I may be only a viewer, but this decision to impose such a severely strict limit on Highlights strikes me as bull-headed, short-sighted, and completely disrespectful of the content creators on Twitch.

Every single person involved in this decision, from suggesting it to approving it, does not understand how the community of creators uses this website. A devastating decision that will wipe over a decade of history for some people and communities. Not only was the decision itself terrible, but the time period before erasure alone is not near enough for most creators to transfer that amount of content.

You should be leaning more into pushing this archived content to the community, make it more searchable, browsable, and watchable, not driving your creators away -to- those other services.

this doesn't seem like a great idea on its face. especially with so relatively short a notice. giving only 2 months to back up things, one at a time, is needless urgency and stress on already streamers & editor's schedules and resources, also especially so with no mass download/upload feature to use for this.

This is about to be the most devastating decision that Twitch has ever gone through with.

There are countless people who are in situations where they can't logistically mass export thousands of hours of footage in such a short period of time. Streamers have even passed away and their entire digital footprint will be wiped from existence with this sweeping change.

I don't understand the push Twitch has made for video uploads and collections when you cannot feasibly use them with the looming hour limit. It just strikes me as out of touch and baffling on a platform like Twitch.

I TRULY hope this gets backtracked, because it absolutely will be a deal breaker for many people to finally seek out other platforms to use instead.

This reads to me like yet another choice made by a greedy higher up that doesn't really understand how this will impact the site. This has to be one of the stupider ideas they've come up with recently. *******.

The loss of this much digitally stored history is a tragedy. Please don't go through with this Twitch!
Not only will this negatively impact the most active communities and streamers, but it will also drive many to other platforms. Why would you want to push streamers and their audiences to Youtube?
The amount of damage this will do to Twitch is immeasurable. Please rethink this storage limit!

Twitch sure is trying really hard to belittle the impact of this claiming it only affects a tiny percentage of creators... but uh... hey Twitch have you considered for even 5 seconds that there is a huge amount of overlap between that tiny percentage and the top performers on your platform? And that many people who discover these streamers later may want to go back and watch older playthroughs they have?

Case in point, last year I played the DOS version of a game that someone else had played the original version of on PC-88 4 years earlier on Twitch, which is incredibly rare to find on an English-speaking broadcast. That playthrough will just be completely gone.

For full-time streamers, 100 hours is probably barely 2 weeks of content at most.

For speedrunners, 100 hours may not cover all of their world records / personal bests (especially for longer genres like RPGs).

You are literally telling your most valuable streamers that you do not want them on your platform.

And don't play the "it turns out to not help discoverability" card. That's on you and your shoddy implementation, yet you're punishing your best creators for it.

On top of that, you haven't offered anything useful in the way of tooling to resolve this, e.g. a way to mass-download VODs, or a way to flag which highlights/uploads to KEEP (and count that towards the 100h limit) rather than forcing everyone to go through possibly thousands of pages in the video producer and delete one by one.

Maybe stop allowing decrees to come down from clueless overpaid CxOs that clearly have no idea how the internet works and yet are somehow allowed to collect an unjustifiably enormous paycheck at a *checks notes* internet services company? I bet if you fired them it'd save you more money than destroying the entire history of "less than 0.5% of streamers".

Sorry I didn't choose "safety" as a category, I chose features. I can't see a way to move it, hopefully a staff member can move it for me. Not sure what happened there. 🥺

We don't care about discoverability or the algorithm; we care about having an already-discovered streamer's entire archived history not erased. Speedrun.com is about to become 90% or more dead links. Decades of content just... gone. A digital library of Alexandria. If Twitch has any humanity at all, they must see how monstrous this is. Even if they don't, even the most soulless executive must understand that driving away Twitch's entire userbase and very reason for existence will NOT make number go up.

i am not even an affiliate and i don't even have 100 followers at the moment. and even i'm over the limit. it's just a bunch of disco elysium vods and a few other streams i've saved for friends. to say that it's "only 0.5% of streamers" is so silly, probably inflating the total number of streamers with the people who streamed to 1 viewer and quit forever. everyone i know who has ever actually put any time and effort into their streams also used highlights to keep memorable moments. also this new limit came into effect IMMEDIATELY. it's already impossible to make new highlights if you're over the limit which has affected EVERY STREAMER THAT I KNOW.

As someone who has left my highlights and VODs only on Twitch, this feels like an active case of "bad idea, but who will stop us?" As everyone has reiterated, this will get rid of years and years of history, and it actively punishes the folks who use the highlight features and stayed loyal to Twitch. I hope they'll reconsider, especially because it's not like they're backed by one of the biggest storage and cloud infrastructures ever-- oh wait, they are!

If this choice isn't remedied and reconsidered, at this rate I'll just move all my VODs to YouTube and on the off-chance when I stream, I'll do it there instead.

Twitch needs to give users a reason to stay, not a reason to leave.

1) People have died, and erasing these highlights *will* erase public memorials. 2) historic world records are stored in highlights, so erasing them will erase history. In all this is a HUGE L for twitch, and will incentivize people to move to twitch's competitors. It's bad for the users, and HORRIBLE for investors

Twitch is literally toying with the idea of erasing over a decade of history from their platform, this is extraordinarily shortsighted on their part and, if we're being honest, only serves to make streaming on YouTube a more appealing option.

and also like, if it's too long for a clip, peeps use highlights!
this doesn't make sense, I don't care if it's cause "they seem to do less", but they still do get views...
and UPLOADS TOO? my goodness... this is just... so... frustrating.

As someone who loves long content and also speedruns, why does twitch want me to go to an other platform to upload and watch them. this doesn't make any sense to me. Specially if I look like the progression I (or other) make through highlights. I just don't get it :/