by Oisakhose Aghomo
Oisakhose is a Georgia peach by way of Nigeria, but she is currently based in Austin, Texas. She writes about arts, culture, climate and politics. She’s written for Austin Chronicle, YES Magazine, Civil Eats Magazine and more. In her free time, she loves experimenting with new recipes and hosting dinners with her friends.
Since she first started 8 years ago, 34-year-old streamer Natasha Walsh, also known as Barefoot Tasha, has amassed almost 44,000 followers on Twitch alongside several brand deals and partnerships. Yet, Walsh noted even as the streaming industry grows, questions about safety, mental health and pay equity linger in the air – questions which are driving her to retire.
“Here is the very honest truth that I will tell you… The space is not really curated towards Black women specifically. I have noticed over the last year or two, a lot of Black women just completely leaving this space,” Walsh said.
From gamers’ paradise to rivaling Hollywood
Twitch, an Amazon-owned, digital platform, is considered the benchmark for streaming alongside Youtube Live. When Walsh started in 2018, there was an average of 1.07 million concurrent viewers or unique viewers watching a stream at a given moment, on the platform. Many of them were focused on watching streamers – content creators that do live broadcasting – play videogames.
As of 2024, the number of concurrent viewers had more than doubled to 2.37 million, according to Business of Apps. Now, there’s streamers for every kind of interest — gaming, food, lifestyle and even reality. Even celebrities like comedian Kevin Hart are viewing streaming as a strong rival to Hollywood’s business.
Walsh mentioned she’s noticed that celebrities are making an effort “to keep their careers going” by collaborating with prominent big streamers like Kai Cenat, who just drew 300,000 concurrent viewers for his streaming marathon in May 2026, and iShowSpeed, who has 54 million subscribers on Youtube.
Walsh said that streaming provides “entertainment that is more authentic than what celebrity culture is,” as streamers capitalize off their personalities and niche interests to grow their audiences
Streaming’s appeal is particularly strong with digital natives – millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha who have grown up in the information age. Forty one percent of Twitch viewers are between the ages of 16 and 24, according to Business of Apps.
Bougie Black Chick is an emerging gaming streamer on Twitch with nearly 5,000 viewers. She initially got interested in the platform to help with grief.
“I was living in Los Angeles and unfortunately in 2022, my mother passed away very quickly from cancer. And two months after she died, I lost my father – cardiac arrest,” she said.
“I had already been in the Twitch space as a viewer. There were a lot of streamers that I watched. I kind of got into gaming that way. So I had a friend who… encouraged me to just kind of spend my time and immerse myself in the video game to kind of deal with my grief.”
Having gone from viewer to streamer, Bougie theorized that streaming platforms have become a sort of digital “third space” for people – a place that is not work and not home that people frequent to socialize with others.
“I think my stream is a place where people come to talk to me. They tell me about their day-to-day life. If they’re having a bad day, it’s where they come to get a little bit of a reprieve and a break from that for a few hours. It’s where people come to decompress after work,” she said.
Confronting a parasocial culture
Walsh mentioned many people flocked into the streaming universe during the
COVID-19 quarantine era looking for connection.
“Watching a stream kind of feels like a one-sided FaceTime call, you know? So it brought a lot of comfort to people who couldn’t leave their house,” she said.
But the relationship between the viewer and the streamer has some added pressures.
“They want to know everything about you. They want to know everything you’re doing… Now you feel like you have to talk about your life because you want to fill that dead air in the stream. Then everybody is going to criticize your life and everything you do,” Walsh said.
Twitch has been under fire before for its response to behavior and campaigns targeted at users from minority backgrounds, notably in 2021 when Black and LGBTIA+ streamers were swarmed with bots spewing hateful language.
Bougie has also had instances of dealing with crude behavior on stream.
“Twitch allows you to change your screen name. Somebody decided to take an account that they had for a few years (since 2020) and change their screen name…they took my profile picture and put it on there and they made the screen name ‘bougie black chick fuck me’ and they came into my chat and made very disgusting, lewd comments at me on that screen name,” she explained.
And the issues aren’t just with their own personal safety. Bougie said she is currently dealing with an impersonator.
“They’re (impersonators) mostly impersonating partnered (Twitch recognized) streamers and I’m getting constant messages from people letting me know, asking if it’s me,” she said.
Streams are live and filled with interactions like emotes (emoticons) and chat messages, and it moves so quickly that moderators have now become a necessary part of the ecosystem.
Moderators monitor what’s happening in the chat while the streamer is performing, sometimes alerting the streamers to important interactions or even removing users displaying inappropriate behaviors from the stream.
Tyelr Jackson, 24, and Jyetori Copper, 31, are both unpaid moderators for Ciarratonin, a 27-year-old gaming, beauty and lifestyle streamer on Twitch and Youtube.
Jackson credited the streaming community for allowing him to “open up” and make new friends. He acknowledged that moderating can be a large responsibility that requires trust.
“As a mod, you really can see a person’s whole channel log, private history. You got to have faith in somebody that you want to make a mod,” Jackson said.
Copper started moderating for Ciarratonin as a viewer in her community, drawn to the streamer because she was trying to find other Black women in the space.
“It’s basically holding down the fort, protecting (Ciarratonin) from weirdos. Personally, because Ciarratonin is a Black woman, I like to take it upon myself to make sure that anything that I find weird is (taken out),” she said.
Make the most of it while you can
Ciarratonin is a full-time streamer and content creator, so she makes her living through streaming platforms and sponsorships with brands like e.l.f. Cosmetics, TUMS and Adobe.
She noted that although companies are rushing to capitalize off ad space on streams, there are still no real regulations on fair pay and fair contracts.
“A lot of us actually like a lot of Black women in the space, we’ll go to each other and we’ll be like, ‘Hey, like I’m getting paid this much. How are you, how much are you getting paid?’” she said.
She credited gaming streamer X Mira Mira for being the first person to teach her buzzwords that are important in contracts – especially to understand ownership.
“She was, like, ‘that needs to be negotiated, like, immediately.’ (Now) I don’t sign anything in perpetuity, unless it’s, like, you’re giving me a bag for that,” Ciarratonin said.
Bougie Black Chic recommended that new streamers entering this space think about maximizing the opportunities.
“I always tell people, if you’re going to do this, if you’re making good money off of this, stack your money. But don’t assume that these platforms and streaming is always going to be here. The bubble on this could burst in 10 years, ” she said.
“So if you’re going to go full speed, go full speed on it now and do the best that you can with it and make the most of it as you can.”
Walsh acknowledged that she has had some great career opportunities from working with brands like HyperX and Epic Games to organizing streaming events with other streamers.
Yet, the race to greatness has taken a toll on her mental health.
“I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I’ve never really had a good grasp on having a good mental health while doing the content creation. You are literally in a state of needing to perform more and better every time…because you always need more views,” she said.
Walsh hosted her final streams the week of May 25, 2026.
Walsh said, “I eventually let go of the wanting, the needing more and found a space where I was content with where I’m at. And if I grow, I grow. If I don’t, I don’t. And honestly, that was through God, through letting it go.”