I find Twitch useful for saving money, so many games out there and watching how they actually play lets me put my money to games that actually fit my play style.
There are some interesting personalities on Twitch, some of the money a few claim to pull in is impressive. Fortunately personality and ability drive followings, having cleavage and a cute face will only get you so far.
Sigh. I should know better than to call these things out on HN.
Hey, does it not seem at all odd to you that he focused in on the stereotype that women trade on their looks in broadcasting, ignoring that men do the same? Does it not seem passing strange that he brought it up when nobody was talking about appearance in broadcasting in the first place? Like the thread wouldn't be complete without a negative comment on women?
If I randomly said, "Some women are gold-diggers," in a thread unrelated to gold-digging -- say, a thread about amicable divorce, which we have had on here before -- it would be a) true, b) irrelevant, and c) probably sexist. Do you understand that? If not, I would say you are probably suffering from an over-abundance of privilege and a serious deficiency in empathy.
> Hey, does it not seem at all odd to you that he focused in on the stereotype that women trade on their looks in broadcasting, ignoring that men do the same?
No, because on Twitch it is much more prominent for women, and even if it wasn't, there's a 50% chance for either.
> Does it not seem passing strange that he brought it up when nobody was talking about appearance in broadcasting in the first place?
No. People bring up new things all the time.
> Like the thread wouldn't be complete without a negative comment on women?
Sounds like a straw man argument. I don't think he or anyone else claimed that the goal of the comment was to "make the thread complete."
> If I randomly said, "Some women are gold-diggers," in a thread unrelated to gold-digging -- say, a thread about amicable divorce, which we have had on here before -- it would be a) true, b) irrelevant, and c) probably sexist.
I disagree with b) and c).
> Do you understand that?
I understand and disagree.
> If not, I would say you are probably suffering from an over-abundance of privilege and a serious deficiency in empathy.
That sentence is preposterous, and inappropriately aggressive and accusatory. I'd prefer that you refrain from judging my "privilege" (which is a meaningless concept that just means "you're bad") and empathy levels when you have essentially no information about either.
> "privilege" (which is a meaningless concept that just means "you're bad")
The rest of your comment was pretty reasonable [1], but here you just went off the rails.
"Privilege" does not simply mean "you're bad". It's a specific sub-category of "different perspective" that is really important and useful in understanding many of the subtler aspects of social power imbalance.
So here's the question: do you care whether/that some broad groups of people are systematically harmed for reasons that are absolutely not their fault? If you don't care, well, I'm sad to hear that, but I think you can safely move forward without caring what "privilege" actually means. If you do care, you can't effectively think about this problem without knowing about privilege, and how it affects your thinking. For one thing, privilege is part of the problem directly. But even more important, privilege causes a type of cognitive bias that makes it harder to see the problem clearly. It's like not knowing about fundamental attribution error, or not knowing about confirmation bias.
[1] Although I personally respectfully disagree with much of your comment, I think it was mostly reasonable. And while I think jamesaguilar is more right than wrong, I think he made his case pretty poorly. And in particular, I agree with you that "If [you don't agree with me], ... you are probably suffering from an over-abundance of privilege and a serious deficiency in empathy" was, as you say, inappropriately aggressive and accusatory.
Well, you just denied that privilege exists, and were unable to recognize a sexist comment as sexist. That gives me plenty of entropy to make a strong guess about how privileged you are.
I didn't deny that privilege exists, I said that in the context of this accusation it is meaningless. And I was not unable to recognize a sexist comment as sexist, because it was not a sexist comment. You have no "entropy," you just have two misconceptions.
If it's not sexist, it sure is still apropos of nothing given the context. Whenever I watch Twitch, I'm rarely looking at somebody's face on the stream (because there isn't one). If there is, it's surely not a face made to "look cute". It's usually a guy with his mouth hanging open because he's concentrating on a game. Using "cleavage" intimates that it's only women (or typifies women as some "other") that try to use their looks on Twitch to get far because they don't have any personality or ability. OP could have just said "good looks" to get the point across.
I went on Twitch for the first time ever tonight as I was reading the linked article, clicked on World of Warcraft at random, and 6 of the 11 featured streams visible above the fold included a picture-in-picture of a cute girl with lots of cleavage. I clicked one out of interest and she wasn't even playing a game...she had the twitch chat up on her screen and was soliciting donations while people spammed the chat with "I wanna cum on your tits" like I was on some awful video game camgirl site. Anyway, clearly you're not watching WoW videos, but statement above was not 'apropos of nothing'.
There are some interesting personalities on Twitch, some of the money a few claim to pull in is impressive. Fortunately personality and ability drive followings, having cleavage and a cute face will only get you so far.