Welp.. time to bail on Twitch now too..
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Peertube is implementing streaming!
Fucking why? Being able to link a bank account for ad payments isn't enough to prove adulthood?
I think the whole reason is not “verify you are an adult”. It’s for anti-bot. Bots are too good nowadays. It’s indistinguishable at scale. And bots are bad for advertisers.
That's one hot take... Advertisers don't care if the streamer is a bot, they care if the viewer is a bot. Mega-corpo's ideal solution is 100% bot streamers and 100% real people viewers.
This isn't age verification, or anti-bot. This is straight up fulfilling surveillance contracts with the US government. They don't even need to justify it, they are holding money hostage instead.
That's gonna be a big 'nope' from me. I wonder if that's US-only, though.
The person on Bluesky mentioned they are Canadian :\
Bye bye, Twitch.
You'll never see huge complaints from established streamers; because much like boomers, "LULW fuck you, got mine".
What power does an affiliate have to protest this?
Exactly, that's why people would expect the streamers on the front page to say something, but they won't.
Have you ever heard the saying "don't bite the hand that feeds you." If you are a full time streamer it is literally the hand that feeds them. The streamers are in it for the ride. For every "lolz fuck you i got mine" there are 1000 streamers just making content.
Nope, never heard of it.
huh haven't used that platform in years, guess I minght as well delete my account
I'm surprised the crowd here hasn't already left twitch. I haven't for a while, since I realised Amazon was involved and was becoming more aware of the online services I used.
So, the giving the deets to Persona part is pretty crap, but requiring ID seems to be pretty normal to me? I'm pretty sure affiliates count as contractors, so needing ID to verify would be standard. They are just using a service that happens to be shitty to do the validation.
Not sure why you're being downvoted.
I have to give my ID to buy website hosting. I have to give it to open a bank. I have to provide it for setting up a e-commerce store.
Like, what privacy are you expecting when money is exchanging hands between a major company and a person - one that is required to track all those details and hand them to their government?
You expecting Twitch to pay you in crypto?
Who is asking you to provide ID to purchase or rent a web hosting server?
What ID are you providing for web hosting? Literally never done this, just payables info.
I needed my driver's license to prove that I was who I said I was with my credit card with ionos.
Crazy. I had Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, Rackspace (back in the day when they did that), never had to prove my identity.
So, the giving the deets to Persona part is pretty crap, but requiring ID seems to be pretty normal to me? I'm pretty sure affiliates count as contractors, so needing ID to verify would be standard. They are just using a service that happens to be shitty to do the validation.
If Persona or Palantir were not involved it would be more likely to not be surveillance state shit. But this is obviously not the case. If they wanted to do actually id verification they would use banks or pay a government service. What people are not getting is that in this exchange, you are the product. Palantir was paying Discord to gather our data to track us and sell our data to Palantir's main client. They backed down because it is more profitable to keep all their customers than integrate with Palantir to sell our data and lose x amount of customers.
Twitch isn't requiring all users upload ID, just affiliates who get paid out for subscriptions/bits. That's such a small portion of people on the site that I sincerely doubt they are even able to sell that data.
You need to fill tax info and everything, which is a very good reason to not need ID because your tax number should be identifying already. I guess they want to combat fraud, but this still seems like a complete overreach.
It's not about combatting fraud