I should probably explain why I stopped streaming

[20-02-2026]

It is now February of 2026. My last twitch stream was on July 27th, it was barely two hours, and I probably ended it unceremoniously by saying something along the lines of "cya, I'll be back", not knowing that I wouldn't be. So what happened? There has never really been an active decision to stop. My streaming has gotten increasingly sparse, and at a certain point, the things preventing me from streaming just permanently outweighed my desire to and I just never started the stream again.

I want to preempt this by giving my gratitude towards everyone who's thrown money at me, watched my stream, chatted, especially the regulars. Despite everything I'm about to say, I had good times and made important friends and memories and I don't regret any of the time I spent doing this. And to everyone who's enjoyed my stream, especially if you've been there regularly, I'm sorry I'm not there anymore.

As a baseline, I'm not the right person to be a streamer. I don't like being the center of attention. I like being acknowledged to a degree, but I don't want to be the reason why a gathering of people is in a space. I also am generally a very withdrawn person and I often don't have a ton of mental energy for socializing. I usually had a good time with the people in my chat, so I didn't exactly have a reason for social anxiety on stream. But the prospect of being put onto a pedestal in public where you'd have to interact with god knows whoever is gonna show up in real time was often a huge mental barrier that prevented me from pressing the "start stream" button. I could just have a nice relaxing evening by myself, or I expose myself to the unpredictableness of random online interactions. Usually, I did not choose the latter.

I am also absolutely allergic to promoting myself. I hate it. I stopped tweeting out my streams a long time before I stopped streaming entirely, but you can't really stream meaningfully without some degree of self-promotion. There's always some sort of presentation, some sense of "join this space for content". And that puts the pressure on me to deliver. People are here for you, so you gotta entertain them. There was a period of time in the past where I would try to build up my stream, but my discomfort with self-promotion meant I was never very persistent with it, I never really grew and I never really earned any money to a degree where it would be a worthwhile effort. Even when I relaxed that approach, streams that didn't meet my expectations felt like I personally failed the viewers, and eventually nearly all my streams were done out of a feeling of obligation for the regulars in my chat.

That brings me to the website itself. Like any major platform, twitch has had a slew of terrible policy decisions and is owned by the corporate overlord final boss of capitalism. Because we live in hell, these are all things that the average internet user is able to push into the background if there's enough that's keeping them on the platform, but everything that changed about twitch in the past years just contributed to me feeling increasingly alienated from it. More and more features for monetization, interaction bait, gamification, social media. Constantly pestering me to use more features I never asked for, and for every single one that was added, I wanted to use the site less. I understand that you can just ignore all of this stuff, and that's what I did. But it is extremely irritating to constantly have to navigate around features or have to worry about if this new thing is gonna impact how people expect to be able to interact with you or your stream.

Alongside the site features, the culture on the site also changed for streamers to be increasingly interactive and professional, both things I never wanted to be. Witnessing twitch culture, whether it was how many peers started to construct and promote their streams or how viewers engaged and talked, increasingly made me feel like I took a wrong turn and ended up on tiktok. I hate it, I hate all that shit. I'm sorry I'm old and bitter. Conducting myself how I really felt seemed unfair to viewers because it was often less than presentable, and forcing an engaging, light-hearted stream persona feels uncomfortable and fake. I'm happy to be engaging and light-hearted if that is just how I happen to feel, but I can't be engaging and light-hearted on command, especially not when going through frequent depressive slumps. I don't want to be an entertainer, I don't want to be interactive. I wanted to do my niche gremlin streams for other niche gremlins. And once again, that's what I did, but the site I was doing it on increasingly felt like it was not a place for me anymore. On paper, nothing was preventing me from doing what I wanted to do, but doing what I wanted to do increasingly felt like I was doing it wrong.

You can probably smell the mental illness oozing from the above paragraphs, but I also have some straight forward "I got older and moved on" reasons. First of all, I started a relationship and was just much more interested in spending time with my partner than to play video games for an audience. I also work full time now, and I straight up don't wanna give up the little bit of leisure time I have left to pursue a hobby that has long started to feel like an obligation. By the time these two things came around, my streaming career was pretty much already dead, so please don't blame my partner for taking my streams from you, but life changes definitely were the final nail in the coffin for my desire to stream.

I'm sorry if this post is very negative. Again, for a long stretch of time I largely enjoyed myself, and I definitely don't want this post to read like an embittered rant about how everyone is stupid and fake except for me. This is my attempt to lay out the things that are wrong in my brain that lead me to leave a hobby I have pursued for over 10 years to wither and die. I haven't retired from speedrunning. I still speedrun and I still enjoy watching speedruns. But I no longer want to be an active participant in a site I can't stand doing something I have no energy for. I'm not gone, if you're lucky you might catch a glimpse of me, away from crowds, hiding from spectacle. I'm not content, I'm a gremlin.