Pokimane Calls Out Greedy Twitch Streamers

In the past few months, Pokimane has been even more open with her thoughts and ideas. In March, she revealed the negative side of streaming by sharing some nasty and toxic Twitch messages she's received. In April, she posted a Q&A session, in which she answered some of the most popular questions sent in by fans. Now, in May, she has addressed what she sees as greediness from some of her fellow Twitch streamers.

While watching a video titled "I Am Not Your Friend," which was posted by another popular Twitch streamer, Ludwig Ahgren, Pokimane had a lot to say. The video from Ludwig featured some of Ludwig's friends discussing the sociology/psychology behind streamers and viewers. And to be clear, Pokimane wasn't attacking Ludwig at all — in fact, she agreed with what the video was saying. 

Pokimane said that she believes streamers use on-screen sub counts as a "marketing tactic" to get money from viewers who are, generally, "people who make less money." She felt that, once you have 50k subscribers, posting a sub count and asking for viewers to get them to 51,000 subscribers is coming from a place of "greediness." She also said that she didn't think it was necessarily wrong for people to want to get ahead and earn money, but it's a completely different story when it comes to some people taking advantage of fans. 

One thing that both Ludwig's video and Pokimane discussed was parasocial relationships, which are defined as "one-sided relationships" and typically come about between celebrities and fans.

Streamers can abuse these relationships by asking for things, like more subs and donations when they don't need them. For example, Pokimane said her last time asking for subs was in between 2k and 3k. Some streamers, both Pokimane and Ludwig included, have instilled donation caps to prevent overzealous fans from donating outrageous numbers because of this kind of relationship.

Pokimane was quick to say that she wasn't calling any particular streamer out with her comments. In fact, she mentioned that she really hates talking about these kinds of topics, but it seemed like she couldn't stop herself from calling out this concerning trend.

However, streamer HasanAbi responded to Poki's comments, arguing that having a visible sub count is a lose-lose situation. He reasoned that some people will be mad and call streamers "fake" if they leave the count out, but others (like Pokimane) consider streamers to be greedy when they have it. Unfortunately for streamers, it doesn't look like this is going to be a situation with a clear right or wrong answer.