MR_SLINI couldn't stand to read the whole thing but I did have a discuss with other staff members about this.
While I understand your points and have a personal interest in growing TF2 myself, my main focus in being a mod on this site is to facilitate the adding of streams and contributing to the competitive community in the best way that I can. Before your start criticizing the way that we do things, you need to first understand where we came from.
Enigma runs the site but he created this request forum pretty early on to field responses from the community regarding how to make site improvements but also to receive feedback from users if they needed help with anything. Once streams started getting bigger within TF2, more people wanted to be added on. Requests to have streams added would sit there for days or even weeks with no response, and it's hard to blame Enigma for not processing those requests when there are a million other things for him to do.
So I stepped up to the plate and began easing the process. I don't want to both dealing with the questionable streams -- I only wanted to add the streams that were VERY obviously supposed to be on the sidebar. I let Enigma take care of the questionable streams, or the streams that may or may not make the bar. It's gotten to the point where it is more of a grey area now, and yes, it's hard to tell which streams should go up and which ones shouldn't, but it's ultimately a judgment call on my part and if I'm not involved then nobody will ever look at the stream request.
Why do we bother limiting the number of streams on the sidebar? Why don't we add all streams? This is a TF2 website and they're playing TF2 right? Well, it's a little more complicated than that. When we first started out, I literally added 100% of all streams. However, it soon became apparent that we needed to limit that. We wanted TFTV to have a focus on the competitive aspects of TF2 whether it be 6v6 or 9v9 Highlander, but we also widened the net to include jumping and surfing as well. Having streams on the sidebar that didn't feature that kind of content seemed counter to our objectives. Secondly, Enigma came back to me and told me that I was bogging down the Twitch API that the site uses by adding so many streams. That API refreshes the number of users actively watching each stream, and if there's too many streams then I suppose that gets slowed down (that's my understanding of it).
So that's why we limit streams. The fairest way to determine whether or not people made the bar was to evaluate 1) if they streamed TF2, 2) if they streamed consistently so as to not take up a slot on the refresh list that would never be used, and 3) if they were a member of the competitive TF2 community then we wanted to support their streaming efforts.
When it comes to a guy like TheWoundedStapler, yeah he's a great entertainer, but it's not furthering our goals of supporting competitive TF2 streaming. People will surely visit TFTV and be directed to his pubbing/newb content, but I see no way that he would direct people from his pubbing content over to the competitive content that TFTV focuses on. In fact, both his stream and his YouTube channel focus on a multitude of games, not just TF2, and so while he may be in a TF2 phase now, he will likely not be in the future. Lastly, it's important to me that we don't just add every great streaming entertainer out there. Why not add Shibby or Jerma985 to the sidebar? Doesn't he entertain thousands of people with their TF2 content? Well sure they do but their audiences and goals do not align with those of TFTV. It simply doesn't make sense.
I'm all for having a discussion about this but be reasonable here.
Wow, I did not know the history of this website and how it's run, that's some deep insight there! On the note of me being mentioned in your post, TF2 is always going to have a special place in my heart, even though I might be playing a multitude of games, i'll still be rolling out TF2 content and streaming frequently now that I realized how fun it is! On top of that, me being a pub/newb TF2 player can and will attract a lot of attention to this site, now that's IF I go big haha, at the rate that i'm moving it's steady and healthy but there's still that off chance of being featured on sites like this that can increase that chance of going big and most of the community seems to approve of my content so if anything, people watching my videos can see how much genuine fun i'm having with this game and it'll bring them over to this website where they'll find competitive content, thus improving your long term traffic.
I'm not much of a numbers guy here, but i'm assuming that if my videos start to peak past 1000s of views and my stream gets a bit more watched, you'll be seeing people who've never played TF2 suddenly want to try it out and maybe even pursue a pro scene. I have been lurking on these forums and posts without an account for a while, I finally had the guts to make an account and show some of my material and it took off, but the fact that the forum was able to attract me is a real life example as to how people who've never played the game but are interested in this genre are going to react!
But like I said before multiple times, i'm not mad/angry at you haha, I appreciate all the work you're putting into your job and at the end of the day, rules are rules! I guess what everyone is asking including myself is, why not put up a streamer whose so heavily wanted by the community as a whole rather than putting up streamers who don't even stream TF2 most of the time!