The Twitch hot tub meta has reached new heights with a green-screen booty scene, and I'm mostly just upset by how inefficient it is

Twitch has had, let's call it a complicated relationship with adult content over the past few months. In case you're completely uninitiated, the rough timeline is as follows: back in 2021, the «Hot Tub Meta» was born—wherein streamers would rake in viewers by streaming in, you guessed it, a hot tub.  Twitch played ball after a brief controversy wherein a hot tub streamer was demonetised without warning, despite playing the game to the letter of the platform's law at the time. 

Then, late last year, Twitch decided to get a little more relaxed about the whole thing by permitting «artistic nudity» on the platform. This lasted 48 hours before Twitch decided actually, no, no wait, nevermind, that was a bad move, and shut the whole thing down.

The arms race between sexy entrepreneurs and Twitch is back with a vengeance in 2024—first up, Twitch had to step in and add implied nudity to its list of sexy no-nos, after streamers were bending the rules with black bars that gave the impression of nakedness.

«While most streamers have labelled this content appropriately with the sexual themes label and are wearing clothing behind the object or outside the camera frame, for many users, the thumbnails of this content can be disruptive to their experience on Twitch.» Which… okay, sure. But I'd argue that if you have the sexual themes label active, you're probably okay with having your experience on Twitch disrupted by sexual themes. Isn't that the entire point of turning it on?

Following that, in what I can only describe as a divine act of creative inspiration, streamer Morgpie (thanks, Kotaku) has levelled up her game. Her butt is a green screen. Humankind and machine drift ever-closer, like Icarus donning wax wings to soar close to the sun.

I’ve officially seen it all