You know I'm partial to the explanation that none of the viewers who watch this kind of shit would really want to watch anything else anyways, because they're just here for the softcore porn market, so it's not really hurting anyone. Or, if they would watch anything else, they clearly have their priorities, and it's not the problem of the softcore streamer to stop streaming so kai cenat can have 0.5% higher viewership since theoretically they're "stealing the views with their feminine wiles". On the other hand, I do think a lot of people (mostly kids) tend to eat whatever you put in front of them, and it's not as though tastes can't change over time, with exposure, rather than something or other being necessarily higher value to the viewer. The only people who could probably attempt to know the truth, if they wanted, would be twitch themselves, because they have access to that collection of statistics, of what viewers are getting converted over to what streams. It's not so clear as to be just a zero sum game, but it's also not not a zero sum game, is basically what I'm saying.

FWIW though I don't really care about softcore on twitch because ALL of twitch is softcore. All of it. Most of the people who complain about this shit are just idiots sitting around doing react content or gaming and doing really dumb stand up, and all the viewers are parasocial andys. The only good twitch streams I've seen are a guy getting tortured in a closet and a dude doing amateur cooking for random people he meets outside, and then a very small handful of people livestreaming technical subjects and doing live tutorials because that's easier and provides more feedback than videos, even if it's not scalable. And the sumo guy, that guy's sick.