Abstract
This study examines three of Twitch's most disputed content metas to theorize the agenda-setting power of controversies and the influence creators and audiences can wield over platform policymaking through disputes around content. Controversies surface how Twitch stakeholders test and push each other’s sensibilities about the culture of Twitch, and how informal collective sentiment around the boundaries of acceptable practices become formalized in governance decisions. Each of these seemingly esoteric enjoyments generated heated discussion on and about one of the largest livestreaming platforms in the world, resulting in significant changes to Twitch's Terms of Service and site design. As case studies for the role of cultural controversy in platform governance, I introduce three metas—hot tubbing, ASMR in yoga pants, and live gambling or “gamba,” examining how discussions about each meta coalesced into policy decisions that both responded to and reaffirmed Twitch's cultural positioning. Finally, I examine the governance role that cultural controversies play, and why discussions around content moderation and platform governance should attend to platform culture.
Introduction
Streaming video games has long been the core competency of Twitch.tv, but the scope of the preeminent livestreaming site has expanded over the years to include many categories that have little or nothing to do with gaming (Taylor, 2018: 9). Some categories, such as the Just Chatting section, substantially outpace gaming in popularity (Hale, 2020). Nevertheless, given the site's history, branding, and investment in esports, a new Twitch user might understandably be surprised to login to the site for the first time and scroll past thumbnails of streamers hosting live game shows, whispering into ear-shaped microphones, or soaking in hot tubs. These changes to the site's content have generated controversies over the character of the platform and its most high-profile streamers, channeled through disputes about new entertainment trends known on Twitch as “metas.”
Streamers borrow the term “metas” from gaming culture, where it describes the optimal way to play a game at any given point in time. On Twitch, metas refer to content that optimizes the balance between a streamer's time and effort and their ability to garner an audience and make money. Like streamers, Twitch viewers are well aware of content metas, describing the movement between different metas on the platform as being like “story arcs” in scripted television, commenting on the quality (or lack thereof) of particular metas, and speculating about the likelihood of a meta being restricted by Twitch.
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Controversies play a useful role in surfacing disagreements between platform stakeholders (Hallinan et al., 2020; Sybert, 2022), setting an agenda for developing platform policies and enrolling unconventional stakeholders in policymaking negotiations. While negotiations over platform policies typically occur behind-the-scenes, controversies over content metas on Twitch attract public attention by morphing the forms of entertainment available on the platform. In so doing, controversial metas on Twitch materially change culture and draw attention to the “policy knot” of platforms, “the multiple gatherings and entanglements through which worlds of design, practice and policy are brought into messy but binding alignment” (Jackson et al., 2014). Their influence, drawn from incorporating streamers and audiences into informal modes of participating in platform governance, makes controversies over Twitch metas an ideal site to study the development of platform policies, the effects of policies on platform culture, and the tactics that different stakeholders use to try and shape platform policies to their benefit.
This study examines three of Twitch's most disputed content metas to theorize the agenda-setting power of controversies and the influence of creators and audiences on platform policymaking. Through controversial metas, Twitch stakeholders test and push each others’ sensibilities about the culture of the platform. Through their resolution, informal collective sentiment around the boundaries of acceptable practices becomes formalized in governance decisions. Each of these seemingly esoteric enjoyments generated heated discussion on and about one of the largest livestreaming platforms in the world, resulting in significant changes to Twitch's Terms of Service (TOS) and site design. In what follows, I explain the role of metas as a form of optimization that draws inspiration from gaming cultures and discuss how stakeholders negotiate effective compromises and reaffirm their roles in the platform ecosystem. I then outline the function of controversies in platform agenda-setting, and peel apart the differences between controversy and drama. I introduce three metas—hot tubbing, ASMR in yoga pants, and live gambling or “gamba”—and examine how discussions about each meta coalesced into policy decisions that both responded to and reaffirmed Twitch's cultural positioning. Finally, I examine the governance role that cultural controversies play, and why content moderation and platform governance research should attend to platform culture.
Literature review
Cultural optimization and the Twitch meta
Livestreaming culture, especially on Twitch, is closely tied to gaming (Taylor, 2018). Twitch relies on gaming culture, and gaming culture (especially the growing sector of esports) draws heavily on Twitch (Partin, 2020). Ruberg et al. (2019: 476–477) explain that “Twitch structures the experience of its streamers much like a competitive game. It encourages streamers to level up, build new skills, and unlock achievements.” Twitch operates a multitiered system of creators, much like the competitive ladder (or ranking systems) of video games, with streamers required to reach certain metrics to level up to Twitch Affiliate or Twitch Partner (Twitch, 2023, "Achievements"), accessing not only new means of monetization but also substantial perks like direct contact with Twitch employees. Leveling up is an ongoing process because Twitch, much like multiplayer competitive online games, is constantly changing. Game players and developers create feedback loops for each other, with the ultimate goal of deploying a “balanced” game—that is a game that is fun both for the individual player, regardless of skill, and for the player base as a whole. To achieve this balance, developers frequently tweak game mechanisms and players find the optimal way to use these mechanisms—the meta. When a particular meta, or way of playing the game, becomes too powerful and creates stagnation in gameplay, developers make changes again. Much like video game players continuously develop and test optimal strategies for winning competitive games, Twitch is a testing ground for new ways to accumulate and monetize attention. Content metas are
The way streamers treat Twitch as a competitive, gamified environment reflects the interdependence of gaming and livestreaming, and their shared goals of optimization. Twitch demonstrates both “a distinctive culture as a platform, and in the channels of individual streamers” (Partin, 2020: 2), who deploy gamified elements in their chats (Abarbanel and Johnson, 2020; Johnson and Woodcock, 2019). This serves to “generate a sense of belonging and a shared culture between a broadcaster and their viewers” (Woodcock and Johnson, 2019: 323), reinforcing Ruberg and Brewer's (2022: 444) contention that livestreaming “is a matter of how we communicate and connect with one another.” T.L. Taylor describes the distinctive mode of Twitch communication as “networked broadcasting” where “content is co-constructed through the network and via the transformative work of play” (2018: 28). In so doing, Twitch functions as a networked public, understood as “the space constructed through networked technologies” and “the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” (boyd, 2010: 39). Networked publics allow “new dynamics [to] emerge that shape participation” (ibid.), with metas channeling these relational dynamics into both content and controversy, and helping stakeholders optimize their engagement with the platform and each other.
As strategies of optimization, metas “respond to the pressures platformization creates” (Morris, 2020: 2). These strategies are necessary because, as Jeremy Morris (2020: 2) argues, “producers of cultural content are dependent on, and their products contingent on, the goals, features, and business models of the platform.” Optimization is a way to identify and benefit from the platformization of culture (Poell et al., 2022); thus, metas represent the cutting edge of Twitch's platform culture. From the streamer perspective, metas help fulfill an insatiable need to populate lengthy streams with broadly appealing content that requires little preparation or personal innovation. From the platform perspective, metas are a creative arms race that draws new viewers. Twitch fuels this arms race by filling its main page and other discovery locations, like the top of each streaming category page, with the most viewed content. Audiences also have a significant hand in the creation of Twitch metas, determining their success through views, donations, and chat feedback. They, like the platform, reward streamers for creating content they like and punish them for creating content they find boring or off-putting. However, some forms of negative audience engagement are still profitable for streamers—that is viewer metrics do not discriminate between hate watchers and actual fans. This generally makes engaging in even controversial metas more optimal than broadcasting anodyne content.
Importantly, while Twitch is a particularly gamified platform in both culture and engagement features (Johnson and Woodcock, 2019; Siutila, 2018), previous research demonstrates that people widely engage with platform governance and algorithmic visibility as “games” to be won through optimization (Cotter, 2019; Petre et al., 2019). Playing the platform game effectively can include individual and collective strategies of optimization regarding content focuses, brand partnerships, and algorithmic experimentation (Bishop, 2018). From the perspective of policymakers, academics, and system engineers, Ziewitz (2019: 723) notes, “gaming tends to be portrayed as a threat to the integrity of systems that is best to be eradicated,” yet for those subject to such systems, “trying to optimize their own appearance is often the only way to reclaim a degree of agency in a potentially oppressive setting.” Furthermore, such behavior is encouraged by the way that platforms “act as infrastructures of valuation, coordinating the actions of humans and algorithms to determine what is good, relevant, worthy, and significant—and what is not” (Hallinan and Brubaker, 2021: 1564). But what is “relevant” versus what is “worthy” may not align in the evaluations of all stakeholders. Examining what kinds of content generate controversy, and what arguments are most common in debates over these controversies, helps uncover the gap between relevance and worth on particular platforms. It also reveals popular (or at least loud) opinions about what are acceptable and unacceptable ways to win the “game” of platform popularity. As Ziewitz puts it, “if we rethink ‘gaming’ not as a problem to be solved but as a tension to be managed, the line between ‘playing along’ and ‘acting up’ becomes blurred” (2019: 725). This is especially relevant to controversies surrounding Twitch metas, where both platform policies and wider sentiment reflect significant divides over what counts as “optimization” versus “erosion” of platform culture.
Finally, as a term, “meta” plays both emic (within culture) and etic (external to culture) roles. Like gamers, academics, too, are fond of describing things as meta, and have frequently deployed the term as a prefix to denote forms of self-address. For example Burnett and Bonnici (2003) analyze the use of “metadiscussions” to negotiate community norms. Writing in the context of Usenet newsgroups, Burnett and Bonnici explain that metadiscussions draw attention to “the dynamics of interaction itself, and to the intricacies of propriety and acceptable behavior” and, as a result, are “the primary mechanism through which groups can interrogate the boundaries of what is acceptable, can construct norms through channels other than the formalized structure of the FAQ, and can enforce a certain degree of compliance to those norms” (2003: 342). In doing so, they highlight the long history of norm-setting via informal and cultural means. In an examination of copyright callout videos on YouTube, a form of metadiscussion, Hallinan et al. (2024: 16) break down the direction of these discussions into “horizontal callouts,” which operate between peers within platform hierarchies, and “vertical callouts,” which speak up or down the hierarchy of stakeholders. Metadiscussions around content metas operate both horizontally and vertically. Looking at a more theoretical dimension of metaness, Greg Urban (2001) describes metaculture as “culture about culture,” a term that Devon Powers (2017) has taken up to examine user behaviors like replying “first” to a YouTube video. Twitch metas provoke both metadiscussions and metaculture, yet they also function as the thing itself—an optimized form of producing entertaining content. To be cheeky, they operate as both metas and metametas.
Stakeholders of platform governance
According to stakeholder theory, analyzing competing stakeholders provides insight into the differing interests of parties in a conflict (Brugha and Varvasovszky, 2000). The development of stakeholder theory went through a boom in the 1980s and 1990s (Freeman, 1984; Freeman and Gilbert, 1989), focusing on consumer brands and the rising tech industry, two business sectors combined on streaming platforms. In a classic work on stakeholder theory, Wicks et al. (1994: 475) describe stakeholders as “a relatively new metaphor for both describing how a business operates and defining what its most basic purposes are,” with Stieb (2009: 401) later sardonically noting “the true nerve of saying that businesses should change the beneficiaries and those with decision-making power to stakeholders rather than just stockholders.” In other words, stakeholder theory represents a shift in business ethics from a near unitary focus on businesses’ fiduciary obligations to corporate investors to an expanded understanding of businesses as entities with social responsibilities whose success relies on a multitude of actors. This dependance on external actors is particularly apt for online platforms, which rely on content creators to generate the consumable product for the site. Platforms also rely on audiences as ad-watching or subscription-paying consumers, a type of ongoing relationship that provokes different considerations of value than a one-time product purchase. Accordingly, I focus here on three stakeholders critical to shaping Twitch's policies, each with a different investment in what Twitch becomes: streamers (or more broadly creators), audiences, and the platform's corporate ownership.
Each stakeholder engages Twitch from a different angle in its role as a platform (Gillespie, 2018). Streamers draw on Twitch as a platform in its sense as “a place from which to speak and be heard,” using this soapbox to court attention and create content (Gillespie, 2010: 352). For audiences, it is a place to build a shared culture through the common consumption of entertainment, thus engaging with Twitch as “an abstract promise as much as a practical one” (ibid.). Twitch corporate, a subsidiary of Amazon, regards the Twitch platform as “something to build upon and innovate from” both computationally and economically (Gillespie, 2018: 352). Each actor's “stake” in the development of Twitch varies accordingly, often diverging and fueling cycles of controversy (Ananny and Gillespie, 2016).
Controversy, rather than just being a source of friction among stakeholders, highlights important issues and draws stakeholders into negotiations. Friedman and Miles (2002: 3) argue that “extremely negative and highly conflicting relations between organizations and stakeholders” surface tensions and push the development of future directions. Resolving these tensions requires engagement in a collaborative negotiation process between stakeholders, which Barbara Gray (1989: 11–16) contends relies on five key factors: interdependence of stakeholder concerns, shared responsibility for chosen directions, joint ownership of decisions, cooperatively developed solutions, and a willingness to view collaboration as “an evolving process.” However, this collaborative process is often hindered on platforms where stakeholders come to the table with unequal levels of information. One of the primary inequities between Twitch's stakeholders is the asymmetrical control of platform data, protected as trade secrets. As Dolničar et al. (2014: 224) argue, “Every communication space where persuasive arguments are needed to drive decision making on certain controversies is prone to the misuse or abuse of statistical data,” making equitable access to relevant data critical for engaging in fair negotiations of value between stakeholders. Additionally, Twitch corporate wields the power to deplatform streamers and audiences deemed unruly or unprofitable based on proprietary considerations. As the enforcer of platform policies, Twitch has more power than other stakeholders in determining who has access to the bargaining table.
Content metas counter corporate platform power by pushing beyond normal, already accepted activities on the platform. Creators can compare their metrics before and after engaging in a meta to understand its value and leverage this knowledge in negotiations with the platform. Mitchell et al. (1997) suggest that organizations recognize external stakeholders based on a combination of prospective stakeholders’ perceived power, legitimacy, and ability to generate urgency. Thus, the popularity of a meta and the boost it gives streamers in their metrics is a way of accessing negotiations. While they do not provide the granularity of data that Twitch corporate has, metas spur a public conversation and are a means of testing attitudes toward specific types of content and platform developments. Much of this conversation happens off-platform, on places like Twitter (now X) and Reddit, or in other arenas that are hard for Twitch to track comprehensively, like conversations between streamers and their chats while livestreaming. Discord is also a popular tool among streamers to both build core communities and communicate with one another; however, Discord servers are unevenly public compared to other forums. Some streamers restrict access to their Discords to subscribers only, many have hidden or private rooms for close contacts or favored subsets of the community, and Discord discussions are often organically limited to a streamer's own community rather than the wider Twitch community. As a result, Discord presents a promising option for in-depth studies into particular communities, but is less useful in measuring responses to public controversies addressing multiple stakeholders.
Platform studies scholars have developed their own models for how stakeholders operate to develop platform governance. Robert Gorwa's influential “triangle” model outlines the roles of firms, government actors, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as the three primary stakeholders of platform governance (2019) and serves “to provide a heuristic that could map out governance relationships and power relations between these broad camps of actors” (2022: 495). Other scholars have expanded on this model to include other stakeholders or to reorder the model into, for example “governance clusters.” Papavangelou suggests six clusters, including “(i) digital platforms, (ii) public authorities, (iii) NGOs, (iv) news media, (v) citizens, and, lastly, (vi) opinion makers” (2021: 8). While this model offers more variety, there are still conceptual issues with overlapping categories of actors and with how to sort extremely varied groups like content creators. It may well be that there is no single model that satisfyingly cuts across the wide variety of platform types, governance structures, and international regulatory standards, and my goal here is not to develop a model that can do so. Rather, I suggest that, within the context of Twitch, examining the interactions between streamers, audiences, and platform ownership in moment of conflicts can provide insight in two ways. First, as opposed to models that attempt to understand and enable increasingly
The role of controversy in governance
The field of STS has long used controversies to investigate public disputes about the role of technology in society (Venturini and Munk, 2022). In recent years, as technologies like social media have transformed the possibilities for public disputes, a broader coalition of researchers have turned to controversy mapping, sometimes for reasons of methodological convenience and sometimes out of theoretical interest in the role of media transformations. As Marres and Moats argue, “Controversies unfolding in digital media settings invite us to investigate both the substantive issues at stake in the controversy as well as the formative role played by mediating technologies in the enactment of these controversies” (2015: 1). This approach to controversy mapping treats controversies as “both an empirical object and method” (ibid.: 2) and examines how platforms mediate public issues. While public issues need not be about platforms, platforms are certainly rife with controversies of their own making (Ananny and Gillespie, 2017; Hallinan et al., 2020). For social media researchers interested in platform governance, controversy analysis “provides a way to surface beliefs and values that might otherwise be overlooked or taken for granted” (Hallinan et al., 2020), and, as this study argues, a way to understand how users actively move policy decisions to the front stage and subject them to public scrutiny via cultural production.
Scholars have long been interested in the role of controversy on platforms to “reveal the uncertain and contested quality of the power relations between the community and the company,” and have argued that it “is in these controversies that we can see the implicit ‘rules’” that govern power relations between platform stakeholders (Burgess and Green, 2008: 8). Ananny and Gillespie (2016: 2) describe such controversies as “shocks,” or “public moments that interrupt the functioning and governance of these ostensibly private platforms, by suddenly highlighting a platform's infrastructural qualities and call it to account for its public implications.” Given this, platform controversies are produced, in large part, through “making noise” on the part of creators, audiences, and both internal and external media (Marchal et al., 2025; Reynolds and Hallinan, 2024). Noise is distinguished here from attention more broadly; there are, of course, instances of Twitch metas that are largely uncontroversial trends. To be a meta is to be an optimized strategy for playing the game of Twitch, and it is only in certain content areas or particular streamers for whom controversy itself is a form of optimization. But, as is usual in content moderation, any decision a platform makes “is likely to be controversial for someone,” a quality that certain stakeholders take full advantage of (Suzor, 2019: 125). In contrast to platform drama creators, who “cluster around a controversy, respond to it, respond to the responses of it, and so on until a new controversy emerges” (Lewis and Christin, 2022: 1639), the streamers examined in this study are the first-movers of controversy. Where Lewis and Christin describe YouTube's drama creators as “meta-commentators” (p. 1638), these Twitch streamers prefer to be meta pioneers.
Like any good metaphor, the
Controversies on Twitch are particularly fertile ground for analysis because Twitch's TOS tends to operate more as a living document than that of other platforms, changing quite frequently in direct response to controversies and, according to many streamers and viewers, enforced inconsistently (e.g. Arias, 2024). This assertion has been borne out, for example by the disclosure of a “Do Not Ban” list as part of a significant leak of business-side information from Twitch in October 2021 (Chalk, 2021) that included many of the platform's top streamers, indicating a different system of moderation and standards for Twitch's most profitable creators, in line with other formations of tiered platform governance (Caplan and Gillespie, 2020). Notably, these are also the creators that popularize platform metas. Further, because Twitch viewership is less algorithmically driven than many other user-generated content platforms (Houssard et al., 2023), and because content metas are often led by the most visible streamers, platform leadership tends to more often directly address issues in public rather than opting for behind-the-scenes technical tweaks (e.g. X demoting posts with links). For example mere days after Twitch changed its policies to allow for more “artistic nudity,” CEO Dan Clancy publicly rolled back the new policy in a blog post where he noted that “Much of the content created has been met with community concern” and that “While I wish we would have predicted this outcome, part of our job is to make adjustments that serve the community” (Clancy, 2023). Clancy also frequently collaborates with leading streamers at events, conventions, or on stream, raising Twitch's brand stakes around the conduct of its stars—something Twitch recognizes itself, being one of the few major platforms to enforce its Terms of Service in response to off-platform behavior (Marinett, 2021), akin to the morality clauses embedded in the contracts of most major sport athletes (Cooley et al., 2008). All this to say, Twitch as a platform is particularly reliant on the conduct of its most visible streamers, yet those same streamers often financially benefit from pushing the lines of acceptable conduct; these qualities make Twitch ideal for studying conflicts between stakeholders.
Platform culture and its discontents
Three case studies—hot tub streaming, ASMR in yoga pants, and gamba—were chosen for analysis based on the controversy they generated on and off of Twitch, and their close temporal proximity. The latter component matters because it means that each of these metas operated under roughly the same policy guidelines and cultural norms, outside of changes provoked by the metas themselves. Commentators also frequently compared the content metas, and Twitch's different responses to them, indicating their cultural proximity. The metas also generated headlines from mainstream media outlets not normally concerned with streaming culture, like
Together, the metas reveal deep-set fissures in Twitch culture around exploitation, transparency, and the purpose of the platform. The question of whether Twitch streamers use the popularity of metas to exploit their audiences came up in discussion of all three metas through the vectors of addiction and parasocial relationships, though the enactment of this purported exploitation was distinctly gendered, as discussed below. The issue of transparency was similarly gendered, divided between concerns around the “external” authenticity of gambling streamer finances and the “internal” authenticity around how hot tubbing and ASMR streamers represented their personal lives (Shifman, 2018)—in other words, whether they were single or in a relationship. Finally, the conversation around platform purpose centered on whether Twitch should host content unrelated to gaming, and what limits should be placed on what qualifies as “gaming.” As an offshoot to this conversation, some commentors who believed that Twitch should host non-gaming forms of content nevertheless drew the line at sexually explicit (or implicit) content. After introducing the metas below, I explore the nuances of these debates in relation to each of the three metas.
Hot tub streaming
In April 2021, a number of streamers purchased blowup hot tubs and positioned them in front of their streaming setups (see Figure 1). Originally hosted in the Just Chatting category, these streams forefront interactive conversations between the hot tubbing streamer, clad in swimwear, and their livechatting viewers. Many streamers incorporated body art, music, and exercises to incentivize chat participation and monetary donations. There is some dispute over which streamer was the first to place a hot tub in their livingroom, 4 but no doubt that the meta exploded when two of Twitch's most popular and controversial streamers, Indiefoxx and Amouranth, 5 entered the water.
Author screenshot of xoAeriel during an August 2021 hot tub stream, featuring donor names written on her arm and on the board in the background labeled “Daddies.”
Other streamers who avoided directly wading into the debate over the appropriateness of hot tub streaming nevertheless capitalized on the meta in both playful and critical ways. QTCinderella, in an example of metacultural content about metas, copied the hot tub setup while clad in a full-body scuba suit (see Figure 2). Men streamers also engaged in the hot tub meta, typically through joint streams with women or in groups. When doing solo hot tub streams, the focus was generally on comedy, with the implicit joke being that few Twitch viewers were really interested in watching men in hot tubs. ScaryCheese, for example directly copied the popular format of such streams with donation rewards that included swallowing a whole hotdog, while popular gaming creator CallMeKevin (also dressed in a scuba suit) used the format as a hook to run a charity stream for St Jude's Children's Research Hospital, generating over $40,000 in donations. Other parody iterations, from jovial and supportive to openly critical of the format, included a fully-clothed man in a bubble bath pouring flour on himself, a Vtuber projecting their animated model over background footage of a hot tub, a man sitting on an inner tube on dry ground while dressed as a mermaid, and a gaming streamer playing Rainbow Siege Six while sitting in an indoor hot tub. As these varied examples demonstrate, the hot tub format dominated conversation across the platform, whether serious or playfully subversive; the hot tub was, within a matter of days, a part of Twitch vernacular.
Author screenshot of QTCinderella during an April 2021 hot tub stream, in which she both copies and makes fun of the format.
After significant uproar about hot tub streams clogging the top of the Just Chatting section, frustrating previously popular chatting streamers who did not want to don swimwear, Twitch created a new section to host them called “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches” that serves as a catch-all for any activities where swimwear is the standard attire. Twitch also updated its TOS to accommodate the new section, adjusting its former blanket ban on swimwear to allow a “contextual exception” so long as the chosen swimsuit “completely covers the genitals, and those who present as women must also cover their nipples” (Twitch, 2023, “Community Guidelines—Attire”). Twitch has an extensive history of adjusting its policies to address what constitutes appropriate attire or acceptable behavior, often with a particular focus on women (Zolides, 2021).
ASMR in yoga pants
The oddly specific combination of yoga pants and ASMR typically featured streamers in tight workout outfits, positioned far enough away from their camera for their whole body to be visible in contrast to the “face cam” generally used by gaming streamers. Highlighting the sexualized aspect of this meta, many streamers would lay on their bellies in either a side view or facing away from the camera, often described as the “ass cam” view (see Figure 3). ASMR streamers often use specially designed microphones shaped like ears to maximize the realistic sensory experience of sound, and yoga pants streamers took full advantage of these by licking them and creating other suggestive sounds and images that pushed the line of credulity about their intentions. Farting into the microphone soon became popular as well (Henley, 2021), driving the meta to its creative edge. This was probably the development that flew the meta too close to the fetish sun in regards to disallowed sexual content on the platform, and several popular streamers were temporarily banned in response (Foster, 2021). Additionally, unlike hot tub streaming, ASMR already existed as a category on Twitch, but the complaints about streamers in yoga pants dominating the top of the explore page for the category mirrored the frustrations of Just Chatting streamers toward hot tubbers. 6
Author screenshot of Amouranth licking an ear-shaped microphone during a June 2021 ASMR stream. This view shows both the “ass cam” in full screen and the eye contact camera in the top left, as well as examples of monetary goals in the bottom left.
Many of the conversational themes driving opposition to hot tub streaming were echoed in the context of ASMR in yoga pants, but with a more vitriolic tone—and notably came from both men and women, whereas hot tub decrials were more common among men. Further, the relative take-up of these metas among other Twitch streamers is demonstrative of popular opinion about how much they pushed the line of acceptable conduct. While hot tub streaming was the subject of a number of jokes and parody streams, and also generated collaborative streams between men, women, and Vtubers, most streamers largely avoided even parodies of yoga pants ASMR. For vocal opponents of the meta, this was evidence of how the line-pushing nature of hot tub streaming had fed a sea of increasingly sexual content, and they warned it would go further yet. For example Pokimane publicly chided platform leaders that “You’re creating an inevitable time bomb” of escalating boundary-pushing by not immediately banning the entire practice (Young, 2021). However, likely as a result of its more explicit nature as a form of titillation, ASMR in yoga pants was only adopted by a few streamers, mostly those already notorious for bannable behavior. It seems the general Twitch zeitgeist sensed the writing on the wall in regards to this meta, and were validated when ASMR in yoga pants was pushed off the platform via increased enforcement of Twitch's existing sexual content policies. Unlike hot tub streaming, no policy concessions were made to keep ASMR in yoga pants on the platform.
Yoga pants would continue to reappear in new metas, including the yoga pants Twister meta several months later (Cooper, 2021) where streamers played the awkward, bendy party game for the camera. Amouranth, who seems to have pioneered both yoga pants metas in addition to being one of the first hot tub streamers, quoted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Twitter after this latest venture, saying “People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving fast and breaking things."
7
While certainly tongue-in-cheek, Amouranth's point is apropos to the agenda-setting role of metas, and as one of the most successful and business-savvy streamers in the industry, she can afford the potential consequences of breaking both norms and the TOS. Indeed, her multiple bans on Twitch may have actually
Gamba
Gambling is often known as “gamba” in Twitch parlance, a term that originated with popular late streamer Reckful's occasional low-roller gambling streams circa 2016. Of the three metas in this analysis, gamba is the only one populated primarily by men. Slots content, in particular, began its rise to popularity on the platform in 2020, although the cottage industry of cryptocasino gambling 9 on Twitch had already drawn the concerned eye of industry journalists and onlookers several years before (e.g. Kent, 2018). In May 2022, Slots became one of the top 10 most-watched categories on Twitch (see Figure 4), driven by three streamers who frequently appeared in Twitch's top 10 most watched channels: TrainwrecksTV, xQc, and Adin Ross. During its heyday on the platform, gamba generated a number of high-profile arguments and scandals, the most notable occurring when streamer ItsSliker was revealed to have defrauded fellow streamers and viewers out of at least US$200,000 to feed his gambling addiction (Parrish, 2022).
Author screenshot of xQc playing virtual slots via cryptocasino provider Stake during a May 2021 gamba stream. He is betting US$150 via Bitcoin for every spin of the slot machine with a credit balance of US$53,710.97. His chat comments on the stream in the top right.
Slots remained one of the most popular categories on the platform until Twitch took action in October 2022 to curb the practice in response to threatened boycotts by prominent Twitch streamers including Pokimane, Hasanabi, and Mizkif (Orland, 2022). Twitch updated its TOS to ban streaming of “gambling sites that include slots, roulette, or dice games,” specifically naming the most popular cryptocasino providers like Stake and Roobet. 10 This was far from a complete ban of gambling, however. Online casinos licensed in the United States were still allowed, as were other forms of gambling like poker or sports betting. The TOS changes clearly targeted the sites and types of gambling used by the most prominent streamers in the meta, and thus effectively killed it as a meta while letting the activities in question continue in less conspicuous forms on Twitch. While nowhere near its former highs, the Slots category still generated more than 12 million watch hours from 17 March to 16 April 2023 (SullyGnome, 2023), but provoked no further major scandals or boycotts. Thus, much like the hot tub meta, Twitch incorporated the aspects of gamba content they wanted to keep on the platform while shaving away elements that caused too much controversy.
As a notable side effect, Twitch's response to gambling received scrutiny from streamers who questioned why the platform responded to the gamba outcry with more force than they had previously expended on responding to hate raids (Jiang, 2022). 11 Twitch's public response to gambling became a point of comparison for streamers advocating for platform attention to other problems that they felt were ignored, despite hashtag campaigns and petitions aimed at the platform (see Blue, 2021). The most prominent effect of the gamba ban, however, was the formation of livestreaming site Kick, backed by money from cryptocasino Stake and owned in part by TrainwrecksTV. The platform quickly established itself as a market rival to Twitch, including by signing some of its most prominent gambling streamers to record-setting deals (Tassi, 2023b). In this case, gamba proved to be a Twitch meta that outlived its life on Twitch.
Mapping meta discussions
As noted above, three issues cut across discussions of all of the metas: exploitation, transparency, and platform purpose. That the same issues appear in what seem, on face, to be very different types of content demonstrates that metas generally serve the same purpose on Twitch: to push boundaries and generate novelty that leads to audience attention. There were, however, particularly notable gendered differences in how these issues were presented by critics of the metas, mirroring the gender differential between streamers participating in the meta. Yoga pants ASMR was performed almost exclusively by women, while hot tub streaming was led most prominently by women (Gonzalez, 2021) but was accompanied by performances from mixed-gender groups, Vtubers, and by men alone (though often with a joking tone). Gambling, by contrast, was primarily the purview of men but included a few prominent women like Corinna Kopf. 12 A content vertical dominated by women streamers is somewhat unusual in terms of Twitch's overall streamer demographics. A 2021 leak of Twitch's payout data revealed that only three women were among Twitch's one hundred top paid streamers (Jiang, 2021), 13 despite the growing value of women to the platform as a whole (Kharif, 2021). Outside of monetary questions, women also face consistent objectification and harassment in Twitch chat (Nakandala et al., 2017), are frequent targets of “hate raids” (Meisner, 2023), and are subject to vitriol from fellow streamers (Grayson, 2017). These factors combined to make both hot tub streaming and ASMR in yoga pants the subjects of considerable gendered invective.
Issues of exploitation and transparency were intertwined in discussions of hot tubbing and yoga pants, as supporters of transparency, in this context, accused streamers of concealing whether they were single or in a relationship to exploit more donations. Women streamers’ relationship status serves as a brightline for whether to donate among a certain sector of the audience. Though much mocked by other parts of the Twitch community, a sizable group of viewers felt that hot tub and yoga pants streamers who were flirty or suggestive on stream gave viewers false hopes if the streamers were actually in a relationship. Some of these critiques certainly came from inside the house—that is many of the most heated criticisms of hot tub and yoga pants streamers came from people who were regular viewers of and donators to these streamers. These critics further pointed to the often-ruinous amount of money some people pay to camgirls and other sex workers, and accused hot tub and yoga pants streamers of encouraging their viewers to do the same, an argument that frames these metas as a less explicit form of sex work. They indicated that the easy availability of such streams on Twitch encouraged young men to develop sex addictions or preyed on those who already had, concerns that have long been tied to the practice of camming (Milrod and Monto, 2025).
Proponents of banning hot tub and yoga pants streamers only rarely addressed the question of sexual content in video games, perhaps because their critiques of sexual content were linked directly to either the bodies of streamers (Ruberg et al., 2019) or the dangers of developing parasocial relationships with them. Parasocial relationships refers to the one-sided relationship between a performer and members of their audience. While audience members may feel that they know a livestreamer, enhanced by Twitch's heavy emphasis on the use of chat to “talk back” to streamers (Taylor, 2018: 42), livestreamers cannot know every member of their audience (Horton and Strauss, 1957). Some commenters contend that parasocial inequality creates an imbalanced relationship that makes accepting financial donations unethical and exploitative, especially in return for intimate forms of content. These accusations, though they were often presented as directly responsive to the popularity of hot tub and yoga pants streaming, echo long-standing rhetoric about women streamers on Twitch. In a particularly extreme example, Twitch viewer Erik Estavillo attempted to sue the site in 2020—a year before the hot tub meta—for allegedly “displaying many sexually suggestive women streamers” who were “only streaming with the sole purpose of taking advantage of such disadvantaged individuals [like Estavillo] who just want to watch a video game stream” but instead are “enticed to spend money on these women for attention and sexual innuendo” (
In regards to gamba streams, discussions of exploitation also invoked the unequal power of parasocial relationships. These criticisms were targeted at streamers who encouraged viewers to sign up for gambling websites using affiliate codes. Gambling sites pay streamers for each new sign-up using their code, or even give them a percentage of the money people using their code lose to the casino, a practice that even leading gambling proponents like TrainwrecksTV admitted was “predatory” (Jiang, 2022). Controversy over the conversion of viewers into gamblers via affiliate codes led Twitch to ban the display of such codes on stream in 2021 (Bernal, 2021). Questions of exploitation also overlapped with discussions of transparency around the question of whether streamers accurately represented the risks. Common accusations included that gamba streamers deliberately misrepresented gambling odds and won a mathematically impossible amount of the time (Kent, 2018), secretly used house money (known as “fill”) rather than risking their own money, and bet egregious amounts like US$1000 per spin of a slot machine, normalizing stakes that average bettors could never match. TrainwrecksTV contended that his massive losses on stream actually showed the “reality of gambling” and served as “a great example of why you shouldn’t gamble” (Deschamps, 2021), but critical viewers and streamers argued that cryptocasinos would not pay streamers to gamble if they did not subsequently profit from the losses of their viewers. Streamers refusing to reveal how much they are paid by cryptocasinos (even if barred by NDAs), or how much they have lost during their gambling careers, further compounds these perceptions.
The issue of addiction was particularly heated in these discussions given the well-established addictive nature of gambling, and online gambling in particular (Chóliz, 2016: 750). As some of the more prominent opponents of the gamba meta were leading women streamers like Pokimane, discussions often turned to direct comparisons of gambling addictions versus sex addictions. Some critics contended that Twitch must treat gambling and sex addictions as both equally likely and damaging, concluding that if Twitch chose to ban gambling (which it did not
A final wrinkle regarding these themes occurred when questions of transparency were directed toward Twitch itself. Twitch is notorious among streamers and audiences for its inconsistent moderation policies, refusal to provide specific reasons for issuing bans, and preferential treatment to certain streamers (Chalk, 2021; Grayson, 2021). Twitch was also criticized in regards to gambling for first lacking a clear policy on the matter, then issuing one at a time that seemed calculated to deflect from other “platform drama” (Lewis and Christin, 2022) and that targeted the gambling habits and sponsorships of particular high-profile streamers. In regards to hot tub and yoga pants creators, questions were raised about which streamers were banned, what they had specifically done to violate policies, and how long the bans were. Twitch did not publicly respond to any of these concerns. By contrast, in regards to exploitation, the idea of the platform itself exploiting streamers or audiences was seldom invoked.
The most prominent conversation around platform purpose for all three metas centered on whether Twitch should host content unrelated to gaming—a debate that has, again, long served as a trojan horse for gendered vilification. Even within gaming cultures, discussions of gender are relentlessly fraught, requiring women to “manage their audiences while also navigating a culture that refuses their legitimacy” (Tran, 2022), including for women who operate as professional gamers and esport players (Witkowski, 2018). Every step removed from gaming tends to worsen this vitriol. Despite general acceptance of Just Chatting as a Twitch category, some streamers and audiences felt that non-gaming content corrupted the culture of the platform and allowed streamers to push the boundaries too far, especially in content areas with more women. The debates around the now-defunct IRL (“In Real Life") streaming section serve as a good example of this rhetoric, most famously epitomized by streamer TrainwrecksTV's rant that, “This used to be a god damn community of gamers, nerds, kids that got bullied, kids that got fucked with, kids that resorted to the gaming world because the real world was too fucking hard, too shitty, too lonely, too sad and depressing” but that this gaming community had been subsumed by “the same sluts that rejected us, the same sluts that chose the god damn cool kids over us. The same sluts that are coming into our community, taking the money, taking the subs, the same way they did back in the day” (Grayson, 2017).
TrainwrecksTV was temporarily banned for this invective, but long remained one of the most popular streamers on the platform, and this rant was regularly invoked by streamers and audiences who felt the platform should return more strictly to its gaming roots—a position that often involves pushing back against the participation of women. This disposition is in line with Adrienne Massanari's (2017: 332) assertion that “to discuss geek and nerd culture is to discuss masculinity,” and TrainwrecksTV's speech reflected the felt threat of the increased presence of women on the platform, especially those who chose to create content outside of the norms of gamer culture (Munn, 2023). Hot tub streaming and ASMR in yoga pants are obviously not gaming content, and thus received substantial support for their removal from the platform on this basis alone. Luck-based gambling, like the playing of slots, faced similar pushback because it lacks any chance of improvement based on skill. Indeed, this was part of the logic that some commentators used to support the ongoing allowance of poker while pushing back against other casino games. However, gamba conversations largely lacked discussions around gender or other demographic factors of its practitioners.
A second strand of the discussion around platform purpose focused on the demographic
The governance role of cultural controversy
My focus on Twitch's disputed metas as a way to understand the governance role of cultural controversies is driven by two contentions. First, I argue that controversies are born of the differing interests among stakeholders and made productive by bringing these differences into contrast and, eventually, open conflict. Cultural controversies are thus an agenda-setting impetus for policymaking on platforms. Much like the adage that regulations are often written in blood, platform policies are often born from the wreckage of platform controversies. Second, I argue that the way to reveal a platform's core culture is to see how controversies are argued, negotiated, and ultimately resolved by stakeholders. In this process of negotiation, there are always compromises and concessions, and it is in here that “platform values” (Hallinan et al., 2022) are developed and defended. These values serve as the basis for the culture of daily life on platforms, and reveal the priorities of platform policymakers in balancing between the needs of creators, audiences, and their own financial and brand interests (Scharlach et al., 2024).
The search for the next meta is a driving force of Twitch creativity, and its liveness and daily broadcasts allow it to be one of the fastest-moving testing grounds for new content online. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2013: 3) argue that creativity has come to be an object of reverence among scholars and practitioners of media industries; yet there are clearly forms of creativity that, whatever their innovation or newness, are potentially offensive, risqué, or otherwise out of step with the culture of platform leaders or audiences. Mediating between the dual pressures of audience demands for fresh content and Twitch's cautious optimism towards new and risky types of streams requires creators to brainstorm successful activities on a day-to-day basis. This means that creators like Amouranth, who was known to frequently set the platform's more risky-but-profitable metas, generate attention not only from fans but also rival creators. Twitch's meta culture is thus interdependent and responsive to the activities of peers in a way that helps galvanize creators and audiences as informal collective stakeholders when disputes arise. Controversial metas also ensure that the balance between creativity and stability, between drawing in new viewers and maintaining loyal audiences, is constantly being tested and adjusted on Twitch. Twitch's platform policies tend to be far more malleable than those of many other user-generated content platforms
The success of any given policy change relies on its take-up within the wider platform culture to ensure compliance and prevent controversy from reoccurring. Metas act to create debate around appropriate norms on the platform, a form of governance that resists formalization and top-down control. As Grimmelman (2015: 61) argues, norms “cannot simply be set by fiat. By definition, they are an emergent property of social interactions.” Metas thus operate as a kind of cultural laboratory for Twitch leadership, and may explain why they sometimes seem slow to respond to content like ASMR in yoga pants; such controversies offer a chance to test the opinions of other stakeholders about what should be allowed on the platform. Further, this testing function explains why, when faced with three different controversial metas, Twitch made three entirely different policy choices. Hot tub streams, though the source of (still-ongoing) ire from certain sectors of the Twitch community, nonetheless proved to ultimately fit within the cultural sensibilities of most platform users, and thus earned both modifications to the TOS and their own dedicated category. By contrast, ASMR yoga pants streams drew disapproval from across the cultural spectrum, and were quickly removed by simply (if slowly) enforcing existing policy. The gamba meta demonstrated yet a third option lying between these poles, partial acceptance and partial rejection. The parts of the meta that generated the most controversy, like high-roller slots, were removed through extremely targeted policy modifications, while generally accepted forms of gambling like poker (or those particularly valuable to advertising partners, like sports betting) were left untouched.
This testing ground has significant value for platforms like Twitch that have to manage a careful balance between the interests of multiple groups including audiences, creators, and advertisers. As Nieborg et al. (2022: 35) argue, “A lack of growth on one side of the market [producers or consumers] will eventually stall growth on the other side, thereby frustrating growth of the entire platform ecosystem.” In this context, not allowing creators enough freedom to innovate new content, or banning content that large swaths of the audience enjoy, risks stifling the cultural relevance of the platform and embracing a slow death by stagnation. On the other hand, allowing content that is too far outside of platform cultural norms may alienate audiences, other creators, and advertisers alike. Controversial metas allow Twitch to give creators a leading role in taking the temperature of platform culture with comparatively little risk on the part of platform leadership; Twitch is, after all, no stranger to awkward headlines, yet remains a giant of Western livestreaming. The platform has often faced more severe pushback for its
Twitch should not be viewed as simply the distant arbitrator of controversial metas, however. As Lewis and Christin (2022: 1651) argue, “platforms are active participants in the power struggles and negotiations between different groups with conflicting interests,” and Twitch, like all platforms, must sometimes make decisions in situations that may be “fraught, continually shifting, and arbitrary to some degree” (Petre et al., 2019: 9). However, platforms do not respond to every controversy publicly; indeed, they are often quite selective about doing so, and that Twitch reacted to each of the controversies outlined here through public statements, banning leading streamers, and crafting substantial TOS changes, indicates that they felt such public responses were important for maintaining governance legitimacy (Shapiro et al., 2024). There are boundaries to the controversy that platforms can meaningfully make use of as a form of attention generation and norm testing. As Suzor (2019: 120) explains, “Individual controversies – small shocks that make platform governance look less legitimate – can be weathered by technology companies without real lasting change.” But courting controversy always risks the possibility of “catastrophes, where the collective weight of previously ignored or dismissed warnings suddenly make change almost unavoidable” (Suzor, 2019: 121), and “prompt users to activate as constituencies capable of issuing demands backed by the threat of collective action” (Shapiro, et al., 2024: 7). The threatened boycott over gamba streams that prompted Twitch's partial ban of the meta serves as a prime example of riding along the edge of controversy and catastrophe. It is in the meta around metas that Twitch attempts to spot this line, through the tone and content of metadiscussions about appropriate platform content, and through the production of metaculture that shows whether controversial metas are being adopted into or rejected by the wider platform culture.
This study of controversial content metas on Twitch shows how the culture of a platform can work to pressure existing policies and help shape new ones. Through an analysis of three of Twitch's most disputed content metas, I highlight the agenda-setting power of controversies and the benefits that generating controversy offer to different platform stakeholders individually and collectively. By generating public debates among the stakeholders of Twitch, metas are one of the most accessible ways to understand how platform cultures are debated and negotiated, and serve as a testing ground for shifting content demands and acceptable norms. On their face, Twitch metas may seem like a ridiculous collection of antics, pandering, and lowest common-denominator entertainment from full-grown adults. They are, at times, certainly these things. Nevertheless, controversial content metas serve important governance functions on one of the largest and fastest-moving bastions of Internet culture.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
