I was not at all suggesting that he enter the business of livestreaming…

See, the thing is, if whatever alternative platform he uses (which you proposed could be his own website) can't facilitate a bunch of other creators moving over, then his effort is useless against the whole issue of Twitch, and only serves to make fewer people watch him. And to be fair, he's not just streaming it on Twitch, he's also doing it on YouTube, TikTok and several other shitty corporate platforms, because that's where people are. At least you get a choice of which one to use, even if they all suck.

People don't want to have to use 10 different platforms to follow the stuff they're interested in. They want their one platform to show most of the content, and the content that's not there might as well be ignored. Now if you had Mamdani, and several other people that some particular viewer cares about, all on one alternative platform, that would be enough for that person to consider watching content on two or three platforms, I'm sure. But nobody's going to type an URL into their browser just for one politician in 2026. That's how fucked we are as a society.

As long as we continue going “where the content is” and refusing to go anywhere else, that’s where it will remain in perpetuity. Someone has to have the influence and the courage to make the content be somewhere else.

I fully agree, but it doesn't help unless there's enough content "somewhere else" and "somewhere else" isn't "different service for every streamer and politician". The reason something like Nebula works is that a whole lot of content creators got together. And they pretty much all still upload to YouTube too, because they need the money - they still get the majority of their views from there, despite offering exclusive content and early access on Nebula. Now Nebula is paid so it has a higher barrier to entry for viewers, but it's ad free and slop free.

You and I might go visit Mamdani's website if he decides to stream on there, but millions of others will not, and he needs to reach them too. Personally, I'm not even the audience he needs to reach. I don't live in the US, let alone NYC.

Personally I think he should also stream it here, but not get rid of the other alternatives just yet. And advertise that more prominently than Twitch or YouTube. Clearly he's already doing multistreaming, it would be great if he could add a non-corporate platform as an alternative. He could also read comments from all platforms rather than just Twitch because there's technology for that too, though it depends on what his solution is (not like a streaming software solution is super hard to replace though).

That’s not why at all. That’s because their platform sucks ass.

I acknowledged that, but there are tons of gamers who outright refuse to entertain the idea of using it even if it was good.

GOG doesn't suck at all, and sees much smaller sales numbers than Steam for games that are listed on both. I know I'm personally guilty of buying CP2077 on Steam rather than GOG (despite the fact that I could still use Proton for the GOG version).