Episode 24 - Content and Community - Boss LVL

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
How are you today's psyche. I'm doing good. How are you? Oh,
I'm hanging in there. Your makeup looks beautiful. I carry um,
you know what, I touched up right before we started
because apparently I have sweaty eyelids or something, because my
highline are already always ends up halfway down my face today.
But I also to you know what, this is so
random that you bring up because I just bought myself

(00:24):
a setting spray for the first time. I never used
setting spray, and it seems to make my makeup slide
off my face more so, I think I'm using it
to use like a primer beforehand, like the primer on
your face. First, I used primer on my eyes and
not on my skin, and I like my whole face.
I think that might be part of the problem. It

(00:44):
could be. Yeah, I I struggle a lot trying to
find like the primer setting spray combo um. I used
to back when I was like in high school and
was going to anime conventions just straight up used aerosol
hair spray. So really, don't do that for us. But
I'm not good for you, terrible for your skin. It
definitely works, though I would get through an entire convention

(01:06):
the rave with not a single smudge on my makeup
at all. But I get that. I feel like I'm
getting into this stage in my life right now where
I'm actually paying attention to skincare a lot more than
I used to because I used to use, like, you know,
makeup remover wipes. I used to use those all the time,
and that was it. That was the limit of my skincare.
I didn't even use moisturizer. It was awful. And I

(01:29):
was like, I don't understand why my skin so dry
and why it's so flaky and the makeup doesn't sit
on it very well because I wasn't taking care of
my skin at all. And I feel like when you,
like when you stream, when you're on a camera all
the time, Um, suddenly it starts to become more important
because like those lights they yes and so it's like

(01:50):
if I have dry skin that day, like it's like
you can see it. It is interesting like being we're
I mean we're doing broadcasting and stuff. It's almost like, uh,
like being on a news like a TV show, like
a news every day you gotta wake up and give
the weather report for everybody, um, and I think that
a lot of things about our job would be uh
something we could learn from news anchors that have been

(02:12):
doing it, you know for sure decades. Yeah, they know.
They actually watched a woman on TikTok who is a
cam like a she does weather stuff but I can't
remember the exact name of her role, but it's basically
a meteorologist. But she does like a lot of presenting
and stuff as well. And she her morning starts super

(02:32):
super early, and she was going through like her whole routine,
and I was just like, wow, I could learn so
much from this person, you know, like some of them
were able to like wake up, hit the gym, you know,
have a balanced breakfast. Why did they find the time?
And literally, um, well, I suppose we should probably introduce
the podcast. Hi everybody, Welcome back to Boss Level, a

(02:55):
podcast or feature conversations with guests who have leveled up
bringing an XP boost table or in the case of
today's episode, you will be with me Psyche and Hey
Shady Daddy as we talk about community growth and content evolution,
which is a topic I think both of us are
very passion about. Yeah, Hi everybody, I hope you're having
a good what are we August almost September? Good? How

(03:19):
did this happen? It's ridiculous because someone mentioned the time
of year to me and I feel like I was
just like, yeah, it's August, no big deal, and I'm like, oh,
Halloween soon, oh the end of the year, Like we
might as well just you know what's going on. I
would start playing in Halloween costumes. I'm not already started.

(03:39):
It's terrible because, like I I really annoy people in
my community because I as soon as the summer solstice
has happened, I'm like, right, it's Halloween. I They're like, no,
it's not. Yeah, no, it's Halloween all the way through
until the end of November, because I need like a
time period after Halloween happens to continue enjoying myself and
then it's Christmas and they're like this is this is rubbish.

(04:01):
You can't like that's not true. But look, Halloween gives
me joy. So it's like, honestly, like Halloween season starts
like as soon as August started. Pretty much. You just
gotta gotta deal with. My mom has her new coffee
cup that she got I don't know, from some some
Walmart or something. It's just an orange cup that says
which please. She was like showing it off to me,
and I was like, oh, it's Halloween season. The pure

(04:25):
serotonein I got from you guys have t J MAX. Right, yes,
we have t K Max. It's pretty much exactly the
same thing, but for some reason they changed one of
the letters. And then that sounds like I would wake
up in an alternate dimension and something like North America
has t J MAX. I was like, well, that's why
did we do that. Anyway, I think it's exactly the

(04:46):
same thing. But they have their Halloween stuff already, and
unfortunately here there's not a lot of stuff in comparison
to I think in the U S there's a lot more.
But I went in and I was just like, I'm
going to have that pillow, and I'm going to have pillow,
and you want to have all of these and I'm
just taking one of everything. And my mom was walking
around behind me, like we came in here for one thing.

(05:07):
It take me to a target. Don't don't take me
to a target. I regret that we do not have
a target, because I feel like, well, maybe I don't imperiously.
You probably don't regret it. Because you'll walk in for
like a gallon of milk or something and you leave
spending a hundred bucks and you're like, how my god.
You're like, but those pajamas were really cute, right, Look,

(05:28):
if it brings you joy in this health scape of
a world, sometimes I think it's worth there. Oh my goodness. Um.
So for anyone who's listening and not watching, I would
also like to point out that you can watch our
YouTube and then you could see the absolute beauty of
Shady's touched up beautiful me on peach hair. I absolutely
love it. By the way, you complimented my makeup and

(05:51):
I was like, hang on a second, we have to
come back to your hair, because I did not tell
you on Instagram how much I appreciate it is such
excited Yeah, I um. I don't typically like my hair
when it's super neon bright. Um. That was my early
twenties where I walk in a room and I feel
like I'm yelling at everyone with my hair color. I
like to be a little more wall flowerish, so whenever

(06:11):
I have to touch up the orange, I love the
orange to like blonde that I have going on for
the words a year or so. But whenever I touched
it up, I'm always like, oh God, I got to
prepare for Neon. But I really liked it right now,
so I guess. I guess I'm in my neon phase again.
But you have super inspired me because my hair for
some reason has gone like this. I like it, but

(06:31):
at the same time, it's gone this like one solid
color of kind of blue at the moment, and I
was going for more of a purple into blue. It's cool, though,
because your roots like purple, and then the main portion
of your hair is this beautiful electric. This is the
result after I spent a lot of time fixing it though,
because one of the episodes we recorded, and I think
it was you and I recorded together. Actually I did

(06:51):
not have my camera on for the recording, so if
the YouTube video comes up, y'all know that that's when
I bleached my hair and it went green. I'm gonna
talk but at because that was not a good time.
It was like I could totally go blonde again. Hang on,
that's not a good color because I wear my hair
intentional blonde for twenty four hours. When I bleached it
for this again, I was like, actually, is it my

(07:12):
Draco malfoy Era and then the four hours I was like, nah,
I gotta have some color in here. I can't. I
can just be a blond like knowing. No, I can't
go back. I feel like that's it. I've I've committed
no to the having weird, bright colored hair life, and
that's just you know, Yeah, it's just a lifestyle at
a certain way. Yeah, absolutely, um so pretty. You may

(07:35):
remember an episode with Jason Confetti where they talked about
working with brands and dropped some really amazing insights. I
just want to remind everybody if you did miss that
episode that I personally listened to it and learned a
lot from it. So I think it's worth bringing up
the habit. Yeah it really was. And I feel like, um,
I hope we can bring some insights to like content
and community stuff as well. But that brand of stuff

(07:58):
is I think something that's been a lot of brand
stuff is is a lot of stuff that isn't talked
about um as openly either. Um it's very I don't
know a lot of stuff about about content creation is
streaming almost feels like it's gate kept in some ways,
and I don't know. Sometimes it's intentional, but most of
the time. I think it's just people just don't talk

(08:18):
about it, like and I think there's like a taboo
on discussing business and money and things like that. When
you're talking about brand feels it's going to be you know,
how much money should I how much? How much money
are you worth? And everybody's everybody values themselves differently and
company's value differently based on your metrics and stuff. So
it can get a little it can feel a little awkward,

(08:39):
I guess, and and makes people feel a type of
way like why are they getting paid this amount? But
I also think that that's a really good tool for
us to have as the creators to the businesses, because
once we're talking about it, it's almost like we're unionizing
in a certain way. You know, I'm not so important
because I agree with you. I think a lot of
the aspects that surround and it's the same for even
just like looking at streaming as you know, being a

(09:00):
community management thing as well having the business aspects. People
not being comfortable talking about that because I guess because
some people it seems to take away from the idea
that you're having fun, even though you can have fun
and also take your business. Seriously, A lot of the
time people are like, oh, well, what reason are you
doing it for? Because like, if you're just doing it
for fun, these things don't matter. But they do matter.

(09:20):
And also you can do it for fun and also
do it as your job, and that's important. And you're
absolutely right. People get keep that knowledge and experience sometimes,
and I really hope we get away from that. Yeah,
I think some people always will. It's in the art
community too, It's just is it. Oh yeah, yeah, I
mean I suppose I'm not really surprised, but like if
you don't, I mean not surprised, a little bit disappointed.

(09:42):
Why would I tell you how I got my brushes
to look like this in photoshop when I spent the
last five years learning how to do it myself. You
got to learn the same way I did. Oh yeah.
And that's the same thing you'll hear in the streamer
community or honestly, in any community. I'm not just trying
to drag the art community, but it's I mean, even
in the beauty community. I'm not going to tell you
how I do my cool I'm not going to tell
you what eyeliner am using, because then you'll do it

(10:03):
and I won't be the only one that does my
eyeliner like this anymore. Like it's so it's so weird.
It's a scarcity mindset. People are afraid that they will
get knocked down if they share their secrets, and I'm
kind of the opposite. Yeah, So that's what we're here
to do today, is we're here to share our secrets
and hopefully, I guess maybe help some people. I and like,

(10:25):
I love sharing stuff like this, and I know you
do too, because you've done so many guys on your
YouTube and like I too, how to do different things
and content creation. Um, what was it that this is
just a totally off the beaten track, But what was
it that really motivated you to want to share that
kind of information? I actually don't know. I think that
I'm just a natural teacher. Um, since I was a kid,

(10:46):
I always wanted to be a teacher, and I just
I accepted I wouldn't because I'm too weird. And there's
no way I'm gonna survive in the school system, you
know what I mean. There's no way I can deal
with like Little Johnny's mom that thinks I'm an abomination,
you know, And there's no way I can do that.
So UM it came naturally to me when I started
streaming and I had UM. I was in a community

(11:06):
and there were people who didn't know how to do
certain things, and UM, I started making videos for them.
It wasn't with the I mean, everyone who I think
does YouTube and TikTok and anything hopes that they'll like
blow up or they'll get big. So I won't say
there wasn't any kind of intention there at all, UM,
But the original videos I was making were just to help,
like people in a community with me, UM, how to

(11:27):
talk to yourself when known is there, Like I you know,
y'all are y'all are streaming and you'll sit here for
an hour and you don't say a word. You gotta
learn how to do this. And then it just kind
of spiraled from there. And in some ways now I
feel kind of trapped in the twitch tutorial niche um
because nothing else I post gets any views, and that's
very disheartening. UM. But I'm trying to build myself up
both ways, and I think that that has a lot

(11:48):
to do with having a strong community behind you, UM
to be able to post whatever you want to post
and still have people turn up to view it, even
if it's not technically in your niche or whatever, um,
and it takes a lot of authenticity and commitment. I
think to those those are probably like my two foundational
pieces of community building, authenticity and commitment. Commitment. I'll get

(12:12):
back to you all on I'll teach about it. But
do as I say, not as I do. Okay, Okay,
I feel that because frequently I'm like, so my, my,
my version of that is like telling people to know
their worth and to not settle for like, for example,
the brand deals and stuff like you know, charge your worth, no,
you're right, whatever, And yet I'm sitting here going, I
don't know how much I should be charging for these things.
I don't know. Again, do as I say, not as

(12:33):
I do, Because I did an advice stream recently and
I was answering people's questions from chat and they were
all like, how do you deal with this? And I'm
sitting there going, well, I don't deal with it very well,
Like how do you deal with boundary setting? I'm pretty
bad at that, So don't don't do what I do.
But I can give you advice that I should really follow,
and I haven't yet but it's hard. Like I, I
think you're absolutely right that being able to pivot on

(12:55):
your content kind of does rely on having a strong
community behind you, and I think for me, I feel
like you have to very intentionally build that community. And
I think when you first start, it's not necessarily something
that comes naturally, and you might make missteps. But as
you get closer to kind of understanding what you want
your community to be like and what you want the

(13:16):
people around you to be like, it becomes a little
bit easier to kind of define that in your mind
and then easier to work towards that yourself authentically. Like
you say, well, my U magical minded folks in the
chat will appreciate this. But I have a friend dukes Ley,
who's always saying that streaming is shadow work, constant shadow work.
And if you're not familiar with that term, um, it

(13:38):
is based in psychology. But it's like the shadow of
the ego, you know, um and uh what that What
that boils down to is you're constantly facing things that
trigger you every second of every day when you're on
the internet, dot com. Um, So when you're dealing with
your community, this is where it's going to come into
a really delicate balance of authenticity and sharing yourself and

(13:59):
connecting your audience and then having really firm boundaries and
and certain walls up UM and knowing when is too
far so that you can protect your mental health UM
and you know where where is the stopping point so
that you don't lose your actual mind UM doing this
and lose yourself to the music the moment you better

(14:21):
let it go. You know. It's difficult, and that is
I think, like on top of just my regular mental
health issues. But I think that's a huge reason why
I'm like in a consistent burnout cycle with streaming. Is
I will learn one boundary and then I go back
and swinging again, and then there's another boundary or an

(14:42):
old lesson from two years ago. It's like, oh yeah,
by the way, oh guess you didn't learn this yet
because you felt for the same trick again, like um
and it it's I think with community building, there's a
lot about loving the community and recognizing danger signs from
certain community members and being willing to wish those people
out to protect yourself and the community that you actually

(15:04):
want to build. I read something the other day I
don't remember where forgive me, but it was something like
if you, um, if you don't create the community you want,
you'll be stuck with the community you get, or something
like that, and it just was this really it sounds
really like basic and dumb, but it was this like
profound moment for me. It's like, if you weren't intentional

(15:25):
about what you're doing, whoever shows up is what your
community is. And as you see this so much in
small streamers, they're sitting there with less than five viewers,
less than ten viewers, I mean honestly, like even even
like in my ranges of between thirty to seventy viewers,
I'm still like, there will be certain people in chat
and I'm like, yeah, but they're here every day, and

(15:46):
if I they're not really doing anything wrong. They're just
kind of on you know, they're kind of on the boundary,
they're kind of on my nerves. They're kind of making
this person uncomfortable, but it's not really and I don't
really have a reason to ban them, and you won't
because you'll lose that consistent and viewer. You'll lose You'll
you'll go from four viewers down to three viewers, and
from one active chattered zero active chatters or but they're

(16:07):
controlling the dialogue, they're controlling you, they're controlling the community space.
And it's so important to UM be okay with saying
no and kicking people out. And the more comfortable I've
gotten with that boundary, the easier it's gotten to where
I don't even think I'm like band whatever, I don't
care UM some some I still care about. It's the
worst for me is when they have been long term

(16:28):
community members that I have to remove. UM So, I
think we'll talk about that a little bit later though.
Let's maybe we should start with the positive sides of
community building. I'm about a couple of examples later on. UM. So,
how long have you been in the content creation sphere? Psyche? So?

(16:50):
I started part time for like as just a hobby,
UM when I was still working in the games industry.
I took on UH streaming kind of was like a
every now and then I'd like to do it to
kind of hang out with people and talk about gaming
and stuff like that. And that was kind of my
first jump into content creation. And it would have been
I would say, like twenty fourteen ish. UM. I don't

(17:13):
know exactly when my first stream was I couldn't honestly say,
but it was some time around um And. I then
started doing it full time in um And, I'd always
been involved in online communities, Like one of my biggest
hobbies whenever I was like a teenager was I was
on a forum called Guya online, which I loved just

(17:34):
so much. I was obsessed with it. UM For anyone
who doesn't know, it was basically like it started out
I think, is like an anime forum, and then it
became something a lot more and you had like an
avatar that you could dress up and stuff. But there
was also like a huge amount of forums. They had
chat rooms, they had like a game that you could play. UM.
I spent a lot of time in different forums there,
and they had like a whole role playing community and everything.

(17:56):
UM I spent a ton of time there. I ended
up actually volunteer moderating that forum for a while. Um
And I don't know what it was like. I worked
in community management and I really enjoyed online forums. Actually,
there was another thing. I'm going to tell you something
that sounds ridiculous, and like I think, I swear to god,
no one has ever heard of this, so I hope
somebody has heard of this. But when I was thirteen,

(18:17):
I was on a forum called a three Alien Adoption
Agency and you could adopt a little No one has
heard of this. I'm like beginning to think it was
a fever dream and it didn't even exist. But you
could adopt an alien, and then you could battle your
alien against other aliens. But they had like forums and
chat rooms and stuff. And I spent literally my entire

(18:38):
life on that forum. Any spare time I had, I
worked on my little alien. I worked on this alignment.
You could become evil or good depending on what other
aliens you fought. And it was such a weirdly fleshed
out thing that I think might have been run out
of some dudes basement. I endored it. So, like early
days of the Internet, my whole life online for like

(18:59):
it was. I started on neopats and then it became
that it very much. It's like the I like to think.
I think it was the adult version of Neopaths. But
I was thirteen and I was on it, and I
was obsessed with it. Um So online communities have always
been a big part of my life. And then content
creation became a thing that happened mostly because I was
lonely and had moved really far away from home and

(19:20):
just wanted to hang out with people talk about video
games so well as old as time, right, have you
been in the content creation space because you have a
lot of different things. It's not just streaming. Well, and
that's that's the bane of my existence. But yeah, I
guess forever. I don't know. Um. I I started building
websites and stuff in the early ages of the internet,

(19:41):
probably back around oh gosh, I don't know, two thousand four,
two thousand five. Um. So it's like building websites. I
I ran the big flex here okay, the biggest, most
visited Inuyasha fan site. Wow okay, so and I ran.
I used to run like MP three rotation sites where

(20:02):
I would share Jay rock music, Japanese rock music, um
back in my like super We've anime days and and
this was alongside the Innyasha fan site. So there was
there was community building involved with that. I didn't really
see it. I didn't see it as content creation because
that word didn't really exist or that term didn't exist, um.
And it kind of built out of that. I was

(20:22):
really big into like my space and doing layouts for
my friends. So I would always make people custom my
Space layouts and that's where you know, it's still reflected
in my Twitch days where I'm making custom overlays, you know,
and I'm selling overlays and stuff for people, and uh,
and it it all kind of spawned out of that.
I've ran up an anime podcast for a bit and
we were bill we built a forum around that. UM

(20:43):
so we had like a small it was modest, like
a small modest community there that me and a couple
of my friends UM moderated and ran and managed and
and it's just kind of always been integrated and streaming
just kind of started up by kind of accident around
twenty fifteen, Um, I tipped, I dipped my toes in,

(21:04):
but around and then uh, um YouTube has always been
on my mind since around and there were a couple
of failed attempts and you know, and so it's been
off and on. Really making stuff online and finding people
that like the things that I'm making online has just
kind of always been part of my um, teenage and

(21:25):
adult existence. So, uh, community building is something that I
never realized that I was doing, but again is kind
of like teaching it just kind of came natural to
me um as well as dealing with toxic because it's
the other thing, Like I said earlier, streaming is constant
shadow work. Community building is going to be a full
reflection of you, UM, And I think that's a really

(21:48):
hard part for a lot of streamers, is the self
awareness involved to recognize the toxic behaviors that you have
that have led some of the toxic energy to exist
in your community spaces. And we see this all the
way up to the top tiers of twitch, where they
just sat out refused to acknowledge that it's their fault.
You know. It's like, that's the thing people say that

(22:08):
you know, your community is a reflection of you, and
that does mean that like if you don't put the
effort in like you were saying, and you you do
struggle because you end up with people who or you know,
just a little bit anyway we said. We talked about
that later, but it is really really interesting because like
you're absolutely right, and it's it's one of those things
I think a lot of people don't realize that even

(22:29):
with just pure streaming, if it's not like because you
dragged a memory out of me, it's funny. As soon
as you start talking about fans sites, I was like,
oh my god, I just remember when I was a teenager,
I ran a Matrix fan site and I had like
a Matrix roleplay and stuff like for Kiana Reeves. Yes,
I was so when I was younger. I so I

(22:49):
got bullied in school because I was the weird kid.
I can't imagine, I'm just kidding. And it was mostly
because I was like a super turbo nerd, and that's right,
but like, um, I find myself like super obsessed with
the Matrix. And I was like, okay, you know what,
at least I know that I can kind of lose
myself and this this community and this kind of fandom,

(23:10):
and you know, my fandoms can be like sometimes they're
really really great and a lot of the time they're not. Um,
So I made my own. I was like, fine, I
won't made my own. And we made like, um we
had like a forum and it was really small. There
was only like a really tiny community of people, but
like those were the people I went and hung right
with in the evenings and I would talk to you
and then we had like a little role play and
stuff and it was really really cool, but it's this
weird memory that it just drags out of me. A

(23:34):
lot of the time, people don't realize that that is
UM a form of community management and community forming and
it's different to UM, like because I've seen people talking about, oh,
it's not really community management because you know, it's not
your job or whatever, but like it's the same thing.
It doesn't like so many things could be dismissed because
it's not your job. That's that's that that's a moot point.

(23:57):
It doesn't mean it doesn't discredit any work or UM
anything that you're building if you're not getting absolutely do it. Yeah,
and it doesn't make sense because like you spend your
time utilizing the exact same skills. And then it's something
that I brought up a lot whenever people have asked me,
like because I worked in recruitment for a little while,
I hated it, but I worked in recruitment for a
while in the games industry UM, and frequently people be like,

(24:18):
how do I get a job if I don't have
any experience and I really want to work in this
particular area, And a lot of the time it was
the kind of like I'm going to say softer skills,
because like that's the term that gets used, but I'm
not sure I really like it. Um of like you know,
community management or customer support and things like that. And
I was like, well, I mean, like, did you ever
run a guilt in an mm o? Did you did

(24:39):
you ever have like a were you part of a
fandom in any way? Like did you engage with forms?
Did you organize events or whatever? Because all of that
stuff is the same skill set, and just because you
haven't professionally approved it to anybody doesn't mean that it's
not valid or helpful. You can totally put that on
a resume and say, hey, here are all the things
I did, here's my professional experience, but here are the

(25:00):
things that are actually super relevant to the job. And
community management in the form of like forums or fun
slite managing or any of that stuff is absolutely valid
and super helpful. Yeah. Yeah, because you're it's the same
skills you you're still having to recognize, Like think about
managing a discord server. You have to recognize who needs
to be banned, what you know this is inappropriate for

(25:20):
this this section, post this over in this channel instead,
like it's it's tidying up constantly. It's constant tidying, and
the same thing for your twitch chat and in the
beginner phases of becoming a streamer, the cultivation of your
community is so important um to the long term growth
and the reflection of like say you're say you're at

(25:42):
fifty viewers now, but when you're at five thousand viewers
the I always equate community building to a garden um.
When you're planting seeds and you're tending to them and
you're letting them grow, you'll have weeds pop up, and
if you don't pick those weeds early, they're going to
strangle and smother the plants that you're actually trying to grow,
and then you're going to have a box of weeds

(26:03):
instead of this beautiful collection of flowers or vegetables or
whatever you're trying to grow. Right, um, you have to
recognize the weeds, because that's the other thing you have
to educate yourself, right Um, you have to become aware.
When I first started trying to grow plants and stuff,
I don't I didn't recognize this leaf popping up. I
was like, oh, the seats are taking no dandelion, but

(26:24):
it's gonna you know, it's a weed. Um. And and
I'm such a you know, I love these flowers. They're beautiful.
I love dandelions, They're so cute. But then you see
them choking out the vegetable I'm trying to grow or whatever.
So you're you're you have to pull it. And it
sucks because I love plants. I love the flowers. I
I don't want to destroy. And you know, and it's

(26:44):
the same thing when I see a toxic community member.
I love people. I see the best in them. I yeah,
you've got toxic behavior, but I see that this is
just a bad behavior that you have because X y
Z happened to you in your childhood and you're having
a bad day. And la la la, I'll make all
of these since an excuse is to not pick the weed,
and then the good vegetables get smothered out and I'm

(27:05):
left with nothing but weeds. And nobody, nobody wants to
come look at a garden full of weeds. You can
look at that on any street corner, um in any
like any you know, um, downtown, walking you know, by
a whatever like um. I go to city because I
live up in the mountains, so I go to city metaphors,
but even down at the creek, like you could see
the leads growing down at the creek or whatever. Um,

(27:26):
So it's it's I hope that metaphor is hitting. I
know I think it hits. If nobody else thinks that
hits to I get here because I do, you know what,
I relate to it really really like strongly because um recently,
well I say recently, um, what is time? I've lost
all track of what is. But in the last year
or two, I've had two people, one of whom was

(27:49):
a i'm gonna say a person who visited my stream
a lot. I'm not gonna say a long term community member,
because they didn't really integrate with the rest of the
community that much. They just came to my stream a
lot um. And they had frequently thrown up yellow flags.
I'm not going to say they were red flags, but
there were those kind of that person's being kind of rude.
Maybe I should just ban them, but no, I'll not
burn them. They may be having a bad day or whatever. Um.

(28:10):
And I eventually did have to ban them because actually
I didn't even ban them. One of my months did
because they were super rude to me. UM and made
like a really like and I mean rude like. They
they insulted my appearance very like intensely in my chat,
and my response, being me trying to be a people pleaser,
was like, Oh, you don't have to be rude, and

(28:30):
then moving on, and they blew up at me and
they were really angry, and they said like, I'm an adult,
I don't need to be scolded or whatever. I'm leaving
and then they laughed and my mom immediately permaband them
and was like, we should have panned this person a
long time ago. Why Like what I've told you, we
should have and I should have listened. And then the
other one was a person who um and this is

(28:51):
when I hope people who are listening can learn from
because I certainly have no This person made me uncomfortable repeatedly,
and I've never broken any rules, but happed making me
uncomfortable and then eventually got banned because they did something
that broke a channel rule and I banned them, and
that was fine, but then multiple people in my community
were like, oh my god, thank god, that person has

(29:12):
been making me uncomfortable in the last couple of months.
And I didn't say anything because I thought you were
flying with them, and that made me realize, you can't
do that. You can't let that person that is the weight,
that is the person who was sitting there choking out
the good, healthy plants that you want to be there
by just existing and being rude and consistently making other
people uncomfortable, It's not just you. If you're a little

(29:33):
bit uncomfortable, they're probably making someone else in your community uncomfortable. Absolutely,
that was a huge wake up call for me. In
my first year or two of streaming, I had a
really toxic person in my community. Um but they were
funny and uh so they were like super edgy. And
this was early in my streaming careers. And they were
also one of, um the first Australian people that I

(29:55):
had gotten to know. Um And that's one of the
things that I love about streaming because I have so
many friends and so many different countries now and I'm
learning a lot about like cultural differences and things. But
um so they used a lot of very choice language
and I was like, oh, there, you know, it's because
they're Australian, and Australians just just they're they're more vulgar,
you know, And that's and eventually they crossed way too

(30:16):
many lines and they had to get um, they had
to get banned. But it wasn't until a long time
friend of mine, a friend from high school who would
hang out in my streams sometimes messaged me and was like, Hey,
I really love your streams and I love to be
here for when you're playing X y Z, but this
person in your chat, I don't even want to be
here when they're there. I don't. And this was a
long time high school friend. I mean we were like

(30:38):
really close in high school and so it's been it's
a ten fifteen year relationship, right, And that if I
hadn't had that person like a canary in the mind shafts,
it's like calling out to me like you're you're in
too deep, You're going to suffocate. UM, then I don't
know that I would have recognized it as quickly. I'm
sure I would have recognized it eventually, but not as quickly.

(30:59):
And that that is a big wake up call of
if this is making my friend uncomfortable, then what am
I doing? Why am I why? I would rather my
friend in this chat than this random person that I
don't know from you know, and I would I would
rather hang out with them because you know, and that
kind of like pulled me back on course. And um,
and it was very difficult because I become especially in

(31:21):
early streaming, when you're under ten fifteen viewers, you become
really close with your viewers. They become they become like
your friends. They become every day you're talking to them
and they're they're your online friends. So it's not as easy.
And even even upwards, I think up to the hundred
viewer mark, there's still people that show up to your
stream every day and the paras social relationships start to form.

(31:42):
And once you're in that relationship, whether it's paras social
or not, for some people, UM, it's incredibly difficult to
break up with people. And that's what it is. You're
you're breaking up with people. Yeah, absolutely, you're completely right.
I feel that lately. And it can be something that
I think a lot of people are not prepared for.

(32:05):
And it's a challenge that I cert he wasn't prepared for. Yeah, um,
but a challenge I am prepared for is to let
us go on an ad break here for a second,
in a moment, welcome back, everybody, you're here with me,
psyche and Hey shitty lady, and we are talking about

(32:26):
community growth and content evolution and content creation. Um, I
have a We've been talking a lot about toxic people,
and I think it's a very important conversation. But I
do have a question, since I have revealed my deepest,
darkest secrets of my alien adoption agency times. Um, what
communities have been super special to you as like a

(32:47):
member rather than a creator in the past. Wow. Um,
I guess I always. I always play the role of
like creator a reader in some ways. Um. Well, I
suppose like the true crime community probably, Um, Weirdly, that's
one that I am such a for years and years
and years, I learn and I'm not. I don't comment

(33:08):
on videos very often unless there's like, oh a creator
been watching for two years, announces a marriage or something.
You know. Um, for the for the most part, I'm
a lurker and uh not on Twitch. On Twitch, I
only watch people if I talk to them in their chat.
But on YouTube, I watch and sometimes I don't even
subscribe to the people. I'm just I just watched for years.
I'm just sitting in the corners, like eating my poor

(33:28):
you know. And UM, I think that probably the true
crime community. Um, I think I've learned a lot about
protecting myself and UM from from that space. So UM,
I know that community has its own, you know, critiques
to come upon it. But UM, that that's the one
I could think of where I've never played an active
role in in UM. And I dipped my toes in

(33:50):
creating a couple of true crime videos with my sister
last year. Lots of work, holy crap, the research that
goes in the nuts, UM, but uh, not taking an
active role as a creator or even a moderator. I'm
just a passive so I can quickly see what the
norm of the community is from the from the comment
sections and stuff like that, as compared to you know

(34:13):
what the norm compared to Wow, this is this. This
person is like lost in the sauce. Um. They they've
completely and and that's what sucks is then I like
look back and it's so easy for me to be
just like completely lost in what I'm doing and not
seeing the forest for the trees. And when I step
out and it's like, oh my god, my community is

(34:34):
controlling me. Like I'm not creating what I want to
create because I'm just in a conversation with this handful
of individuals, I've completely been derailed. Um. And I've said
that about Twitch a lot um in general when I
first started creating content. Um, And this is interesting because
I see it's one of our questions on our outline,

(34:56):
which changed about your content over the years and what
impact did I have on your audience? This this this is
like such a like. I started out in YouTube like five, six,
seven years ago. However long ago it was making videos
about my my pagan journey, my my witchcraft journey. And
within about a year of doing those videos, I had
started streaming on Twitch and it was mostly star to

(35:18):
but and that was there was no tarot category or
anything on Twitch at the time, so it was video
games only, you know, and and I had so I
started up gaming and then very quickly I had um
people coming in. I kind of built accidentally because I
had gone through a breakup and I was in my
single era, my single villain era, and so I started

(35:39):
kind of like going down the egirl route, not really
understanding that. I was just like, you know, dressed up,
Titti's out, ready to go, you know what I mean?
And um, and my audience was recommending like Dark Souls
and Overwatch and BioShock and Outlast, and so I was
playing a lot of these heavy adrenaline games, um, drinking wine,

(36:00):
getting drunk, you know, looking looking hot as hell, and uh,
eventually it I don't remember very specifically the day it
all changed. Um was I had someone who in my
chat I had like went to stand up from my
desk and it was just enough to kind of lean
over and be a bit of a down shirt shot
and not intentional, just literally a girl standing up from

(36:23):
desk walking away. And one of my community members at
the time took a picture of their computer screen with
their phone of the down shirt shot, sent it to
me on Snapchat and said more streams like this please,
And that was that was when I realized, like, I mean,
that's that's a whole conversation that we have about like
being a girl streamer or whatever. But I also that
made me go like, this is this is what this

(36:47):
is what this is my community, this is what I'm
this is the interactions I'm having. And and then it
for a couple of months there was this reflection of
like I'm inviting this space by addressing the way that
I do by and I say that about anybody. This
is my own expression. I don't say this about anybody
that's stressing the way that they want to. UM. Because
now I think I'm in a space where I've built

(37:08):
a foundation of a community that I could. I started
wearing a lot of less revealing clothes, turtlenecks and stuff
and kind of thing um and uh to to kind
of thwart that. I stopped playing the adrenaline games. I
switched over to tarot once that category existed in Stard Valley,
and I started playing soft sandbox games again. Um No
more adrenaline games. Completely demolished the community that I had

(37:30):
built because I was close to partner numbers at the time.
Demolished that community, rebuilt it back with the girls Gaze
and them's um and uh. And now I'm facing a
different level of toxicity with this community space that I've built.
UM the sandbox U WU wholesome cozy community space it
has it's it's the complete opposite side of the coin

(37:51):
of like the egroal moment that I had, which was,
you know, a good two years or so of my streaming,
and this has been a good two or three years now,
and it's like I've played both extremes, and where can
I get to this middle ground? And what I was
going to say is like, I've I've built up a
foundation enough with the girl's gaze and them's that if
I come on stream with cleavage or anything like that there,
I'm not gonna get harassed. I know I'm not because

(38:14):
and they're they're there to be like, oh my god,
you look hot. Yes, yes, queen. You know, they're there
to cheer me on, and when someone does show up
making inappropriate comments, they're immediately drowned out and pushed away
because everyone's like, whoa, what's up with you? You unhinged freak.
So it this is what I wanted to talk about
the very start, when I was saying, you're The foundation

(38:36):
that you're building is so important because now I'm in
a space where I can be authentic and express myself
without worrying about being harassed, I mean like in in
that or being you know UM. And that that was
the big thing for me, is it was why I
don't want I don't want to make content. And I
remember thinking, I remember seeing another streamer who I really

(38:56):
really uh still admire um, who was a our tender
and she was very like ego energy and I really
want to you know um, and I think it was
me looking that I was like, she's a bartender. She
this is the you know, the type of energy like
people coming in. And I went through my party girl
phase in my early twenties or it was like punk
house you know house parties all the time, and it's like,

(39:19):
I don't want to. I hated that. I moved for
a reason, and I brought it into my bedroom with
me by you know, streaming and creating the content out
of my room like that. So changing my content from
the ground up destroyed my community. But this was a
good thing. It was the you know, the Phoenix moment um.

(39:42):
And I'm in another Phoenix moment now where I've built,
I've built. The problem now is not the community heap like,
the type of people I love, the community space that
I'm in. It's the relationships that i've like, the the
way that I allow my community to relate to me,
the paras social problem. I don't have strong enough boundaries.
And so now it's I know I'm in this this

(40:03):
niche and the space that I want to be in,
but now I need to come in and I'm on
stage and you're in the audience, and that's I. I
the ego that goes behind that. That mental shift has
been very hard for me to um step into because
I don't I don't like seeming like an ego, narcissist

(40:23):
whatever else. Like, I don't want to. I don't want
people to, you know, judge me in that way. UM
So I try really hard to be the people pleaser,
soft pussy foot, don't. I don't care, you know a little,
And that's how I keep getting walked all over. Um So,
I know you do a lot of like sci fi
games on your channel. Have you always been in this realm?

(40:45):
Or because I mean you're going back to like Matrix
and Aliens, it sounds like yeah, I mean I've always
been like a big sci fi person, but your your
journey through I have like a similar experience, but like
maybe not quite to the same degree. Um I always streamed.
So two fourteen was when Elite Dangerous, which is a
game I stream a lot, was a very big part
of my journey, A very big part of the reason, well,

(41:07):
I say part of the reason that I was partnered
because I recognize that I put work in time and
there was also luck, but that game in particular, the
community is very, very passionate. Um and it's quite a
small uh streaming viewership, like the viewer basis quite small,
so it's a lot easier, I guess, to be noticed
in that category versus like Fortnite or whatever. Um And

(41:27):
I started streaming in two dozen fourteen, and again I
was doing it as a hobby, but it was definitely
like my highest performing streams and everything um And while
my my content didn't change a great deal, I feel
like I did as a streamer. I did start to
focus more on like I used to feel very lost
because I'm a variety gamer, so I was going to
be a variety streamer. I cannot sit with one game

(41:49):
every single day and playing nothing, but I just I
don't do that in my spare time. I've never done that.
I was never going to be like a one game streamer.
I would have been board burned out and I would
have been done with it. So I always streamed whatever
the heck I wanted. And then one day someone in
my chat actually said, I've always kind of seen you
as either a space or a sandbox streamer, and I

(42:09):
realized that a lot of the games I streamed, not
all of them, but a lot of the games that
I streamed fit that kind of niche. So I was like, right, Okay,
well maybe I'm just going to focus on that because
if the game doesn't really fit, I can still stream
it if I want to, and if I don't, I
can always just play it off stream, and then I
can focus on the games that actually fit within my niche.
And that did help a lot with growth. But I

(42:29):
went through a phase around the sort of I want
to say like the end beginning of where I definitely
started focusing a lot more on being openly queer. Um.
I have been on the internet as bisexual pretty much
ever since I was on the internet. Like, I never
hit it, I never really talked about it that much.

(42:49):
I started to talk about it more I had been
in real life except to my family. My family found
out I was by from Twitter, which was kind of awkward,
but um, that was fun, a great fun conversation. But
I started focusing on it a lot more and being
more openly queer, talking about queer issues, talking about l
g B t Q I a plus representation um. And
I started to notice that people that were staying with

(43:13):
me were people that I wanted to be around. And
that's not to say that like, you know, oh, I
do want straight people. I have loads of straight people
in my community. I have loads of sis people in
my community. That's fine. It's not that. It was people
who actually gave a ship about those kinds of issues
and people that were welcoming and inclusive. And I started
to notice that, like I didn't have a huge drop

(43:36):
in viewership. That might also be because we were at
the very beginning of a lockdown and there were more
people on Twitch. So I'm just happened to time it
really well. But what I did have is I had
a lot of teething problems where I had people work
with my opinions teething problems. It's like like a toddler. Yeah,
that's such a cool way to phrase it. No, I've

(43:56):
never heard Okay, well we use teething for time. I've
never I've ever thought of it in as a meda
like literal toddler's teeth. Okay, So yeah, like exactly like that.
I had a lot of teething problems where I had
people who would like it's like they bristled at the
idea of um, these are the things we're going to
talk about more Like I would talk about my sexuality

(44:17):
and people be like, I don't understand why that matters
for your content. I was like, well, I mean there's
a lot of people in my chat who get to
see somebody like them streaming a game. They like, that's cool, right,
And some people laughed, some people stuck around and then
ended up leaving because I basically started enforcing I didn't
even enforce rules. I frequently would say things like, oh,
if you think X y or zed, then you're not

(44:38):
welcome here. And I had one person make this massive
post in our discord like, well, I guess I'm not
welcome in this community anymore. And I was like, yeah,
by like if you're if you're a hateful person, they
deslitely not welcome. I'm surprised you thought you were to
begin with. But you start to kind of as you
become more authentically you, I feel, you start to have

(45:01):
people that are like you and you're respectful of you
will stick around and the people who aren't will start
to feel like they're not welcome. And that's a good thing,
but it does mean that you will encointer either in
my case, you'll have people who will start to be
route to you or will be all, oh, I'm not
welcome anymore, and it'll cause you issues, or you might
end up finding that you have large numbers of your

(45:22):
community don't show up anymore, and then you start building
a new one and that can be really, really difficult,
and it's sorry, it really sucks. It made me feel
makes me feel because I'm going through the process again,
um like a complete failure. It makes me feel like
I've done something wrong, Like I'm like, I'm not good

(45:42):
at content creation. I'm not worth watching. No one ever
stays around for very long because you can only like
me and doses, and once you get too much of me,
leave like it's it's which is you know, all like
that's on trying. But we frequently hit that topic because
it is something both of us relate to so strongly.
That is absolutely a trauma response and it's hard. But

(46:06):
if you if you find yourself in a situation where
you are looking at your community going wow, these are
not the people that I expected to have watching my
stream and I'm concerned, then you need to start setting
your blind taries and you need to actually look at
communities you like and respect, write keywords doing to describe them, like,
what is it you like about that streamer's community? What

(46:28):
is it you don't like? Write those keywords on and
you've just started to build yourself a plan for what
you want your community to look like. You want those keywords.
How do you make that happen? Really difficult? It's it's
it's easy to recognize an other people's communities and very
hard to recognize it. It is, UM. Absolutely, It's interesting
because the conversation we're having here goes hand in hand

(46:51):
with success, with the branding conversation that Jess and Milady
Confetti had UM. So if you have a wrong community,
then brands are eyeballing you as someone that is worth
working with because your community listens to you and you
can sell their product to them. So building this strong
community and not that obviously, I would hope that's not

(47:14):
your intention going in, UM. But if you are looking
at how to become like a lot of people ask
um through my twitchet toils and stuff, how do you
get brand deals, how do you get sponsorships? How do
you do this? Well? You have to prove your value
to the company's first and you prove your value by
being a valuable UM community builder, a valuable opinion, someone

(47:36):
who people respect and listen to. UM. The only reason,
the only reason the brands work with us is because
they make money off of us. That's it. And if
you can't make them money, they don't want to work
with you. And you make them money by telling people
or or displaying to people. It doesn't have to be
telling out right. You can show, not tell by wearing
a T shirt of Algado, you know what I mean?

(47:58):
And and now everyone's thinking, oh I should get you know,
I even just showing my setup. I don't have to
say all gotto sponsor you do for like, you know,
transparency or whatever. But even if I even if it
wasn't a sponsorship deal, and I post a picture on
my Instagram and it gets a thousand likes or whatever,
and I've got the Algado key lights and um, I
don't know what I'm thinking, all goatto, My my stream

(48:19):
decks right in front of me is probably why? Um uh?
Having having that picture you know, do really well on Instagram.
And then everyone's like, oh my god, I want my
setup to look like yours. What lights are you using?
And then maybe Algado notices that they got like twenty
sales that day of their their key lights, and then
they're like che ching, you know, and then they zoom

(48:39):
in on you. And that's exactly so. The way that
you get to where you're valuable enough for the brand
deals is by having a strong community that listens to you.
And how do you get that strong community that listens
to you. You're an authentic person that is consistent and
committed and reliable. UM, you show up. That's the most
important thing I think is showing up. UM doing the work.

(49:00):
And some people only have to show up once a month. Uh,
they hit the algorithm really well, and other people they
show up every single day and it looks different for everyone. UM.
But a huge part of this community building is UM
values as well. And so you were talking about how
you started voicing your values out loud. I if you

(49:25):
if you like this or if you believe in this,
you're not welcome here. If you believe in this, you
are welcome here. And to me, if I were a
business person looking to you know, sell my product or something,
you I'm looking for someone who has strong values. I'm
looking for someone who has a strong identity like, um,
maybe I'm trying to sell um, you know, some kind

(49:46):
of uh like activewear or something um for for specifically
like plus sized women or something like that. Like I'm
thinking like brands that I look at and that's the
thing that I really There's this this brand I'm really
liking right now called thunder Thighs and they sell thigh
high socks for for big ladies, and um, oh my god.
Look but that kind of company is not looking for

(50:15):
any popular streamer, right. They're not going to be knocking
on x qc S door, right. Um. Yeah, They're looking
for a very specific type of content creator. They want
someone who is body positive um and is creating this
welcoming space for for plus size people people of all
body sizes. Really, um, and how will that brand know
that you stand for that unless you're voicing that and

(50:37):
showing that. You have to know who you are, and
that is so difficult. I think there's a whole other
conversation to have about like Starlet's like thirteen fourteen year
old like the stranger things kids that are growing up
in the spotlight, right you know, or yeah, like they
they're I think Millie Bobby Brown just recently put it
like some kind of She doesn't use social media often.

(50:58):
Here's your social ship popping out, sar. She doesn't have
social media often, but she posted something recently about how
um difficult it is for her to constantly get criticized
for every single thing she does. This girl's like seventeen sixteen,
seventeen eighteen somewhere around there, um, and how she doesn't
even know who she is, and it's hard to see.

(51:18):
You know, I'm gonna try these pants on today. I'm
gonna try to be silly like this today. I'm gonna
try and I remember when I was that age and
and trying out a new sense of humor, trying out
a new personality, like oh, I like my friend who
does this thing. I'm gonna try out the way that
they joked. I'm gonna like trying on different hats to
figure out who I am. UM doing that in the
public eye. Uh God, You've got to be strong inside,

(51:43):
because it's it's easy to think that the people don't
the people. These people, these people in my chat or whatever,
are reacting to um me saying if you believe in this,
you're not welcome here. When they leave. This is a
reflection of me. They don't like me. I'm me, I'm
a bad person or I'm a bad person quote unquote

(52:06):
to them. And it's like, if you think I'm a
bad person for believing in these strong values I have,
then good, I think you're a bad person to go
way right, like that should be the reaction. But I
think depending on your emotional maturity, it really isn't your
physical age to your emotional maturity. Um, how well you're
going to be able to bounce back from people reacting

(52:27):
poorly to you setting your boundaries and standing for your
values and things like that. But the sooner you start
doing it, the more practice you get and the easier
it gets. You don't even think if I've done it sooner,
like absolutely. And also I just want to touch on
the fact that when you're a divergent people, it can
be particularly difficult because I know that, for example, masking

(52:48):
is a big thing. So people sometimes will find themselves
like adopting personality traits or like the sense of humor
or something of the people around them to try and
feel like they fit in. And I know that's something
that I experience, so I know that it's particularly difficult
and it can be really really hard for you to
be able to set like this is what I want

(53:09):
things to look like, and these are what my values are,
and this is the type of person. Please excuse if
you're watching the YouTube video. My cat is going to
tin on my curtain right now. He's like, yeah, Mom,
I like what you're saying, but I'm going to rip
your curtain in half. He's just a huge baby and ridiculous.
But it is very difficult, and it is something that

(53:30):
I know that you're divergent people in particular find a
challenge in general and it can be very very challenging
incoming cattail. Do you know what, No, it seems like
a really great time to take an ad break that
can have the rest of this conversation on my cats,
but isn't in my face? Okay, welcome back everybody to

(53:54):
the bus Lettle podcast. I'm here a shady lady with Psyche.
We're chatting about can any building and all that entails,
which is everything. Community building is like the primary I mean,
obviously you're gaming or you're creating content of some kind
on Twitch, but the you're also creating a community space
and you don't even have to come into content creation

(54:16):
with an intention to build a community. It happens naturally
people gathering in your chat that is the community, right. Um,
so yeah, I don't know even We've been kind of
back and forth all over the place, um with the
positives the negatives of community building, of changing your content dramatically. Um,
are there Anything's one of my favorite reflective kind of questions.

(54:40):
But is there something you wish you could tell yourself
back in when you first really started thinking about full time,
when you really let's let's go to when you went
from part time to full time on Twitch? Is there
something you now would want to tell yourself about, specifically
about community building. I would say that what we were

(55:00):
just talking about would probably be the biggest thing for
me to tell myself, which would be that the sooner
you get started on being intentional about what you want
your community to look like, the easier it will be
because it is difficult. And like one of the things
I forgot to mention earlier, and we were talking about,
like this sort of sci fi games and stuff, the
elite dangerous community is super passionate and I am very

(55:23):
fond of it. But um, a lot of the time
those people only watch elite. They're not there for the
person who streaming and not everybody. And I met a
lot of great people, but a lot of the time
those people are looking for just elite streams and they
will only come by for the elite streams. And that's fine.
But because of that, I guess at the time, I

(55:43):
was so worried about losing people who were only potentially
going to come by for like one or two streams
every now and then. I was so worried about doing
anything that might scare them away that I wasn't building
the community that was going to be there for the
other streams. I wasn't focusing on those people because I
wasn't being intentional enough. If I had sat down then

(56:06):
and been like, right, I need to be more authentically myself.
I need to talk about the things that are important
to me UM. And one of the things someone recently
said about my streams no that I don't think it's
true of whenever I first started streaming UM is that
they like the fact that in my elite streams it
frequently feels like a podcast where I just have the
game on as kind of like a backdrop, And that

(56:29):
is something I've leaned into a lot, but at the
time I didn't really do that, and I didn't know
what to talk about, so I kind of just played
the game and talked about the game and didn't really
build meaningful connections with people, Whereas if I had sat
down at the time and really being intentional and conscious
about what I wanted to achieve and what kind of
community I wanted to build and the kind of people

(56:49):
I wanted to surround myself with and was more more
conscious of building those relationships rather than focusing on being
scared of losing people that probably didn't really care about
me and my content. They just cared about the game.
I think I would have had a much better time,
and I would have definitely find myself and been happier
with my content a lot sooner. Because since I've started

(57:10):
to feel a lot more at home, I look forward
to streaming every day. I do still have obviously issues
with like toxic people that come in and that I'm
not good enough at setting boundaries with, but it's a
lot better and it's become a lot easier to know
because these are my values and these are my boundaries.
I'm starting to get better identifying when there's a problem,
and then going right, Okay, I need to fix this
noise so that it doesn't become a bigger problem so

(57:31):
you don't get the garden filled with weeds. Right, That's
probably the one for me. What about your um, I've
actually been thinking recently, like a like a little brain
point that's been coming up to me is like, one
of the biggest mistakes I've made with community building is
getting to know my audience too much. UM. And I

(57:51):
think that that is not intuitive to hear or to
say UM. And it makes me feel like a bit
of an asshole, which is why I've just been kind
of like golem hoarding it to myself. But the more
and I don't mean like getting to know them at all.
I mean and my my mine is particularly difficult because
I'm I'm a Taro streamer, so I spend a lot

(58:12):
of time, if you're not really familiar with Taro, I
spend a lot of time talking to people about their
feelings UM and talking about their you know, UM, I
don't know if I should get this job. I don't
know if I should break up with my boyfriend. So
it's like advice giving. Really, it's like a vice streams.
That'd be an easier way to put it if you're
not familiar with taro um and so people you know,
like a Dear Abbey kind of newsletter kind of thing,

(58:33):
like you know, my mom is being really toxic in this,
How do I deal with this? How do I tell
my boyfriend I don't like him anymore? How do I
how do I quit my job and pursue my dreams?
Like and when you have those kinds of conversations with
your audience all the time, of course, the boundaries are
going to get blurred. Um. And on top of that,
I'm talking about everything that I'm going through. I share,
you know, like I broke my arm and here's the

(58:55):
whole entire story, even the hospital visit where I had
academy ship like off to talk to God, Like I
tell I'm so open, and I think that's a huge
positive to what I do online. But when I mixed
that with how peeled back, I get my audience as well,
like we we. I can't tell the difference. And this

(59:16):
has always been a problem for me, like in everything
in life is I can't always tell the difference between
me and other people in my life, And just Pisces
rising things. But um, I I the boundaries are not strong,
We're blurred together, and then I don't know how to
pull us apart anymore. And it's incredibly painful to pull
to pull me apart from from anybody that has become close. Right. Um,

(59:41):
So I don't mean getting to know my audience being like, hey,
welcome back, thanks for the five months sub How how
are you doing? You know, how is your you know?
I know you told me last stream that you were
going to quit your job. Did you do that? How's
that going? Like that? I think there's a there's a
healthy way to do that, and there's an unhealthy way
to do that. And the unhealthy way for has turned
into if we're talking off stream, if you're in my

(01:00:03):
d ms, if every day like I'm you know, you're
like you're in my d MS on Instagram and Discord
and you know, like and you're leaving a comment on
my Twitter that's like, hey, Shady, you didn't reply to
my Discord d M. People are coming into my Twitch
chat and saying, hey, Shady, can you check your d
M s? No, I'm sorry I'm streaming right now, Like, um,
like they getting to know my audience too much, trying

(01:00:25):
to become friends with everybody in my audience. And this
is also just trauma things because I've I just want
to be popular, I just want to be well liked.
I just want to have a lot of friends. And
so for me to not go into the d M
and say hi back is like blasphemy to me, Like
like I'm having to reprogram myself, which is which is

(01:00:46):
a good thing and about it's a good thing and
a difficult thing. I don't think it's a bad thing
at all. Um, it's a difficult thing because I've always
been like this and this is why I continue to
have the same kinds of problems over and over and
for again. Um. So if I could go back to
tie Shady, Um, I would tell her not to stop

(01:01:09):
wearing tank tops. I would tell her, I would tell
her fuck that. Um. But I would say to quit
looking at twitch chat the whole time, like make your content,
start looking at my What what I wish I had
been employing from the beginning is I'm live streaming the
content creation process and uh, there's people watching, but they're

(01:01:32):
not controlling. I have an intention going and said I
want this YouTube video at the end of this stream,
I want to do x y Z so, like Starry Valley,
I want to um figure out who I'm going to
marry and start a valley today. So I'm gonna go
talk to every eligible bachelor and bachelorette and I'm going
to have I'm going to record my reaction in a
live stream format to every villager, and then I'm going

(01:01:55):
to be able to the end of the stream, chop
this up, put it on YouTube and be like, here's
my you know, Abigail she eats rocks? What the hell? Uh?
You know what I mean? Like, I can have the
production at the end, But if I go into the
stream without that intention, and I'm just like, and I
think there's space for both on your streams. But but
for me, having a firmer understanding of what I'm trying

(01:02:16):
to make helps me not get derailed and controlled by
the audience, right. Um, If I go in without an intention,
everyone starts coming in and they're like, oh, I like
your hair dye shady you know what what brand you use?
And then I'm like, oh, good question, and then let
me go to my just chatting scene. Here's the hair dye,
And then I and then I'm off on an hour talking,
which there's a time and a place for. But if

(01:02:38):
I now the community has come in, they've common deer.
This is no longer a starry valley stream This is
now shady. Tell us everything about your hair dye and
teach us how to do it. And if you are
a people pleaser like I am, you will fall into
that very easily and you will like, Okay, yeah, forget
what I was in planning on doing, let me focus
on who's here in twitch chat. And again, I think

(01:02:59):
that there's a value in doing that to a certain degree,
and there's a detriment to doing that to an extreme degree.
So everything about life and streaming is a constant balance.
Um and when is too far? When is not far enough? Uh? Like,
if I'm just sitting there and I don't even open

(01:03:20):
twitch chat and I don't even talk to chat at all,
you're not feeding the chat what they like, which is
the streamer interaction. And you need to give a little
bit of streamer interaction. There has to be a little
bit of it, but you have to be in control.
And that, like, community building is a really interesting dance.
It is, I like, I you know, forgive me to
my audience. But it is like a child. It is

(01:03:42):
like a toddler. You and a toddler. No, you can't
have candy every day. Me talking to me right now,
and I'm not even a toddler. You can't eat candy
every day. You have to go clean your room. You
have to be quiet right now because I'm doing X
Y Z and I have I'm on the phone. I
can't do the like it is. It's boundary setting with
a child. Um. It's very interesting to see the mirroring

(01:04:07):
of that there, but it's really hard to balance though,
and I think to pivot off of that. One of
the things that I think I've started doing that I
wish I had done sooner is setting myself an intention
for the stream. And I do it for every single stream,
and I highly recommend that people do it, because even
if it's just something like this is what I want

(01:04:28):
to achieve today, and then I often give myself like
this is going to sound really silly, but I read
it on the internet once that, Um, if you go
into your stream planning what you're going to do and
planning what you're going to talk about, you're already ahead
of everybody else because most of them don't plan at
about So I started doing that and it has helped

(01:04:49):
me a lot. Because I have a very chaotic brain
and I have a notepad file every single day, I
update it before I go live with even if I
never touch a single one of the topics on. I
list myself some topics that I want to talk about,
and it could be something like gaming news or like,
let me open up my one from today, So my
my one from today. I was talking about recording today

(01:05:09):
and that was great. I had a kit, well I didn't,
but I had a kitten. Played it planned for today
because I'm planning on bringing another kitten into my household
because apparently I could never have too many cats. Um
it ended up getting canceled, but either way, I'm going
to do it this week. So I was talking about that. UM,
I was talking about how I've been playing Sturdy Valley
on the Steam deck with mods now that I've got
them installed. That's pretty cool. And it was just simple

(01:05:32):
things like little things that I wanted to make sure
I remember to touch on because that can help me
focus on like I usually do, like a coffee time.
At the beginning of my streams and we'll talk about
stuff if I can feel like I'm somewhat in control
of the conversation, and my community will pull me in
all different directions and it's fun and I love it
and it's great. But if I know there are specific

(01:05:52):
things I want to touch on, specific things I want
to talk about, I have them in my little document,
And even if I don't have anything, it means that
I get really anxious and having that kind of like
gentle guiding pathway that can guide me through my stream.
Like I was playing Mass Effect Andromeda today and I've
never played it before, so I wrote myself notes of
things I wanted to get to in the game today.

(01:06:13):
So I was like, right, I need to make sure
that I do the murder investigation from the mission I got.
I need to talk to all my crew members because
I haven't spoken to them all. These are the ones
I haven't spoken to yet. And like, people will maybe
think that's overpreparing, but even if you don't stick to it,
it's like a guiding light kind of thing, and I
think it really really helps me. So you're talking about
setting your intentions to having a little notepad to the

(01:06:34):
side of the different topics you want to talk about.
And the reason I think that this is Um, you
said it puts you ahead of the game, and I
think that's like absolutely true. UM. Imagine, like you start
streaming at zero viewer this is this is something I've
talked about one of my YouTube videos. But you start
streaming at zero viewers and uh, you have nobody in
your chat. And if you sit there and you have

(01:06:55):
nothing to say because there's nobody in chat feeding you
anything to say, then your streams are boring, right you
and nobody anybody that tunes in is going to be like, Okay,
this is boring. I'm gonna go find something else. But
if you already know with your zero viewers, zero viewer,
Andy sitting over there, Um, I'm going to talk about
my cat play date and this cool gaming video that's
coming out and how I'm playing starting with all of

(01:07:15):
these mos, and then someone tunes into you, they find
you in the category and they're like, wow, this person
is interesting to listen to. They they have interesting things
to say. Um, and then that starts to build steamroll
a little bit. You get up to tew sixty viewers,
um and and chat is pretty active, but it's not unmanageable,
and you can almost stay high to everyone. Sometimes you

(01:07:35):
you sometimes chat still a little slow and you're like, oh,
no one said anything in five minutes, you know, um,
And you still have a second to kind of like
say whatever you want to say. And then it's like, oh,
you know, no one, no one's in chat asking me
a question, so oh yeah, let me talk about the
cat play date. UM. Now, imagine you go from your
hundred two hundred three d four hundred views up to
six thousand, seven thousand, and thinking, like Mark applier level,

(01:07:56):
hundreds of thousands of people, chat is just st There's
not a single way that you could even at this point,
you might as well not have a chat again. You
can't have a conversation with those people. UM. And you
can maybe say like, oh, you know, thanks for the
fifty monthree sub or whatever, like thanks for the twenty
gifted subs whatever. You can respond to those things that

(01:08:17):
are that are monetized and are like happening less often typically, UM.
But the chat that's just rapid firing by you as
a larger streamer, you're back to the mindset that you
were when you were a zero viewer. Streamer, um or
you're back to the space where you were. The mindset
is completely different because as a zeroviewer streamer, you're like,
no one is here, no one cares about me. As
a you know, fifty viewers streamer, you're like, everyone cares

(01:08:40):
about me. I'm so important. It's a totally it's a
totally different ego game. But you cannot depend on chat
in the same way as a zero viewer streamer and
viewer streamer. Um So, then what do you do. You've
got your little notepad. I talked about my cat, my cat,
you know, my kiddy cat training thing and of or sorry,
played a training. Oh my god, it's your cat going

(01:09:01):
to be a bloody Maybe going to school, we don't know.
One of mine could definitely use going to school. But
you're absolutely right. I think maybe people could benefit from
looking at like a bigger streamer on how they interact
or don't interact with their child, because it is quite
the same. Like it's not the same, but it's it's
very similar. That kind of like you can't rely on

(01:09:21):
chat to give you things to talk about. You're absolutely right.
I don't often watch like huge streamers. Um uh. And
when I do. It is such I always learned something UM,
and it's usually around wow, like I think. I think
a lot of it is like UM, amory, God bless her,
UM open her stream like little curiosity gets going sometimes

(01:09:44):
like pull her streams open and I just see the
chat and I'm like, what have I learned here? I
absolutely do not want that audience. That's what I've learned.
Respect the hell out of her, but holy sh it,
absolutely and uh that that that can And other times
I'll open a someone who you know, and it's like, wow,
there can nity rules like they're not you know, I
want and and how do I? How do I get this?

(01:10:05):
How do I not get that? And we talked about
this a little bit at the start to I think
that that finding role models. I think that's what this
is boiling down to here, like role models and people
you respect and admire UM and even someone like like
I might not want amaranths UM community right UM as
far as the individuals and the culture of it, but

(01:10:26):
the UM dedication and maybe the volume and maybe the
monetization and stuff. Either, there are other things there that
I'm like, how does she do this? I respect that
the work ethic that goes into that like, um, there
are things to learn, Like, so I've learned. I don't
like the I don't like the way that these people
speak to her, um, but I like the way that

(01:10:47):
they support her financially? How do I? How do I?
You know? And then I can come to another stream
and it's like, I love that this person has, you know,
hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of viewers, but they have
eighty subs. Why don't they have a of subscribers? What
is she doing different? What are they doing different? What? How? How?
And then you put them together and you start to
come to your own your own branding conclusions, your own

(01:11:09):
business conclusions. Um. Yeah, I think that a lot of
what we're we're kind of boiling around with this is
how do we not be controlled? But it's so interesting.
I can't stop thinking about the child metaphor now because
it is like, how do you stay the parent in this?
How do you not let like even though the kids

(01:11:29):
screaming and crying and I want the candy and I
want to stay up till midnight and I want to
do this, but you know, it's for the long term
best interest if you go to bed at this time
and you don't have candy every day like or whatever
it is, right, Um, it's it's very interesting how much vigilance,
mental vigilance goes into uh, community building and being a

(01:11:51):
content creator discipline to definitely coming on to oh no,
I feel like it boils down to what you sat
at the beginning, which is that the consistency and the
being authentic and the intentional nature of like building a
community is probably the biggest core thing that you can
do for yourself is to really think about who you

(01:12:13):
are and the types of people that are going to
essentially like be your brand to a degree, And that
sounds really like I'm kind of diminishing because these are people,
their individual people. They're not number, but they are reflective
of the type of content that you create. And again
it comes back to like what brands are going to see,

(01:12:34):
What new people coming into your community are going to
see is the reactions that you get from people in
your chat and how they engage the same way. You
find that when you went to Amaranth Stream, you were like, oh,
I really don't want people who treat me the way
her community treats her, because sometimes they can be like
disrespectful to it lately, so you know you don't want that.

(01:12:55):
So what like think to yourself what you as a streamer, Like,
what are you creating that is putting forward a message
to a new person? Like if someone comes into your stream,
what are they going to see in the first couple
of minutes from you and from your chat? Because like
your chat does reflect on you to some degree. I
joke all the time that my community is feral. I
told them that and they thought it was funny, and

(01:13:17):
it's true. They are absolutely feral. But I know that
they're nice and they're good, and they're welcoming and they're
inclusive and that's the important part. So yeah, they're chaotic
all the time, but like that's where the funny stuff
comes in, as long as you feel like the people
that are there are not scaring away new people or
making them uncomfortable, because that's that's where you'll learn to grow.

(01:13:39):
And that's why community. Community is so important in growth.
It's just it's tricky. You gotta get the bounce right
and then at a certain point you can um let
go of the wheel a little bit because the community
will start and this is where you know, to three
hundred thousand viewer streamers kind of sit um is their
community now starts to get their their moderators are in place,

(01:14:01):
you've trained the moderators, the moderates are now training new
moderators um, and there's community there, maybe there's a community
manager that's stepping up. At a certain point, you can
step back from it. And it's the same thing with
like your garden. At a certain point, it grows so
much that there's no there's no sunshine anymore for the
weeds to even plant, like even grow because all of
the other plants are so big and that they're they're

(01:14:23):
already soaking up and we're the sun as the streamer.
So in this metaphor, so we're putting out a certain
amount of energy to these plants. And when you're just
heating an entire empty garden bed, anything that's in that
dirt can grow. But once you're once you're picking all
of the weeds and you're you're only allowing the ones
that you want to grow to grow, and they get

(01:14:43):
big enough they're now casting shade over the dirt and
nothing else can grow besides what's already there. Okay, so
we're we want our community, our intentional community to grow
so strong and so tall and so wide, um that
the weeds cannot take hold anymore. Um and we don't
even have to worry about it anymore. Um And And
also I mean you'll you're never going to not just

(01:15:08):
you're never going to be able to just stop worrying
full stop about your community like you're because because then
you're going to deal with a different breed. And this
is of like moderators that are starting to get too
big for their bridges, or they're being they're abusing their
power or their or whatever. Like, then you're going to
deal with the whole different like a whole different ballpark,
but the same thing, just on a bigger scale. Um.

(01:15:29):
And No, I don't want it to sound like and
I'm a very business minded person, but um I don't
want it to sound like community is nothing but numbers.
But I do feel like looking at the different levels
of fame on the Internet and comparing the mindsets that
go behind managing that volume of that level of people,
that volume of people watching you, UM, I think that

(01:15:51):
it's really helpful to get small streamers in the right
mindset to ever be able to grow into a large streamer.
I you think that the small streamer mindset is um
a plague uh and and is go. If you think
of yourself as a small streamer, you will remain a
small streamer. Um. Some people like that, some people want that,

(01:16:13):
and I, you know, in some ways I relate to that,
Like I think I wonder sometimes if I self sabotage
because I don't want five thousand people commenting on me
every day. UM. So it's you know, to each their
own um and And that's again there's a lot of
self discovery and who are you and what do you want?
That is so necessary to be able to be a

(01:16:35):
successful content creator no matter what size you grow to.
So definitely be aware of what you want to achieve
and be realistic. Like I I frequently say to people
like if you're because people will ask. I feel like
people ask me for advice with gross streaming, and I'm
not an expert. I just know what's worked for me.
And I feel like if anyone says art right, this

(01:16:56):
is the one way to do it, probably not a
good line because they're probably lying, But I I feel
like my biggest piece of advice for stuff like that
is to know what you want to achieve what your
goals are and what your metrics for success are, and
don't make them the same as someone else, because, like
I an example I gave last was it last week

(01:17:16):
whenever I did my stream about streaming in the game's
industry and stuff, um, I talked about how I have
a friend who I know for a fact their goals
for streaming and their metrics for success are completely different
to mine. So I would look at them and consider
them more successful than me because they have the metrics
for success that I want, but they actually would rather

(01:17:37):
have some of the things I have, and they're working
towards that. And I know, like there's a person I
used to work with who has thousands of viewers, but
their subcind is significantly lower because the people watch for
a different reason. They don't get the same engagement because
they're watching for the skill level of the game, and
that sometimes doesn't really relate so well to monetization. So
your your journey is going to be completely different to

(01:17:59):
end anyone else's. You have to really be very open
with yourself and acknowledge this is what I want to
achieve and this is why I want to achieve it,
and always keep that in the back of your mind
no matter what, because it will help you make the
decisions that you need to make. And that's that's bad
on that I also really want to bring back. This

(01:18:21):
is so way back at the beginning of our conversation,
but you were talking about the e girl phase that
you feel like you went through and then how you
feel like, no, you know that you could wear like
a tank top or whatever I want to yeah, and
have a much better reaction. And it just reminded me whenever.
Quite recently, I co streamed the Gaming Awards g a
Y Gaming Awards on Twitch on the front page, and

(01:18:43):
I wore a dress, and I wore a really low
cut dress. And I don't show and I don't tend
to wear a lot like I'm wearing right now. I'm
wearing like a high necked black dress. I don't generally
show a lot of cleavage on Twitch. But I was like,
you know what, I want to look fancy and I
have a big chest, and I should get to wear
whatever I want. So I'm going to take this one

(01:19:04):
day be on the front page where whatever I want.
And you know what, apart from the fact that I
nearly had a wardrobe malfunction because of the sequence dress
and my sleeve kept catching on the neckline and I
was like, I'm going to end up making a mistake.
But everyone was so nice. Not one creepy comment. Everybody
was just like, Yeah, you look really good. This is
a great dress. You should wear more dresses like this,

(01:19:25):
but not like in a creepy way. And I feel
like when you are intentional with your community and you've
built that community, you can do that and you can
feel comfortable and then you don't feel like, oh I
have to wear like T shirts or high necklines or
whatever because I might get comments about my cleavage. We
might still do that, but you'll they will be drowned
out by all of the right and positive and inclusive

(01:19:46):
people that you've built the community with, assuming that's what
you want to build and that that was the And
like the other thing is is like some some people
listening to this might want that type of audience. Um,
they might, and and I mean it's highly monetize able,
So yeah, go for it, that's what you want. Yeah,
I don't. I I just know from my experience that
I hated it. Um, So I would highly encourage you

(01:20:08):
to experiment and figure out what you do. Like, I
don't think that there's any wrong or right way, um
to to be a content creator. I mean, well there's
some like hard wrongs to, but but as far as
as like like expressing yourself with your clothes and things
like that, Like, I think that it's important to experiment.
And I'm really glad that I went through that period, um,

(01:20:33):
where I was coming out of my party girl phase,
just got out of a four or five year relationship.
It was in my single moment wanted I wanted, you know,
to feel I wanted to feel attractive because I just
got dumped, do you know what I mean? So that
I understand psychologically why I got to that space and
what was happening there. Um. And I'm really glad that
I stopped the bus, um because if I was still

(01:20:54):
here years later with the audience that I was building
at a time where I was drunken e girl plays
Overwatch like, um, oh my god, I would have probably
gone back to working in a nine to five office
by this point because it's like no way, like, no
way do I want to deal with this every single day?
No way these grown children oh uh. And um, I'm

(01:21:16):
glad that I did, and I'm in a space where
I'm kind of doing the same thing now. But it's
it sucks because it's like Twitch tutorials or why my
YouTube tests, why I have any type of cloud at all.
That's why anybody you know, like even gives me the
time of day. It feels like in in the gaming industry,
the Twitch industry. But I don't want to do Twitch
tutorials forever. I want to be able to play video
games and and get the same viewership like I you know,

(01:21:38):
and um just post a gaming video on my YouTube
and it gets it gets a hundred thousand views, not
you know, how to get rich quick on Twitch success
videos Like I love teaching people and I love inspiring
and encouraging people to be cool, creative individuals that are
not afraid to But I don't know, it's like you said,

(01:21:58):
I don't want to do the same thing every day
or else I'm going to go absolutely insane. I want
to be able to be a variety creator and have
support um across the board. UM, So I'm having to
rebuild again from the ground up and just accept that
I'm going to have lower numbers again. Um. But hopefully
that you know, I'm just as valuable um as a

(01:22:20):
you know, gaming commentary person and just a variety lifestyle person. Um.
It's just gonna I think that it's you know, in
the and and there's some things that that are going
to hit the algorithm without a doubt, um, and are
going to get more viewership. Uh. Um. I could put
up a hot, spicy take on toxic people in the
gaming industry and guarantee you know a lot of views

(01:22:42):
on that. There's there's things you can do that that
are going to probably be viewership wise, and then there's
the long grind. And I guess I'm just having to
settle to the long grind. And I don't know. The
hardest thing for me is having someone come up to
me being like, Shady, I watched your video and you
encourage me to start streaming three months ago, and look

(01:23:04):
at me now and they have five viewers in their
partner and I'm like, I've been here for six years.
That's the thing where you shouldn't compare yourself to others.
But at the same time, it's really difficult. Like I
frequently I've seen people coming into the same space creating
the same content as me. And seeming to just surpass
me and immediately, Yeah, I don't get it will happen.

(01:23:24):
And it's not that I'm not happy for them, of
course I'm happy, but I'm like, why did they do that?
And why did they do that with advice for me?
And I'm like, how can I? And what am I?
What am I not doing that? Like? And I think
that's the hard thing. I was talking to my friend
the other day and I was like, it's really hard
for me to be the those who can't do teach
like I really want to be the person who can

(01:23:45):
do it, like I don't want to and teach about
it like and so I, yeah, maybe I'm going through
another dark knight of the soul right now. But you know,
breaking your arm when you're trying something new, We'll do
that to you a good times. But I do think,
like you, you have given so many examples over various
episodes of like the phoenix moment and like the kind
of being able to come and rise out of the

(01:24:05):
ashes and be the beautiful phoenix, And I think that's
something that's really valuable and experimentation is really really important
in this space. I'm really bad at it because I
get like, I get this is going to sound really weird,
because I'm very very much like a numbers aren't important,
but obviously they're important to a certain point, but numbers
aren't the most important thing. But I find that whenever

(01:24:26):
you go from like, say you have fifty average viewers,
if you dropped like one or two viewers to like
forty nine or forty eight, it always feels so much
worse than when you're in the fifties and you dropped
to like fifty two. Like, say you're fifty eight average viewers,
you dropped fifty two, but when you go from fifty
down to forty something. And I had this recently where
I went from being like so a little while ago,

(01:24:47):
I was averaging like a hundred and fifty. Then I
dropped on too, like one twenty, and I was like,
that's fine, that's okay. But then when I went from
one hundred ninety nine, I was like, and it's one
average viewer difference, but going from one fIF he didn't
feel as bad. It's so weird, But I feel like
that's one of those things where I I get to
the point where where I'm so scared of experimenting and

(01:25:10):
losing some of the people who come and hang out
with me all the time. I'm gonna be like, oh
my god, I tried this new thing and like a
good chunk of the people that I know come by
every day just are not interested. And then I'm like,
are they never going to go back? I was used
to like I was, I was pushing partner members again. Um,
like four or five six months ago, you know, was
averaging between like forty to seventy viewers sometimes depending and

(01:25:32):
then um, I tried um Breath of the Wild, beautiful game,
one of my favorite games of all times, might be
one of my favorite video games of all times. Um,
and I had thirteen viewers, and it's difference. Oh my god,
I said, I'm never streaming this game again. Yeah. I
don't know. I don't because maybe if I streamed Breath

(01:25:53):
of the Wild every day for a month, I would
have built back up to my seventy or eighty. It's
just people weren't used to watching me play a game.
But I've really was just like, and you can ask
any of my friends. They were like, I would not
shut up about it because it was so demoralizing to me.
And I was like I've been here since and I'm
at thirteen viewers, Like from like what this is? What?
What is wrong with me? I I need to give up.

(01:26:14):
I need to stop doing this, Like I need to
This is embarrassing, like for people to come in and
see my like success on YouTube and then come in
I found you from YouTube and you're at thirteen viewers.
Why am I taking advice from you? Like it was
you know, and it was one day you know what
I mean? Like it wasn't. And I also have been
going through a lot for the last year, like emotionally,
like going through you know, ending a relationship and then

(01:26:35):
breaking my arm now and also we're at the end
of two years of a pandemic and everybody is starting
to drift away from the Internet because everyone's sick of
being introverted. So there's viewerships dropping all across the board
in general, it's a lot of things just were like
adding up I think to create that moment. But that
moment scared me um and it's scary, yeah, because it's

(01:26:56):
like day and then the other day I was going
through my Twitch dash word you can like change you
as the founder, badges or whatever, which I think is
a really cool feature UM And so I was going
through and I was like, Okay, I haven't even seen
this person in four years, so like removing the founder
badges and putting them on the next person. And I
went through like so many where I was like, Wow,

(01:27:16):
all of these people used to support me, and they're
just I haven't seen them in years, what you know,
And it's not just about me. I mean, maybe they
stopped using the internet in that way, maybe they don't
watch twitch anymore, maybe they started, maybe they became the
streamers like or you know, anything could have happened, but
it was just there's just so much like reflective work
that I'm doing lately that is making me feel like

(01:27:38):
do I really do have what it takes. Maybe I don't.
Maybe it's time for me to hang up the towel.
And then the other part of me is like I
know that even if I said I was not going
to stream anymore, like I'm not going to try to
be a professional streamer anymore, I still would just stream sometimes.
I still would because, like we talked about at the
start of the episode, UM in a Yasha fan site,
I always want to talk about what I'm passionate about.

(01:27:58):
Like I'm saying, I know that, I know that if
everything goes to hell, I'm just I'm still going to stream,
but I'm it would be definitely on a like a
lesser schedule or whenever I wanted to. It's like, because
I love sharing stuff that I'm passionate about, and I did.
I went through the like sort of similar thing. I
hit partner, and my celebration stream for this is so sad,

(01:28:19):
But my celebration stream for when I got partnered. After
I finished the stream, I cried because I was like,
my numbers were significantly lower already immediately, like literally within
a month of getting partner, because that happens to a
lot of people. And I was like, and then there's
no goals exactly, there's no hype, there's no nothing carrying
the people forward with excitement. So I hit that, I

(01:28:39):
did the celebration stream, and I was like, wow, people
did not enjoy that, Like, what did I do wrong?
Have I made a terrible mistake getting excited about this?
And then within like six months to a year, I
had dropped from I was averaging like nine hundred viewers.
I had dropped to like the high thirties to low forties,
and again, I still think those are numbers to be
proud of. But whenever you dropped by over half your

(01:29:01):
viewership in six months, it's terrifying. You're like, is it
just going to keep dropping? Am I done? Is that? It?
Was that my chance and I messed it up? Like
you start asking yourself questions, was that my chance? Did
I miss it? Did I miss the window of opportunity?
Did I? That's true, but it does feel like that,
and there's the fear that you think to yourself, right,
you know that if if people hit a lucky a

(01:29:22):
lucky streak with streaming, that they can carry that forward.
Did I hit my lucky streak? And then I messed
it up? And that's it? And I have to find
another one and keep going. That was really scary, and
I remember sitting on the couch with my partner and
crying and saying I think, like I knew I was
always going to continue streaming, but I was like, I
think I need to get like a normal nine to
five and just do this as a hobby. Because that

(01:29:43):
was heartbreaking, and I'm glad I stuck with it because
it did come back very slowly and with a lot
of self reflection, which again, like you were just saying,
self reflection is hard and sometimes it can be really hurtful,
but doing it and getting through it is valuable. It's
just something that you have to be very intentional with
and I did do it, and I still I still
maintain that if if everything went to hell, I'd still stream.

(01:30:06):
It just might not be my job anymore. Um, but
it's really hard, and it's really hard seeing because it's
it's super fickle, like the Twitch viewership can go up
and dine. The algorithms on most platforms, like I my TikTok,
I have no idea what's going on on alm TikTok anymore.
I hit like several videos in a view in a
row where I was getting like seventy thoughts and views
or like whatever, and then I backed onto like a

(01:30:27):
hundred maybe two hundred, and I'm like, what did I do?
That was how the algorithm works, TikTok. It's like when
you go to the I've never been to Las Vegas
or anything, but it's like when you go to the
slab machines or whatever, some of them are just racking.
And I mean even like the lottery tickets at the
gas station. Some of them are rigged to win, um,
to make you feel like you want to keep with
you and be like, oh my god, I won once.

(01:30:49):
I should keep trying. Oh that's TikTok. That's exactly how that.
That definitely happened. And I had. I had like my
first video didn't do very well, my second video didn't
do very well, my third video didn't do really well.
And then the next one got three hundred and views
and I was like, right, this is a nothing after
that for a long time. And then I hit another
one a couple of months later and it got like
four hundred though in views or something. I actually think

(01:31:10):
it might be all more annoy and I was like, wow, okay.
And then a couple of videos after that, I was
getting a couple of thoughts and views and I was like, okay,
like I mean that's something. That's that's more than I
was getting before. And then I hit another one that
hit seventy thoughs in or something, and I was like, yes, okay,
let's keep going. And then you get back and it's like,
you know, the algorithm just does not give a ship.
You know, it's Instagrams like it too. I'll notice that,

(01:31:33):
like I post a real right now, and it goes
up to like within within the first hour, it gets
up to like two thousand views sometimes and it's like whoa, Like,
I'm like, wow, Instagram is showing this to people, and
then and then it just stops and there's not a
single new view for days and days and days and
sometimes never more. Um, and I'm like, Okay, Instagram really
just decided to stop showing this to people. But it

(01:31:55):
wasn't some kind of conscious decision. It's an AI program,
And I know what has happened ing is they show
it to x amount of people. This is my understanding
this and my understanding of computer brain. Right, they show
it to x amount of people if it gets comments,
if it gets engagement, if they click on your profile,
if they watch more reels, if they if your video
causes them to close the app, or if too many

(01:32:16):
people close the app or too many people do this,
or if too many people do that, well, Instagram goes
or TikTok, both of them. This isn't a good video,
it's not engaging people, it's not keeping people on the app.
Stop showing it, start showing a different video. And they
have billions of videos being made, so they have a
never ending supply and it's just so in some ways
it's algorithmic, and to me, I'm like, just keep showing

(01:32:39):
it to people, Like, like, just keep showing it to people.
Because the other thing about TikTok and Instagram reels and
all of these short form contents is this social proof.
People think it's a good video if it has a
lot of views, period, Like, if it doesn't have a
lot of views, even if it's a phenomenal video, or
if it's a really cool short that you put a
lot of time into, if it has a hundred views,
people are like, well, it's clearly not good. It only

(01:33:00):
has a hundred views. Proof behind these things drives me
actually insane. It's wild. This is why it's it's i
don't know, like chase the numbers or chase the passion
and again annoying as it is, where's the balance between
the two. You have to find a mixture of the two.
If you want to do this as a job, you

(01:33:21):
can easily do it as a hobby. That's a totally
different conversation. Don't give a shit about the numbers then,
like you don't look at them. You can use them
to like inform yourself about you know, hey, what people
like watching when people don't. But you could just go
about your life being happy and doing the things that
make you happy and make you feel joy. And I
think you're right, there's a there's a balance, and I
think there's a balance and everything because you need to

(01:33:42):
find the joy and the reason that you do it.
But at the same time, if you're doing it as
a business, you also have to see what works from
a business standpoint. And it's tricky, yeah, because otherwise it's
like I either have a lot of time to make
content or I get a nine to five and I
make content whenever I maybe have the opportunity to UM.
And that's that's where it comes in. And that's where
that conversation with your community. Um, if y'all want me

(01:34:05):
to be here all the time, y'all got to support
my content even if that if you can't subscribe with money,
then share this on your Twitter, share it to something,
help help me grow so that I can do this
more often and that and that's another that's another thing
with the community is which we didn't touch on. I
know we're getting like we're pushing time right now. But um,

(01:34:27):
this is such a I love this conversation. Um. But
community members that grow resentful of your growth, um, and
then we'll definitely like intentionally abandon you or become angry
at you, like you know you've changed since you know
let it out or I only wanted to. There's some
if I if I go from and their social proof

(01:34:50):
on Twitch too, because I'm sitting at thirteen viewers, people
are going to come in. But if I get the
raid and pushes me over a hundred viewers or something,
all of a sudden, all these names come knock knock,
knock in and I'm like, oh cool, the cat dragged
in your only thing because I look popular right now?
And um, and uh now you're like, what's you know?
You know you're being nosy. It's not even because you're
interested in me. You're just like, you have so many

(01:35:11):
viewers today, and that's that's social proof too, of like,
and and to be fair, I'm not sometimes I'll notice like, oh,
you know, some and so has like quadruple their viewer account.
I'm not like tuning in just to be a mean
nosy person. I'm just like, what's going on I'm happy
for them, you know, Like, so it's not I'm a
very jaded person. I come at things from so many
things at this point that's made me jaded. But um,

(01:35:32):
but yeah, I have had where my viewership will be
up for for like maybe consistently, like maybe I'm pushing
partner numbers again, and um, someone will come in and
be like something like wow you uh. I can't even
think of the phrase that they'll use now, but it's
commenting on um, well, there's really a lot of people
here now. I guess you're you're really popular now or
you're you know, they'll they'll make some kind of comment

(01:35:53):
about how you know, there's so many people and you
aren't gonna be able to talk to me anymore or something,
you know, And that can I think cause people to
be afraid of growth. Um. And this is where I
think self sabotage will start to come in. Like I
don't want people like me. I'm afraid of judgment in
this type of way, in a lot of types of way.
But um, I don't want people to think that I
think I'm too good to be a five viewer Andy

(01:36:15):
Like I don't. So I'm you know, I don't need
five thousand viewers, and you know, in fact, I'm going
to prove that by staying five viewers forever. I get you, though,
and I feel like I've said to my community that, like, genuinely,
in the next couple of years of contemgregation, I don't
want to be at thousands of viewers. I'd like to
still feel like I can have a conversation with people. Um,
but then, like, does that mean that I'm treating myself

(01:36:39):
on the foot and I'm just trying not to get
any bigger, Like, at what point do I have to
do some self reflection again, sit down with myself and
be like, yo, what are you doing? Like are you
making this harder for yours? Yeah? Yeah, and it's hard.
It's really get harder for myself. I'm literally that name
of the person that's riding the bike and they have
the stick in their hands and they're putting it in
the spokes of the wheel and they're knocking their own bicycle.

(01:37:02):
That's literally me. That's so funny. I Like I get
that because my partner is that person, so I like
see it every single day. He's literally that person like
every day, and I'm just like you're doing it again.
So I'm trying not to be that person because I
witness it, but it is. It's really hard, and you
have to be comfortable with like sitting with yourself and

(01:37:22):
really being honest with yourself. That's tricky, And you're right.
I feel like we could talk about this for ages,
and I know, because we're kind of seguing all over
it's part two of this. Sometimes I think it could
be really fun. I know, it sounds like almost like
metrics and uh yeah, interesting, how do you interpret your

(01:37:42):
dashboard and your metrics that could be dealing dealing with
the Yeah, dealing with numbers, and I don't not let
the numbers control you know, Yes, very important. So yeah,
stay tuned for the next time that we have a
conversation where we absolutely don't stick to the outline that
we prepared ahead of time, but it gave us a
backphone to fall back on when we ran out of
meanderings that pack file with a stuff. Um well, I

(01:38:08):
guess then we should maybe wrap up. Are there any
projects or anything that you'd like to shine that are
coming up for you? So? Um well, I'm really excited
because with my Celestial Cafe podcast, which is if you know,
you'll hear me with my little shadow work and Pisces
rising things like throughout this podcast, if you're interested in witchy,
magical minded things. Um, I've ups that we were doing

(01:38:28):
it once a month and now we're doing it twice
a month, and um, super excited. We talked about the
full moon each month and what sign it's in and
how that that affects you, and then we also talked
about other witchy topics. Um, tomorrow, I think we're talking
about what our daily practice looks like and like what
what what it just looks like I guess in the
daily existence of being a tech which now, but um,

(01:38:51):
so that that's something I'm super super excited about. And
it's the longest running project I've had. We're almost at
a year now, and I'm very you know, do something
for two months and then try something else for two
and this I'm I'm proud of how long and consistent
this has been. We haven't missed a single episode. Like
also like Boss level. Boss Level is also like we're
going strong, you know, like pushing eight months now. Yeah,

(01:39:16):
so um, I think that's it And oh no, there's
a huge I finished my O B S video. I've
been working on this thing, okay, so it's huge. Um.
I've been working on this for I think like six
to eight weeks now. I wrote a blog for it,
researched it, recorded the video. It was a three hour
long video that I had to edit down to an

(01:39:36):
hour and a half. I've been hyper editing, zooming in
where it needs to be zoomed in, adding all the
reference pictures, adding time stamps, editing it. I just finished
editing it last night, so I'm gonna export it tonight.
It'll be alive hopefully fingers crossed. If there's no tech issues.
It'll be live on my YouTube channel tomorrow and I
can wipe my hands. It's a it's I've called it.
Hey Shady Lady over explains O B S. So it's

(01:39:59):
for beginner is it's, and I think like also intermediate
people because even while I was researching this, I learned
a lot of new things about O B S. So, um,
I think new people to O b S and people
who have used it for a couple of years that
are like, WHOA, I didn't know that hidden feature was
there the whole time, Like I dug deep, I learned
everything I could about this program, so I would consider
myself an O B S expert at this point and

(01:40:21):
that that is that is my big project. And then
I can just be like, no more O B S videos.
I've done. I've got this big mega boss video on
my channel. Uh, and now I can make gaming videos
and I got this one. I can be like, look
I did that, I earned some gaming videos. Now, okay,
yeah you did. Let's go. But yeah that's hey shady

(01:40:41):
lady UM on YouTube and Twitch, Instagram and Twitter everywhere.
So what do you guys coming up? Psyche UM? So
I last week I actually did a This is not
a talk that's available anywhere because it was just to
a college class. But um, I didn't talk with some
girls at our local college i'll Fast met UM about
working in the games industry and they were very interested

(01:41:03):
in streaming. So I answered a lot of questions there.
It was really cool, and I'm actually probably going to
be working with the Belfast met on their Gaming and
E Sports Support club that's for UM women and non
binary people in wanting to get into gaming and e
sports UM and also just like I guess, kind of

(01:41:24):
providing uh kind of space for people who don't necessarily
see themselves represented very often UM and giving them advice
and support and stuff like that. UM. And this week, actually,
on the day of our episode coming I I will
be doing a talk with a charity, a local charity
about mental health in gaming and UM. They work with

(01:41:45):
like local youths that have UM mental health issues and
also in particular with like gambling and gaming UM and
the impacts that that can have. So I'm trying to
kind of pivot into doing more, like I guess, positive
work with providing information and advice and knowledge and stuff
like that. UM. I did a talk about how brands

(01:42:07):
can provide inclusive experiences when working with influencers. I'd really
like to start doing more of that kind of stuff
as well, because I feel like, I guess, it feels
like a kind of positive way to work with what
I do and what I'm passionate about. So I want
to kind of start doing more of that. So if
you're listening to the episode and you need me to
talk about anything, I love talking is it probably was
very obvious. UM. But yeah, if that's available anywhere, I'm

(01:42:28):
not sure. I think it will be available digitally, so
I will link to it. On social media. I am
psyche plays everywhere on social media and Psyche on Twitch,
and then TikTok is Psychi Twitch because I was silly
and did not sign up for my name. I was
trying to find you on Twitch last night because I
was using, um one of your streams as an example
in the video the studio. So I have like compile

(01:42:52):
starting student screens just chatting scenes and gaming scenes, and
I think I used your gaming scene, so I have
like five or six and Milady Confetti's in there, and
UM just kind of like pulling like five or six
examples of each. So and I typed in twitch at
tv slash Psyche place and I was like, this is Psyche.
It's a thing, and it's really awkward because I think
the same person has Psyche plays on TikTok and I

(01:43:13):
didn't sign up for it quickly enough and I'm like
very confusing. I wish I was better at branding. And
oh well, well that's me pretty much summed up. Um,
that's not me summed up, but we already did that,
So I guess that's gonna wrap it up. Make sure
that if you all want to have a chat with
us and continue the conversation, if you like our um

(01:43:33):
next video idea, if you want to tell us you don't,
you want us to do something else. We do have
a discord server that you can join and hang out
and chat with us there. If you're listening on uh
you know, Apple Podcasts or Spotify and you want to
rate the podcast, I'd be super helpful. It helps us
out a lot with discoverability and things like that. Um.
And then of course we do have a YouTube channel
if you want to watch the video version of this

(01:43:55):
uh instead. UM. So I guess that's it and we'll
see all the next episode. So thank you everyone so much,
and having a wonderful rest of your August. Bye bye
bye

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Episode 24 - Content and Community

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 24 - Content and Community