Artists claim Twitch is ignoring creative streamers by hiding category

Twitch started rolling out a discoverability experiment on their platform that merges art and creative streams into the IRL category, and it hasn’t sat well with streamers, who feel like it makes it even harder for viewers to find them.

Twitch is always looking to innovate and streamline its platform in an attempt to make the site a better experience for streamers and viewers alike.

However, they don’t always get it right. They recently came under fire for introducing ‘intrusive’ mid-stream ads and dishing out a relentless series of DMCA takedowns, which they’ve since apologized for and explained.

Twitch

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has done a lot of apologizing lately.

Unfortunately, it seems like they’ve done it again. This time, they’ve tried to streamline their categories and directories, inadvertently ignoring artists and creative streamers in the process.

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“We’re rolling out a discoverability experiment to a portion of users,” they said. “This experiment will provide a new way to browse Twitch, and make it easier to find content you’ll love!” The new directories include Games, Music, IRL, and Esports.

However, artists are nowhere to be seen. The update shoehorns artistic and creative streamers into the IRL category, which many believe will make it harder for viewers to find them.

It didn’t take long for streamers to start voicing their concerns. Ross O’Donovan is an animator, artist, voice actor, and streamer with more than 250,000 followers on Twitch. He was one of the first to express his dissatisfaction.

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“Hey Twitch. Your decision to gradually dismantle creative as a category over time isn’t going unnoticed,” he said. 

“Merging it with IRL is not fair on the artists who already have a hard time with discoverability,” he added. “These are the artists who make the very emotes that sell your subscriptions.”

“If Twitch supports artists, streamers will have in community access to easily found talent to collaborate with,” said Ross, in a separate tweet.

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“Emotes, layouts, animated alerts.. fostering this category only benefits the entire community as a whole and raises production quality across the board,” he added.

It’s not only artistic and creative streamers who are angered by the situation. Even popular variety streamers like ‘AnneMunition’ are jumping on board to support them.

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“Adding a +1 for Creative as its own category,” she said, in response to the initial post. She went on to list the categories with a creative one in the mix.

Twitch has not updated their stance beyond their initial comment. However, they have said it’s entirely experimental and are open to feedback.

A petition from artists on Twitch to include the creative category has nearly reached 5,000 votes at the time of publishing.