Living on Twitch: An Ethnography of Fatigue

This paper examines the lived experience of small Twitch streamers, particularly those in pre-affiliate and affiliate positions who sit between hobbyist and professional status. Its central argument is that academic attention has concentrated on famous or financially successful streamers, leaving smaller creators largely unexamined, and that their position in the livestreaming ecosystem produces distinct pressures of self-discipline, fatigue, and exploitation that cannot be explained by economic factors alone. The authors frame their contribution as a call for multipronged research approaches capable of understanding and advocating for these streamers.

The study draws on a triangulated qualitative design built around long-form interviews with more than 40 participants conducted over two years, each lasting between 45 and 200 minutes. These were supplemented by longitudinal follow-up surveys administered twelve months later, analytic autoethnographic reflection on the authors' own streaming activity, three years of ethnographic observation of livestreams, and attendance at TwitchCon between 2015 and 2017.

The findings center on fatigue as a recurring theme across interviews, survey responses, and autoethnographic data. Most participants described an escalating, persistent exhaustion driven by affiliate and partnership requirements, which demand progressively greater time and energy investment for approval. The platform's Achievements system, introduced in 2017, is identified as a mechanism that quantifies and reinforces consistent work schedules. The authors also report that this fatigue is intensified by harassment and systemic inequalities affecting women, neurodivergent people, disabled people, queer people, and people of color at markedly higher rates.

The paper concludes that streamers on the cusp of partnership perform sustained, structured labor under uncertain conditions, often with little or no financial return, while receiving little transparency from partnership programs. Although these creators do not readily present as laborers, the authors argue they bear burdens comparable to their partnered counterparts, and that their lives and struggles warrant urgent scholarly attention.