any other live streaming platform, what can they do? And that's what I want to look at a couple of things here. But what I to put in here is that if you're enjoying what you're watching, this is a quick pause.
If you're loving these insights and want to keep the conversation going, ⁓ jump into our any creator discord. I have a link down below in the description, but it's where creators like all of us myself, you can swap ideas, share wins and, you know, get real time feedback. So if you want to do that, go ahead and check out the link down below. But moving on to the actual live streaming platforms as a whole.
is what can, you know, Twitch, Kick, and the rest of them do. They really are caught in a rock and a hard place. They can't be the arbiters of good behavior. They can only say, hey, follow our terms of service and everything is cool. If you go against that, then we're going to have a problem. So.
What I'm thinking is there might be an issue where the platforms might start getting some feedback or ⁓ getting some pushback, I should say, from outside sources, governments, ⁓ initiatives and anything like that,
So the streaming platform Kick has accused French authorities of politicizing the death of a content creator who passed away during a live stream. He was found, we already know that.
The prosecutors have opened an investigation into the Australian video platform and French government minister. Clarisha has said the state would take kick to court to stop the damage caused by the content involved in this tragedy. Now, they also say this is not about creator safety, customer safety or the well-being of the industry, but rather a politicized narrative that takes advantage of a tragic personal loss. Kick told BBC News.
Now, we can say that, yeah, kick is fully ⁓ at fault for everything that's been happening here, but we can't. These platforms are in a position that they're kind of like what's sometimes like a safe harbor that they can't enforce ⁓ something that is on the platform until it's been reported. We've seen that.
multiple occasions of horrific mass shootings. Christchurch in Australia happened on Facebook, the Facebook streaming service, and also on Twitch. There was another incident, I think, in Buffalo, New York. I think it was on Twitch. But anyways, the platforms have some duty.
that if something is happening that is so horrific, like ⁓ a mass shooting or anything like that, that if it's reported, they're quick in shutting that stream down, getting it off the platform. And luckily, they had that capability. And kick ahead to their credit that when ⁓ informed of what was happening, they did shut the stream down and ⁓
So no VODs can be created and basically out of respect of the people or the people involved, things can be taken care of offline.
But the thing is, is that we probably, like I said, we're going to see more and more of this happening, that we're going to probably see a lot of terms of service changes where IRL category is going to be, I'm not going to say nerfed to the ground, but there's going to be a lot of restrictions on what can be constituted as IRL live stream, what can be conducted on an IRL stream and the behavior of
the streamer and the people interacting with the streamer. We have it already where, especially on Twitch, that especially with the music side of things, that if you're going into, let's say you're walking around Disney World and of course Disney World is going to have music playing that is copyrighted by Disney. So the streamer has to be aware of what's going on, what is being
pumped out onto their stream and possible ramifications of the upcoming copyright claim or strike on their channel. But that is like very tame ⁓ scenario that a streamer can't control the general public. They don't have control.
over what other people are going to do on their stream. All they could do is cut the feed, cut the camera or move away, go to a different location. But. If chat the community that they have ⁓ emboldened to say, hey, we want more of the shock, we want more of this, that. They're they're going to be like, yeah, OK, let's do it, but.
Then again, the platforms are gonna start pushing back against this type of ⁓ shock content and everything like that. But to recap, that very bad things have happened on these live stream platforms. There's no way we can get past that. We can only look forward to ways to to... ⁓
keep this from happening again as best as humanly possible. There's only so much that we can do as streamers and there's only so much that like so the platforms can do themselves without going full ⁓ take down of everything. No IRL, no nothing. We have to pretty much for the IRL people who are doing this type of content.
Take a step back from your content and take a step back of what you're actually doing and think to yourself, if I continue this way, is this worth the pain and suffering I'm going to be enduring for rest of my life? Is the money worth it? And that's the only thing I can say to ⁓ the people who do this kind of content.
Take a step back. Take a look at what you're what you're creating. Take a look at the community, the ⁓ your chat, your community that is pushing you, your egging you to do this stuff. And don't don't come crying when the platforms ⁓ cancel you or ban you from the platforms because of the stuff that you are doing. So if you are doing this, do let me know.
I would love to have kind of like a discussion with other streamers that are doing this type of content. What are you doing to help protect not only yourself, but other people as well and your community in a nutshell of going too far to be ⁓ shocking that it can lead to somebody becoming very hurt or possibly dead. So let me know in the comments down below. I definitely love to hear your stories or go to our Discord.
server, I have a thread in our server that is just for discussions on this particular episode of the Independent Creator podcast. Now, if you enjoyed this, you can also listen to it audio format and any podcast player of your choice. It'll be in the next couple of days, but do be sure to hit that subscribe and ⁓ I'll see you later, taters.