I really don't think it's possible to build a big political stream on twitch that has the potential to create a mass movement. Twitch is great for entertainment and for drawing attention to specific events or news, but growing a brand compromises your politics.

This is not a hate post there's a lot of political streamers I am good friends with who I respect tremendously, I just think that the structure of the platform is antithetical to communist or anarchist propagandizing.

Everything is distilled down to a small group of individuals and their "takes" (god I am so sick of that word), which turns the conversation into one about individual people instead of developing an understanding of what leftists actually belief

Being an "effective" leftist is not about dunking on people online, it's about actually building a movement to liberate marginalized, working class people worldwide. But for growth on Twitch you need to place a huge amount of importance on yourself as an individual

Think about the type of viewers you'd like to have on twitch. The best viewers are active chatters who tune in to watch multiple hours of you talking every day. It's not possible to attract these types of viewers without forming some degree of social or parasocial relationship

And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing or that you're evil if you talk to your chat or w/e, it just means that the people watching you are going to walk away from your stream and parrot your ideas as "YOUR" ideas.

Intentionally or unintentionally, what you say on stream becomes about yourself, and not about the context of the message. We've created a social club, not a movement. This is why we have spineless fuckin libs like xanderhal or socdoneleft mixed in with us.

We are at war with liberals, but to the people who need education on leftism the most, we have not done enough to distinguish ourselves from them. Because the platforms we rely on cause us to develop an individualist mindset that's incompatible with our own politics.

I wish I had a solution to this problem. As someone with disabilities that make it really hard to do work offline, I want online activism to be more effective. But for now, awareness of the contradiction is better than nothing.

For now here's some online folks who I think are doing a good job of navigating this contradiction.

@trashcan1312 @CamazotzA @AlkiHistoriker @lottieblix @LunaOi_VN There are more but idk these are just the people who come to my mind first