>>96696133TLDR its youtube's fault.
99% of the vtubers i watch are on twitch so I just stay there. I'll be watching a stream and then oh look, another streamer i watch went live, I guess I'll watch her now. That's literally it. I think Irina is one of teh funniest fucking people ever but there's a lot of friction for a twitch main like me to start watching youtube for one (1) streamer I care about.
I have several youtube accounts - one for my overall interests, one i follow streamers on, and the one i post videos on, that i'm usually logged into. If I want to watch an irina stream I have to separately click on youtube and then switch over to my stream watching account. So i essentially never organically just notice irina is live, in the way i organically notice other streamers are live on twitch every day.
To youtube's credit they do make it easy to switch between youtube accounts but the issue is still youtube. It's the only place to watch essentially all video content that isnt just tv. And its also the only place for video content creators to do business. So they have cast their net very wide. When I open up twitch I do so just to watch streams and nothing else. Twitch is kind of a shitty platform in general but they are great for streamer discoverability with the raids, emotes, clips, recommended, etc. My impression of youtube vtubers is basically 99% major corpo streamers that I don't care to watch, and also irina who I'd love to see if I ever saw her streaming but I don't because I don't have my youtube open all day, I have my twitch open.
Finally, all that brouhaha about twitch crushing down on vtubers, which is my understanding of why she permanently switched over, essentially went nowhere. We heard about vtuber hips for a week but nothing actually happened to anyone I know of. Twitch drastically changes its rules about this kind of thing every few months, theyre a very unserious website. Would irina have been affected even with her very boundary pushing antics? Honestly probably not, because that would require twitch to pay attention to a) streamers under 10000 ccvs and b) their policies beyond the week after they change them.
