Ex-Twitch director explains why clips can’t work like TikTok in response to Trainwreck

Former Twitch Director of Creator Development Marcus ‘djWHEAT’ Graham has doubts that Kick’s upcoming TikTok-style clips feature will work.

Trainwreck has the streaming community hyped over a new Kick feature that aims to increase the discoverability of creators through a feature similar to TikTok.

While many have called for Twitch to do something similar with clips, djWHEAT doesn’t see it ever coming to the Amazon-owned site despite viewer demand.

In response to fans asking about the possibility of something like this ever making its way to the purple platform, the former Twitch employee ruled it out completely, stating that clips aren’t why people come to the site.

Is having an idea innovation? Or is executing it innovation? It's pretty easy to make yourself better than Twitch by just telling everyone what they want to hear, but the reality is, this is an incredibly complex problem to solve (Twitch has tried for years).

— djWHEAT (@djWHEAT) March 15, 2023

djWHEAT dismisses TikTok-style clip feature on Twitch

According to the former Twitch director, the site had been trying to solve the issue of discoverability for years, but it’s an “incredibly complex problem.”

He added that the vast majority of viewers come to the platform for longer form content and most clips only get a handful of views through Reddit.

“The amount of clips generated per minute is insane. Most of the clips generated are bad and only get a few views. A tiny percentage are viewed because of their sharability,” he noted.

Clips are a pretty amazing discovery tool on a HUB platform like Reddit, but people underestimate user behavior. It's the same reason why TikTok livestreams are a fraction of their normal viewership, because people open TikTok for consuming shorter content.

— djWHEAT (@djWHEAT) March 15, 2023

When the topic of having specific algorithms tailored to individual viewers, djWHEAT explained that he had been pulling reports for weekly top clips as part of his job and Twitch didn’t want those to be representative of their brand.

“And that’s also why it doesn’t exist today. Kick is 100x worse,” he added.

Speaking of Kick’s system, which includes a voting feature, djWHEAT said it all comes down to the number of clips and that there was no easy fix.

If you think a voting system is going to solve this problem when there are 100k clips an hour, then I don’t know what to tell you. Right now Kick is averaging 10-15 clips an hour. How come no one ever wants to think about scale? It’s just not as simple as, “I made a like button”

— djWHEAT (@djWHEAT) March 15, 2023

“If you think a voting system is going to solve this problem when there are 100k clips an hour, then I don’t know what to tell you,” he explained. “Right now Kick is averaging 10-15 clips an hour. How come no one ever wants to think about scale? It’s just not as simple as, ‘I made a like button.’”

We’ll have to see if the former Twitch director is right about Kick and its new feature or if Trainwreck can end up proving him wrong as the streaming wars escalate.