Okay I’m actually getting quite annoyed because it doesn’t seem like you’re listening to us and just pushing these changes no matter what so let me take a step back and try to understand why this change is absolutely necessary so immediately and share my own thoughts on the motivations for this change…
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Viewers struggle to understand what elements of a stream are – and aren’t – Extensions. - Why is this a bad thing?? A great extension should blur these lines but in a clean and seamless way
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Viewers have difficulty comprehending an Extension’s purpose or how to interact with it. - This is from bad/early Extension design and UX, not an inherent Twitch component design
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Extension positioning is different from channel to channel. - Okay, organizing components better might be great but streamers use the screenspace differently so shouldn’t the most effective positioning be up to the streamer? If only we could preview this positioning properly…
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Broadcasters are unsure how Extensions will appear on their stream and how viewers will be able to interact with them. - I explained this before about how we can’t preview components properly unless we go live on-stream to see it and then have to refresh the stream each time we move the little square on a separate configuration page that’s supposed to represent the component of whatever shape/size
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In 2017 (Extension launch) everyone wanted multiple components but 2018, only 11-12% of streams had multiple components - How many truly, really great and innovative components have even been developed so far?!
All of these motivations seem to boil down to components still not being used effectively and properly by both the developers and streamers, and therefore making it a bad experience for viewers, but it isn’t as if streamers are forced to use these extensions, and maybe the reason most streamers still only use one component is because they still only feel comfortable with familiar names like Twitch Prime or Streamlabs, but if that’s not the case then I’d also love to hear more about that. Basically, it seems like as developers, we’re still noobs with Extension development and haven’t made good use of Video Components yet and rather than guidelines and best practices / examples for what is working and what isn’t for components, you’re trying to do more work on Twitch’s side to cripple components’ potential and create more work for developers that are already invested in Extensions, and this doesn’t make any sense to me. And sure, you’ll be having a dev update Q&A next Wed but we already have less than 2 months from this launching so by Wed, that Q&A would just be a “here’s what we’re doing” and not a “here’s what we’re proposing”. Could you please help me understand better why you’re trying to make more work for both your team and for the rest of us where the reasons aren’t because streamers can’t properly place & configure the component or because we haven’t made compelling enough component Extensions yet for streamers to want as many cool and helpful components as they originally wanted at launch?