Twitch has stories now, because all social media has to be the same

Jungle George ๐ŸŒด@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 496 points –
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Same with Signal. That was a headscratcher. Of all the features they could add to possibly compete better with Telegram and WhatsApp, they really did Stories first.

Possibly it was low hanging fruit. Easy to implement, and it gives people a feature pretty much everything else has.

So low itโ€™s fermenting on the floor with nobody touching it.

And here I was waiting for simultaneous phone and tablet sync as well as notifications for Signal. Nope, I can only use one device at a time. I noped out and went with Telegram. Priorities.

Look for Matrix/Element, it's the Lemmy to Signal/Discord/Teams/Slack's Reddit. ๐Ÿ‘

I'd compare it to Mastodon more. Like Mastodon, it has an actual competent non-profit behind it and is very transparent and open up community engagement with a ton of clients. Lemmy developers are... just doing their own thing I guess. Lemmy needs a rewrite tbh, it's still a mess.

Maybe. I just assumed people on Lemmy would be familiar with Lemmy when I'm not sure they'd be familiar with Mastodon. But, yeah, maybe they are.

Matrix is neat but incredibly slow, lacks many functions of Discord/Teams/Slack, etc, and lastly is not private at all unless you run your own server and use it only to converse with people on your server.

Matrix supports e2e chats with other users, even over federation.

That's all well and good but your server collects pretty much all metadata.

I know signal claims they have little/no metadata, but is that a protocol guarantee or are we just trusting them that they arenโ€™t logging anything? I personally have no trust in signal given they are against federation and custom clients.

I mean they have provided court documents from when they have been subpoenaed and they didn't give any metadata. I'm not sure what more you can ask for.

I canโ€™t get enough of my contacts using signal for stories to be useful

Literally everyone I talk to uses Telegram and not a single one of us uses their Stories feature. It's fucking useless in a chat app.

Stories are useless everywhere, be good if we just got rid of them

There is no head-scratcher.

  1. It was one of the top requested features on the Signal forum for a long time. These things aren't being implemented all over every service for no reason. People want them, even if you don't .

  2. It brings more people onto the platform, which is handy if you ever want to use it to actually converse with other people.

  3. They created the first and only form of private social media in existence.

I actually liked having it, even though I don't use it much. Makes it easier to get other people to switch if this is a feature they were using already. It now pretty much does everything Snapchat does, only better

Snapchat was a privacy/security/performance nightmare

yeah, I actually like using stories on Signal. I used to post to them much more back when I was still using Snapchat, but it's still a fun way of sharing some throwaway, unimportant photos with friends.

and besides, if you don't want them, Signal lets you disable them and they disappear from the UI completely.

They killed sms for bullshit reasons but they gave us stories

Stories, on an app for secure communication. All the sudden all my family that I set up with it who know nothing about encryption stopped using it because they don't want two texting apps. It's border on useless for me now because I only know like 2 people who still have it

Yeah Signal is completely irrelevant to me now after they dropped SMS integration. The centralized servers and closed source servers don't help either. Matrix/Element is much closer to what I hoped Signal would become. Matrix has its own issues, but I at least agree more with their direction.

encrypted stories on an app for secure communication make more sense than unencrypted SMS.

Except that the whole selling point was you could replace your SMS app so you got secure communication without having yet another app. I dropped it when they dropped SMS.

stories for messaging apps like WhatsApp/Signal were the most out of place irritating features. no idea why they thought it'd work

Generally I agree, on Messenger it's an annoying waste of space that barely anyone uses.

It is nice to have if you can hide it, lets those that use it use it

If every corporation and social media offers the same thing you wonโ€™t notice when they are all inevitably bought and own by the same person.

Can't help but feel like most of what's posted here is like the "old man yells at cloud" meme lol. Short form video is huge, people love it, young adults spend a ton of time on it, and most importantly it's profitable.

But I get it, us millenials were the primary demographic on the internet for a long time, it's a weird shift to see things that don't cater to us pop up.

Not really, twitch is a streaming service. It's weird for it to have stories. It's like if your toaster also was able to have a small one item freezer. It just doesn't make that much sense.

There's shorts and there's stories. Superficially similar but fundamentally different in how they are consumed.

Makes a lot of sense for Twitch to have shorts, it fits into their core business of streaming. Stories not so much, maybe I'm biased by Instagram and WhatsApp but stories are for personal stuff.

I would argue that short video clips on a video streaming service actually makes a lot of sense...

It is a live streaming service. That doesn't make any sense at all. What are you going to post, the first minute of your stream?

You could already watch previously recorded videos before. You could also previously โ€œclipโ€ a video to isolate a short moment of a stream.

I don't know, maybe funny clips? Notable moments from stream? You know, that clip functionality that Twitch has had for years that allows sharing short clips from the stream?

I'm starting to think you guys have never actually used the platforms you're complaining about lol.

I think itโ€™s a way for Streamers who go live infrequently can still provide updates and content without forcing their fans to follow them on Twitter. I agree though if a Streamer is going live 4 hours a day everyday why would they create shorts?

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Twitch isn't only live streaming. There's tons of highlight clips and prerecorded videos on there. They're expanding their feature set to be more varied, I don't really see what the big deal is, honestly. You don't have to use it and it's there for those who will, no real harm done.

You post stream highlights. Not complicated.

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Tons of creators streaming on YouTube. Also shorts are an easily palatable way to watch highlights or funny moments from a stream, it makes sense

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It's more than just being a certain demographic, I've caught myself numerous times just swiping through YouTube stories without thought. It's a way to gauge interest in topics quickly and frequently to sell advertising. It honestly freaks me out sometimes, how easily it is to just scroll and scroll without even noticing....

Just like the new "samples" tab in YouTube music. A whole new tab, just to show 10 sec versions of music clips.

It seems that in a few generations, the average attention span will consist of milliseconds.

Maybe this generation has already evolved in a way that their brains are able to process the amount of information we are confronted with daily.

This could be our next step in evolution: our brains learn to handle information unconsciously, they grow even bigger over generations, archiving tons of data, we haven't even looked at yet - but can look into, if required.

For sure, constant instant rewarding mechanisms and not practising delayed rewarding in no way whatsoever will do great.

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Ah another amazing idea like their "moments" which just ended up being cringe. This is just clips but with an expiration date. It'd make more sense to have them copy TikTok/YouTube shorts format, but with Twitch clips that they already have.

Yeah, but somehow they don't like clips and it's a pain to access them now, if the streamer has not highlighted any.

I'm surprised that Twitch still doesn't allow users to upload pre-made videos besides of channel intros. Amazon has the technical infrastructure to actually compete with YouTube on its own turf, and they decide to just limit themselves for no particular reason

one can still "stream" a pre-recorded video-file and even make re-runs or their older streams officially, they just want to limit actual data-rehosting, as storage costs for backlogs might exceed any ad-revenue from them

these features are why i avoid those other sites so seeing it leak into sites i actually use is really irritating. iโ€™m still annoyed with youtube shorts all over my damn subscription feed