> Twitch [...]

People donate to/tip streamers because they perceive that it will strengthen their parasocial relationship with the streamer in question, and more generally because they're watching a performance where tipping the performer(s) is directly encouraged and culturally normalized. It follows that for e.g. a writer to make money from this model, they have to either a) turn the act of writing itself into a performance compelling enough to extract donations/tips from an audience, or b) perform on stream when they aren't writing.

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Given how competitive streaming already is (most streamers seem to report working long hours just to maintain their audience, however large or small, and burnout is common), I don't think it's unfair to equate streaming with more or less a full time job. If you aren't writing on stream, then, you've got your day job (presumably, for 99% of writers and early-career streamers), plus your streaming^[1], plus actually writing. It feels untenable to me, and it's also wandering further from "making money as a writer" as an abstract concept---at what point are you making money as a streamer/performer instead, and how important does your writing end up being to whatever success you find?

So I think we can say option b) is not a good replacement for making money off your writing directly, by selling published written works to people who want to read them. It introduces many extra steps, requires a skillset many writers simply don't have and shouldn't be expected to have (performance), and finding meaningful success will likely marginalize your actual writing practice.

As seems to be the case with many "variety streamers", you'll probably just end up playing video games in a crop top and cat ears.^[2]

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Option a), actually writing on stream, will not be an option for most writers who haven't allowed the nature of that performance to erode the quality, complexity, and/or volume of their work. Writing is a full brain thing that requires you to hold a thread of complex context in your mind (a bit like programming, actually), and it's not visual, which is going to make an audiovisual performance centered around it that much more difficult to execute well.

Seriously, imagine pair programming except it's a thousand people looking over your shoulder and your livelihood depends on making each one of them believe you're their friend.

I know writing streamers do exist. Right now on Twitch the viewer counts are very small, but I'll check them out later because I'm curious. However, the fact that some of them exist doesn't change any of the above; the vast majority of writers aren't doing it.

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> Richard Bachman

From the linked Wiki page:

> King concludes that he has yet to find an answer to the "talent versus luck" question, as he felt he was outed as Bachman too early to know. The Bachman book Thinner (1984) sold 28,000 copies during its initial run—and then ten times as many when it was revealed that Bachman was, in fact, King.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what point you're getting at by invoking Bachman. Writing is a talent and a skill, and King is supremely talented and skilled at it. From a 'determinism' angle, it makes complete sense that he could write a book under a pseudonym, get it published, and see some amount of success on the market. The average debut author starting at his level could expect the same.

However, the average debut author is not at his level. King has (famously) done a lot of writing, and it shows. One has to wonder how that would have gone if the only way for him to find success as an author was to run a successful Twitch channel at the same time.

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tl;dr: Streaming is not writing, and they go together like oil and water. Other media might integrate better with audiovisual performance, e.g. drawing. Either way, losing rights to their work will strip independent creators of important avenues to profiting from it.

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> There are also countless other examples of things like DRM free products selling just fine in spite of the fact you can get a byte identical copy for free in about 2 seconds with a torrent. The point I make with this is that people are willing to part with more than enough money for people to make a living off of, even when they are not coerced into doing so.

It's naive to think torrenting is an accessible option for the average person. It would probably take me hours spread across multiple days to get my wife set up for it, for instance.

"DRM Free" content, unless I'm mistaken, still allows the original creator(s) to maintain the copyright. This prevents big distribution channels that are accessible to normal consumers (e.g. Kindle) from selling the work without giving the creator(s) a cut. If I publish a novel "DRM Free" in some indie-ish context, I can still sell it through other channels, and I have some recourse if somebody rips it off. Not so, if copyright is dissolved.

> coerced

This word choice is totally absurd. Nobody is being coerced, with a few notable exceptions (students who need certain overpriced textbooks to graduate, etc.). Is it coercion if I list an old lawnmower on Craigslist for $100, and when somebody shows up to buy it I expect them to pay?

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^[1] Obviously, hypothetically, you expect streaming to pay your bills. Bootstrapping an audience big enough for that is the problem; if you already have a following big enough to make a living on, maybe you will have the time and creative energy to write on the side to do a little writing, but this goes back to the Kickstarter problem: you have to build your platform first.

^[2] Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it isn't writing.