Here’s what I learned from the /r/leagueoflegends mod drama over the past few days.

bcarr: but what you haven’t seen are the [Riot] orders to prevent e-stalking and the distribution of e-stalking detectors called e-readers and books about scientology
bcarr: OFUCK E-STALKING IS SCIENTOLOGY
§1: we need more hyphens.
bcarr: hyphenation is spreading across the nation-state
§1: I prefer e-hypenation really
§2: eHyphens
bcarr: now spell like AN euro
bcarr: e-hyphenuateons
§1: E H Y P H E N S
§3: e-Hyphens

Look, I don’t know if Riot really is pulling strings and shouting orders at the subreddit moderators or not like Richard Lewis’ articles suggest. Here’s what I believe:

  1. If you’re running a public fan forum for X and the company behind X approaches you, you trumpet it ’til kingdom come as a victory—you shouldn’t bury it. If you don’t, something’s weird.
  2. A NDA isn’t control, but it sure is ~control.~ There is a difference.
  3. “Trust but verify” will never work in esports. That’s why Richard Lewis and others investigate esports stories for more information.

Twitch does what ever it wants, policy and partner status be damned.

Twitch announced that Ultra Music was going to be streaming a biggun live event with them. It’s a big deal. I want to listen to every single thing that comes out of that show.

But then there’s the trailer posted to the blog post that just sort of flies in the face of the Twitch moral code.

I decided to be a little silly and post the link to the tweet in a reply to the Twitch official blog:

Will the next post be an addendum to the ToS that reads “official partners can break all of the rules because ~reasons~” or something like that?

Then I got this reply:

Screen Shot 2015-03-24 at 10.39.03 AM

And so I decided to elaborate:

It’s not a question of “are all the important bodily parts covered” it’s more to do with an ill conceived moralistic clause that is hurting more than it helps. Ferg goes into detail about the shortcomings of the Twitch policy than I do and I think that deserves a legit read.

I’m not a lawyer or claim to have ~the answer~ or anything like that (I don’t have an objection to Ultra’s content here, either, because I’m not a fucking moron), but I think the whole situation is two simpler situations:

First, by ignoring the actions of a partner–which I’m assuming is the case because why else would Twitch assign a staffer to write up a blog post to promote something massive like Ultra Music deciding to make Twitch its broadcasting platform–it begs the question: why would Twitch take down the pool party stream if they’re going to let a glorified yet well-produced pool party stream from a partner take its place?

Secondly, if Twitch was focused on growing its business with the music industry, they would have rewritten their obscenities clause in their Rules of Conduct (arguably alternatively titled “Twitch’s sole judgement”) after the pool party beer pong stream. If

If it’s unbearably hot where you are, and you happen to have your shirt off (guys) or a bikini top (girls), then just crop the webcam to your face. Problem solved. We sell t-shirts, and those are always acceptable. #Kappa

is their policy towards suggestive clothing or lack of it, is that policy not begging for a more professional treatment?

It’s not as if the management at Twitch have ever been in this situation before at, say, another live streaming service where the focus was on watching people when video gamers started taking over, prompting them to spin off the network into its own niche broadcasting network to escape legal terms and guidelines written for an entirely different type of broadcaster—WAIT A MINUTE, HERE. I SWEAR THAT’S HAPPENED BEFORE. COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN? WE’LL SOON FIND OUT

But I dunno, maybe I’m just nitpicking because it seems like an obvious oversight to me. Maybe I’m wrong. The policy still needs clarifications a-plenty.