Gambling Streams Vs Twitch Farts Meta

Ennan Zapanta June 7, 2022
Gambling Streams Vs Twitch Farts Meta

The fart meta was all the rage on Twitch last year. It involved streamers farting – frequently conventionally attractive female streamers in skin-tight clothing – for the amusement of their viewers, as the term suggested.

The actual meta, on the other hand, was a lot more diverse. It also included suggestive yoga, licking microphones, moaning breathlessly, putting subs’ names on their skin, and leaping up and down on the bed while wearing a Spider-Gwen lycra morph costume and a horse head mask. One of them is a forgery, and it isn’t the one you’re thinking of. The fart meta was a spin-off of the hot tub meta, in which the former basically introduced Twitch’s softcore adult content into the mainstream consciousness, and the later used it as a springboard to assist streamers acquire popularity and reputation with ever crazier, yet still erotically tilted, content.

xQc was one of the most outspoken critics of these metas, but he was also working on something even worse: the gambling meta.

Both the hot tub meta and the fart meta, including Amouranth’s follow-up after the hoopla of selling her own bottled farts faded down. It’s a complicated issue: we know Twitch is used by children and fosters parasocial ties, therefore adult content, even (or perhaps especially) the oddest sort, need more regulation. At the same time, Twitch is a male-dominated environment, and it’s to their credit that some women were able to profit from the inherent sexism of both the platform and game.

There’s nothing legally or ethically wrong with paying a lady to write your name on her stomach and then fart into a microphone if you’re a consenting adult, odd as it may seem. xQc’s judgment of this video as “trash” appeared to be a bottom-of-the-barrel perspective that reeked of the concept that Twitch was for gaming, and gaming was for men, rather than an analytical analysis of how online relationships are twisting our connections to both sex and one other.

Minors utilize Twitch, and it encourages them to create parasocial ties. If those were reasons to be careful of the hot tub and fart metas that xQc was such a loud opponent of, what does he have to say about the frequent gambling streams that he participates in and encourages his viewers to partake in? xQc told his followers last year that he had lost $2 million to online casinos and that he believed he had a gambling addiction and would no longer accept sponsorships from gaming companies.  But that doesn’t change the fact that he and Twitch both have an obligation to the viewers, especially since xQc recently reneged on his pledge and accepted a sponsorship from gambling company Stake.

This sponsorship includes not only xQc streaming the company’s products, but also giving away coupons and limited-time incentives to his fans. He recently stated that his followers have lost $119 million as a result of his offerings, which he claims is “not that bad” because money “always comes back somehow.”

This is an outrageously enormous sum of money to be so casual about, and to make matters worst, xQc may be benefitting from it, as some sponsorship businesses offer streamers a percentage of their followers’ losses. This is significantly more detrimental than women bursting wind on camera for money in terms of both financial and long-term consequences, and it’s surprising that the industry isn’t making a bigger fuss about it.

There have been requests for Twitch to amend the rules to prevent exploitative streams, but Twitch’s normal response is bans, which simply served to increase the popularity of the hot tub meta and are unlikely to be implemented permanently for a broadcaster as well-known as xQc. Affiliate links were previously prohibited, but this was before xQc’s recent losses, so it appears to be ineffectual at best. There’s little to stop impressionable viewers from losing large at online casinos while their favorite creator cheers them on and collects the losses if there’s no strong regulation in place.