After being banned from Twitch for completely unknown reasons, the widely popular streamer Dr. Disrespect found himself without a job and the entirety of his entertainment platform stripped away from him without warning, without any contact or reasoning.
Fortunately for him, his entertainment talent granted him an audience that will follow him wherever he goes, so during his first stream on YouTube he amounted to an insane amount of views, totalling over 500,000 viewers.
During this stream, Herschel “Guy” Beahm IV (yeah he has roman letters on his name, deal with it), he addressed this situation in a very….Dr Disrespect fashion. He built up hype but then he actually revealed that he actually still doesn’t know anything to this day. It’s hard to believe right? Well, not really, at least not for me.
As the CEO at Solidpop I had many experiences with working with huge platforms as a partner, like Amazon, Etsy, Ebay and many others. Obviously, these are more “e-commerce” related platforms while Twitch is a streaming/entertainment, but the thing is that in essence, they are all the same. How? easy, they are all big companies that make money with their users.
Even though these platforms are very different, they share a lot of the same values, struggles and difficulties:
- A lot of these are Publicly Traded – This means they will spend a lot of resources and make decisions based on how they think they will make shareholders happy. Publicly traded companies end up making more money with happy shareholders at the cost of some unhappier users of the platform. If any user, for whatever reason has the potential of making a few important people unhappy, they may get kicked out even if they make hundreds of thousands of others happy.
- These companies have very profitable partnerships – We might think we know what’s up by following some key people on twitter but really, we have absolutely no idea what’s going on inside these major companies. Not even the employees know, it’s really above their paygrade. There might be deals going on, buyouts, buyins, new partnerships being formed, old partnerships being protected, the list goes on. A lot of times we, the users, have no idea what any of these even are, so how could we know what interests they have in the background? There could be a billion different reasons why Dr Disrespect and many other streamers get banned on a daily basis. And yes, there are countless streamers getting banned all the time, but they aren’t famous enough to make the news. If we don’t even really understand the rules of the game how could we possibly know why these people get banned.
- Being banned from any of these platforms without any contact, reason, warning or anything is a common thing – I get emails, messages, see it on forums and communities every day. The horrible experience that is losing your main source of income out of the blue, without warning or any reason. One moment you are online, the other you try to login to find an error message like “your account has been deactivated” or “account doesn’t exist” or “account has been banned”. This is a daily occurrence for thousands of people every day, so seeing this happen to Dr Disrespect is not surprising. The only thing that surprises me, is that the difference here is that there is a huge audience behind him, so we’d think that Twitch would come up with an excuse or something. But will it though? if they are willing to ban him in the first place, knowing full well what would happen after, is because they have more to lose by keeping him than to baning him. I followed up personally with a lot of these people who got banned from whatever platform, and after years they still don’t know anything. Some of these people were generating 6 figures a year and got their account removed out of the blue.
Personally, I think that Twitch is just waiting for the perfect opportunity to come up to finally explain the circumstances of his ban. My guess would be something related to the former suspension following a bathroom stream incident. At least it would be an easy scapegoat to add on a list of misconduct.
