i don’t really “get” twitch, but in retrospect i can kinda understand how this blew up. there were a lotta hooks to draw people in:
the fundraiser was started in part to spite a semi-famous Internet Asshole, who had just tried to get a children’s charity partially defunded. so it was fun as hell to help out charity AND spite him at the same time
said Internet Asshole then proceeded to throw a full-on transphobic shit-fit, which made supporting the fundraiser even MORE fun, because he was so clearly Mad Online about it
hbomb had previously made a very in-depth video about why he liked speedrunning, which helped introduce parts of his audience who might not be familiar (like me) to the concept of speedruns before he started the stream
a good chunk of that video was about how much he hated donkey kong 64 in particular, so his audience would be interested in watching him suffer live on stream for days on end (beaver bother beaver bother beaver bother)
the stream was at the intersection of three solid bases who are all, to varying degrees, really good at fundraising and word-of-mouth advertising: lefttube, speedrunners, and the online queer community. i mean, say what u want about online-left chapo dorks, but we are pretty good at posting. hence, getting fucking AOC on a twitch livestream in less time than it takes to 101% dk64
honestly? it’s really fuckin’ neat to see how much power we can generate by fucking Posting. i’m amazed how much this blew up, and i really hope that we can learn some lessons from this about how to, like, organize and fundraise and sh*t like that. this was really, really cool and interesting. spite and solidarity are two of the most powerful forces in the world, man.