Just a day after Unity announced it would be laying off 1,800 employees as part of an ongoing “company reset”, it’s bei…

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    Fair, but surely a lot of that is automated, no? You’d want a human to review it, but it’s not like you’d need people watching the streams constantly.

    I’m just saying that eliminating 500 people means they have a lot more than 500 people working there, probably well over 2k. That’s way bigger than I expected.

    • Chozo@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      I think you greatly underestimate how large of a platform Twitch truly is. They have over thirty million daily active users.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        Probably. I only watch one streamer, and only occasionally.

        That said, headcount shouldn’t need to scale much with more users. Look at Valve, which has ~360 employees and hit 33.5M active users, ~11M playing a game. Here’s some of what Valve does:

        • hardware products, like Steam Deck and Valve Index
        • Windows compat - Proton; granted, most of the people working on this aren’t Valve employees, but contractors Valve pays
        • make games - not often, but there’s still maintenance work
        • manage a CDN - not quite as much data as Twitch, but still substantial, and it’s certainly in the realm of not being a huge difference in terms of manpower to maintain
        • Steam Link app - available on many of the platforms you listed
        • Steam mobile app
        • Steam app - Linux, Windows, macOS

        So Valve has a similar-ish level of complexity with well under 500 employees. Maybe Twitch needs another 100 or so employees to manage the CDN, but surely not another 1500 or more.

    • hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      but surely a lot of that is automated, no?

      You know, ppl have tried to automate it in its totality. They’ve tried to make it 50/50, but it turns out there’s not much to automate. Sure you can automate copyright claims on media sources, but that’s about it. As soon as there’s any complexity to it, human review is necessary. You have to appreciate that content moderation mistakes can have a ripple effect into platform integrity and company image as well as user experience. The risks are easy to underestimate.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        Oh sure. I’m just saying that a big chunk of it can be automated, so you’re left with manual review of clips that either users or bots generate. That’s a big workload, but how many people are we talking? 50? 500? I’m guessing it’s closer to 50 than 500, but I don’t really know.