Online Identity, Net Neutrality, and Live Broadcasting.

 "Why waste hundreds of dollars on supplements for recovery and neglect sleep when it is free, doesn't show up on a drug test, and improves more than just physical performance?" - CJ Roth

Allow me to provide a brief overview of myself. My full name is William "Reid" Taylor, but I go by Reid as indicated by the quotation marks. I am a senior level athletic training student in Longwood University's athletic training program (which may be obvious based on the topic of my blog). Since an early age, I have always been fascinated with the human body. As the years went by and reality started chipping away at my maturing mind, I became more and more aware of what I wanted to become when I got older; At first it was a surgeon, then a physicians assistant specializing in emergency medicine, and finally athletic training or physical therapy. To this day, my interests have not changed. With each passing day, the want and drive to further study and learn about the healthcare profession all but increases, which is indicative considering this blog's topic. What this blog hopes to do is bring to light the importance of sleep, not only in the athletic population but the general population as well. The positive impacts of sleep far outweigh any other supplement out there and the negative impacts that become present with a lack of sleep are far more serious than one may think. With this blog, I hope to stress these topics to whoever may read the blog so that they may understand the importance of sleep as a whole.


photo of yours truly

*I wasn't aware on December 12, 2017 that the entirety of this blog's goals were to discuss social media stuff so I am leaving my About Me page as is.*

Online Identity

As college level students, the importance of always keeping a professional image both in person, and online, has been drilled into our heads. Family members, professors, and athletic training preceptors, have all told me about the impact it may have on our futures. If a future employer wants to perform a background check involving what it is we put online and what kind of person we may be. Social media is a great source for future employers to get a grasp on what kind of person an individual may be. They can find out if you have nothing but bad things to say about the people you work with or the professors that teach you, and whether you act belligerently ignorant towards everyone around you. Overall, it gives whoever is anonymously looking through your social media accounts a positive or negative outlook on who you are as a person.

It is because of this that I have set all my social media accounts to private. This isn’t because I have anything to hide, but because it is my social media accounts and I have the right to know who it is that gets to see what it is I post or upload online. This doesn’t mean that I post things that I would consider to be rude, hurtful, unprofessional, or etc. It simply means that we live in a time where people are easily offended by almost everything that is online. Future employers are not an exception to this fact either and, being the college student that I am, I would be lying if I said I never post anything that others may find inappropriate. When it comes to my Facebook and Instagram, I try to only post things that no one could find unprofessional. With Facebook, I leave everything I post accessible only to friends and family, because that is the respectable thing to do. I post things that interest me such amazing things that occur (whether it be BMX or motocross stunts, amazing sports plays, etc.), hobbies that I enjoy, and your typical memes that every one of my generation enjoys. With Instagram, there aren’t really any pictures that people may find unprofessional unless you are stupid and post pictures from where you went out partying the other night and got blackout drunk (which if you are doing stupid stuff like that and posting it for all to see then maybe you do not deserve a job at whatever company or employer may be scanning your social media.) My Instagram is only filled with selfies and places I travel to, along with the occasional picture that someone may take of me while I am out at clinical rotation for athletic training. Overall, I keep my Instagram open for all to see because I am proud of how I keep my appearances through the app. There is nothing that someone might find offensive or unprofessional. It is just pictures of myself and the places I have visited (such as the beach or other vacation spots).

My twitter on the other hand is open for most to see. This is because twitter is a lot more challenging for people to find and I have made it so that no one can find it easily. This doesn’t mean that no one can find it and, if someone looked hard enough, one can find just about anything if it is accessible to the public. With this in mind, I openly allow whoever to view my Twitter as I do not use it that often. However, despite it being accessible to anyone, I still use my twitter to speak what is on my mind. I retweet memes that some may find to be inappropriate and I give my political and social opinions where I see fit. With these being highly debated subjects, some may find my twitter to be offensive as everyone has their own thoughts and opinions on the topics I tend to discuss on my Twitter. This being the case, I do not hide anything about who I really am as a person. If anything, I would say Twitter is the social media platform out of the three I have mentioned that best describes who I am as a person, and if anyone is persistent enough to find my twitter (which is hard to find due to the nature of twitter using twitter handles instead of names) then they will find the real me; The me who retweets relatable struggles of a college student and bashes on Trump and his entire family, the me who isn’t afraid to speak his mind on a certain highly sensitive subject.

I like to think that I put thought into my social media accounts and whether they will affect me positively or negatively. A clear majority of social media users out there do not put thought in what it is they post or who might be watching (which has led to a lot of people either getting fired or not getting a job, they applied for). With my accounts, I keep some of them private even though I have nothing to hide (Facebook for example); others I keep open for all to see, like my Instagram and Twitter. My Instagram has nothing but respectable pictures and my Twitter I hardly use. With each post or picture uploaded, I think about who might be watching or who might see it in the future and I tailor my accounts to be as professional as possible while at the same time being human. I may cuss every now and then or debate with others on controversial topics, but I don’t openly discuss, post, or upload pictures that have no business being on social media and that is what counts most.

 

Op-Ed

 

The New York Times

Opinion  ǀ   OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

 

Net Neutrality’s Impact on Social Media Outlets

By REID TAYLOR        DEC. 29, 2017

 

 

VIRGINIA – With the recent repeal of net neutrality regulations by the F.C.C, a majority of the American population have taken to social media to complain about the decision that lead to this outcome with F.C.C chairman Ajit Pai at the helm. It is within good reason that, so many people are up in arms about the decision that was made. In the end, the decision that would affect a nation was left to the decision of 5 people, a decision that repealed regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. With the weeks leading up to the decision, many people took to Twitter and Facebook posting about how the repeal of the net neutrality regulations would open the floodgates for these providers to start charging the general population just for using the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that it would “invite a future where only the largest internet, cable, and telephone companies survive, while every start-up, small business and new innovator would get crowded out.” While these views are extremely blown out of proportion, it is true that some companies have tried doing this in the past with little success, as the people protested to the F.C.C. Today, I am here to talk about how these concerns with the “collapse” of open internet are being overblown.

First, service providers have in fact tried to block not only customers, but companies as well, despite the net neutrality regulations. In 2004, the Madison River Telephone Company blocked Vonage in North Carolina to protect its own phone service from competition. The F.C.C fined them for violating network neutrality rules. Yet again, in 2012, AT&T let only a few of its customers use the Facetime app on their phones. Once again, a flood of complaints came into the F.C.C and they took care of the problem, allowing everyone with AT&T to use the app. Now, it is understandable that people would start thinking “well, now that the F.C.C is allowing providers to do this, there is nothing else stopping them from getting away with it.” It is important, however, to remember two important facts about this. Although it appears the F.C.C played the only roll in preventing these acts from happening, the public blowback from these two occasions was nothing short of fierce. Both the MRTC and AT&T received outraged feedback, scaring other providers from following suit. Next to that, blocking your competitors to protect your own services can’t just be stopped by the F.C.C. It is considered anticompetitive conduct that can be stopped by antitrust laws without any need for the network neutrality regulations.

Now, I will not lie, I also have my doubts as to whether I should be infuriated or accepting of the new repeal. In about 2 years, if the repeal stands, Americans will get to accurately compare as to whether American internet will be slower and less innovative such as Portugal’s internet packages, or if it will compare to be as promising as the European Union and Canada’s stringent network neutrality regulations. Recently, Americans have shown how expressive they can be when faced with an unfavorable outcome (what with the latest presidential election), which is reassuring in the event of service providers following the same path of Portugal or MRTC and AT&T years ago. Fortunately, it has been said from many employees who have worked years in the service provider and telecommunication company industry that the internet did not start out as a neutral invention. In fact, neutrality was an organic outcome; a product of a competitive market, meaning that it is in the best interest of not only the people but the service providers as well to not throttle access to what consumers want to see and ruin the ties they have with huge companies such as Google, Netflix, and almost every social media outlet out there. Neutral broadband access is a cash cow for all forms of internet, cable, telephone, and social media companies; it would be counterproductive to kill it.

Even if service providers wanted to regulate what people could and could not access, they would have a troubling time extorting money from the massive corporations/companies like the ones listed above. It makes sense that service providers would need companies like Google and Facebook a lot more than the two would need the service provider. However, the outcome pans out, social media will exponentially change with what is to come. In the first few weeks of regulation repeal, political and legal fights have already started, hoping to reestablish the rules. Numerous Democrats on Capitol Hill have already called for a bill to reinsert the network neutrality regulations, although their intended outcome is looking bleak. What people are overlooking is that competition between these service providers and companies is sure to hold up net neutrality on its own. Many are expecting that it is certain that a clear majority of the American population will cut all forms of business if any of these service providers or companies do follow suit and abuse the absence of the open internet regulations. This will most likely act as an important deterrent for these businesses to capitalize as it makes for a great marketing tool for other companies and providers to use against them, especially for social media applications.

At the end of the day, there is still competition. There may be some markets with just one cable provider, but phone companies offer increasingly comparable internet access – so if the cable providers start charging for, blocking, or slowing down certain sites, the phone companies could soak up the affected customers simply by promising not to do so. With competition at its peak, these providers would be taking considerable risks to capitalize on the new changes. It would be unnecessarily greedy of them to gamble the killing that they are already making by making enemies of other companies and their customers. As I said, these are all valid reasons as to why net neutrality wasn’t as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be but, in the end, only time can truly tell. The internet as a whole may very well change drastically, social media included, despite the numerous amounts of evidence concluding that that would be a bad move on everyone’s parts.

Potugal’s packages

 

Proposal

Twitch and it’s Support for Small-time Streamers

 

Twitch is a popular online service for watching and livestreaming digital broadcast videos, specifically video games. Back when it was founded in 2011, Twitch focused heavily on video games however, since then, has also included artwork creation, music, talk shows, and occasionally tv shows, although the main hype for the streaming platform comes from video games as previously mentioned. Now, if asked, most Twitch streamers will say that they stream because it is a hobby that they enjoy doing and it is fun interacting with people and potential fans. In a sense, streaming video games is fun, but what makes it even more fun is getting paid to do it. Imagine that….getting paid to play video games; however, this is a lot easier said than done. An unexplainable amount of detail goes into how Twitch works. Any new streamer can create a profile on Twitch and start livestreaming but, unfortunately, the hardest part is growing an audience or even a fanbase (which is harder). Upon setting up the hundreds or even thousands of dollars of equipment needed to stream (which includes, typically, a pc, monitor, mouse, keyboard, face cam, microphone, headset, and streaming software such as a capture card or other things to make the streaming process easier.

The streaming service boasts over 2 million unique streamers every month and only 17 thousand of these streamers earn money for streaming. Any big-time streamer will say that at the end of the day, her or she streams for the fun and his or her fans; that is bull. Everyone does it for the money, no matter how humble they appear or how kindhearted they seem, it is always about the potential pile of cash that streaming on Twitch can bring to a streamer. The top streamers average around 10-100k viewers. Depending on how many viewers they have, they can also get outside sponsors, make revenue based on their viewer count and, most importantly, can get money from putting advertisements on their streams and becoming twitch partners and affiliates. So, if we were to add in the amount of money they make annually from their sponsors, ads, donations, and subscribers, the top twitch streamers make, roughly, 200k to millions of dollars in a year. Here is a YouTube link demonstrating the absurd amounts of money that people donate (URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy8SfbF9jKw). In this 3-minute video, a single donator goes around to different popular live streamers and donates around 20,000 dollars. In the last clip, a different person is seen donating 20,000 dollars to Summit1g, one of the most popular streamers on Twitch who is known to make the 2^nd most amount of money on Twitch. There is no hiding that these millions of streamers flock to Twitch, hoping for a chance to be a full-time Twitch streamer and make a ridiculous amount of money like the ones in the video. The problem that lies with Twitch is how it tries showing love to those other millions of streamers that do not make money. Twitch’s popularity is growing rapidly, with some livestreams carrying in 200-300 thousand viewers at a time (enough to fill 20-30 baseball stadiums).

Twitch is a subsidiary of Amazon, and together the two rakes in billions of dollars annually. Twitch is kind enough to allow anyone new to Twitch to start off by setting up a donation option for their viewers to use. Twitch also sends out affiliate invites to those who meet the following requirements: AT least 8 hours broadcast in the last 30 days, at least 7 unique broadcast days in the last 30 days, an average of 3 concurrent viewers or more over the last 30 days, and at least 50 followers. When typed out, this doesn’t seem like a big problem but, it is. There are so many users on Twitch that it makes it hard for streamers to get started on a task as simple as becoming an affiliate, let alone acquiring thousands of subscribers and millions of followers. Due to the large number of streamers, Twitch needs better means of providing a chance for these streamers to have an easier time growing their channels. Like I said, 2 million streamers are on Twitch and only 17 thousand of them are getting paid, with most of them not getting paid enough. With the amount of money that Twitch makes off all these streamers, they need to give a little back to those who work hard trying to grow something that is precious to them instead of giving it to not top 10%. The hardest part about Twitch is getting viewers. I have known many Twitch streamers that have gone to Twitch having the necessary skill and characteristics needed to be a great streamer. You must appeal to people, be entertaining, and be an overall interesting person that people would want to watch and, most, of the time even that is not enough. Every top tier, successful streamer on Twitch would say that it took a lot of luck to get to where they are now, which is why Twitch needs to start finding a way to spread the viewership around while at the same time not taking away from what the top have achieved. What Twitch has tried doing to help is allowing anyone wanting to stream the ability to set up a method for viewers to donate, but donations aren’t that effective if viewers can’t find your channel out of the potential tens or hundreds of thousands of people who may be streaming at the same time as you. This means unsuccessful streamers must work unbelievably hard to get their viewers (years of streaming) for something that may not even pay off, play video games that viewers want to see instead of games that the streamer wants to play, and invest impossible amounts of time trying to grow their stream (which most people can’t do because in order to be successful in streaming you have to dedicate a lot of time and money into something that has a very high chance of not working out.

Summing up what has been said so far. Twitch makes a lot of money along with Amazon. Both businesses have enough money to advertise more, potentially bringing in more customers; after all, not many people have heard of Twitch despite how popular it is, advertising could help a lot. Advertising could bring in more viewers which, in turn, helps the smaller streamers and gives Twitch more ideas to work with in regard to marketing with small stream’s in mind without messing with the top tier streamers who supply Twitch with a majority of the money Twitch makes. Viewers are the most important aspect to a streamer, as viewers are the ones that give a streamer donation and give the streamer followers and viewers which, eventually lead to getting partnered or affiliated with Twitch which allows the streamer to have ads on his or her streams, gets him or her a subscription button, and allows viewers to donate bits and use Twitch Prime subscriptions on the streamer. Right now, the most important thing that Twitch needs to be doing is looking out for the 90% instead of just the top 10. The hundreds of thousands that are working hard and investing so much time into streaming have an even bigger impact on the success of Twitch than the top-tier streamers do which many people do not realize. With more money invested in expanding Twitch’s fanbase, Twitch can provide a bigger spotlight for the smaller streamers to get their chance without stealing viewers from the big streams. Another popular method that the big streamers like to use (but typically doesn’t result in anything productive) is hosting. When a big streamer goes offline, he or she can host another streamer which basically tells his or her viewers to go and check this smaller stream out. Often it results in that smaller streamer having a few more views than normal for a short amount of time but ultimately after a day or two, that small streamer is back to nothing. What the smaller streamers need to do is propose some sort of Streamers Hub in which smaller streamers can go to who are looking to widen their fanbase. With this Streamer Hub, accessible through Twitch and put in a location where a lot of people can find it, smaller streamers will be able to support each other by mentioning people that others should check out or even creating content together. It could also be an area where bigger streamers go to suggest smaller streamers that deserve more popularity. Twitch also needs to make it easier for people to find small streams when they are live, as viewers have the option to click on what game it is that they want to see which then pulls up the streamers that are streaming that game in descending order depending on the amount of views they have. This means when someone clicks on what game they want to watch, the streamers with the bigger fanbase and higher views are the first ones to pop up. This is unfair for those who haven’t had their chance to shine yet. The options that have been presented will not negatively effect Twitch financially or create beef between the big streamers and Twitch.