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Tickiwaw
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127 votes
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I wanted to comment on this, especially given the recent uptick in interest in my post here.
When myself and many others streamed in the Art category 10ish years ago, it was primarily traditional art. Back then, it was easy to grow a community. Raiding other art streams, especially ones we hadn’t visited before, almost always led to real conversations. Discussing mediums, techniques, sharing socials, and showing each other’s work. While a follow-back was common courtesy, their viewers would often follow too if they liked your art that was displayed on the screen of the person you'd raid.
That’s how many of us mapped our growth. We planned which streams we’d visit, who we’d raid, and even built dedicated scenes in our streaming software specifically to highlight raiders and showcase their artwork. It felt collaborative, constructive, and community driven.
At some point, traditional art streams stopped being the majority in the Art category.
That shift made raiding significantly harder. Traditional artists could easily continue drawing or painting while showcasing a raider’s work, but for many digital artists, their screen is their workspace. Putting up someone else’s art often meant stopping their own work entirely. Over time, that dynamic quietly changed raid culture.
Eventually, raids stopped being met with follows. Communities stopped growing. Streamers who were on a steady upward path, some nearly making a living from streaming alone, saw that momentum disappear. Many of their viewers, often middle-aged or older, slowly drifted away as they struggled to find the kind of daily art streams they once enjoyed.
Art is already a difficult space. Streaming art, creating YouTube videos, and selling work is impossible without a community. Personally, I would only ever sell artwork when people watched me create it or when my viewers could hear my passion. In the end, its not so much about the art, or the artist, but the story of behind the work and its creation. The same was true for dozens of other traditional art streamers who no longer stream at all due to lack of discoverability and community. Even creators with tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers, people who once could succeed on Twitch, now find the Art category largely unusable.
It may not seem obvious from the outside, but traditional artists and digital artists, and the audiences that watch them, tend to be very different. That’s not a negative statement, just an observation from years of experience. When I’ve streamed in Makers & Crafting, it actually felt much closer to the old days of art streaming. But whenever I return to the Art category, I’m reminded that traditional art there has effectively disappeared and with it, my community.
Starting over is hard. Starting over when you’re never seen is harder.
That’s why I strongly believe a dedicated Traditional Art category isn’t just my nostalgia for a different era of twitch, it’s necessary for myself and people like me to exist on the platform.
Tickiwaw
shared this idea
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I could get in board with better raid systems. Back when i streamed multiple times a week, whenever I would raid I'd get atleast 1 follow. Raiding is sometimes the only real way to grow your community that isn't just luck based. Having a better way to manage that would be a positive. Just have to make sure twitch doesn't do classic twitch things and reccomend you raid large channels and hide the small streams that you could share more conversation with