Jo-dell Brodhagen, a Dlive streamer and comedian from Ontario, said she had increasingly seen the site cater to far-right members by quickly addressing their questions and complaints while silencing longtime streamers who raised questions about their racist statements. She said Dlive favored white supremacists because it saw “the numbers and the money that’s being spent on these streamers.” She said she planned to leave the site.
Dlive’s growth has been stark, analysts said. The site reported five million active users in April 2019. On Wednesday, more than 150,000 people watched Dlive streams at the same time, one of the site’s busiest days ever, and more than 95 percent of those views went to the far-right streamers, according to Genevieve Oh, a livestreaming analyst.
Dlive was started by Charles Wayn and Cole Chen, young entrepreneurs who studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Wayn leads the company; Mr. Chen left it “a long time ago,” said Dlive, which is based in Silicon Valley.
The site was built on so-called blockchain technology created by another start-up, Lino, which raised $20 million from investors in 2018. Dlive initially positioned itself as a video game streaming platform that would not take a cut of its streamers’ incomes, as Twitch and others do. That policy changed this year.
In April 2019, Dlive scored a top-tier streamer when Felix Kjellberg, a YouTube star better known as PewDiePie, said he would stream his play on Dlive. (He returned to YouTube last year.)
But by late 2019, Dlive was “on its last legs,” according to a longtime streamer, Nikola Jovanovic. That was when BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file sharing service, stepped in to buy Dlive. BitTorrent’s parent company, Tron, is owned by Justin Sun, a Chinese cryptocurrency multimillionaire.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-mob.html
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.