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Please no, I love Twitch chat the way it is. If streamers want to moderate chat some way, let them do it, but I really hope Twitch doesn't enforce one-size fits all topdown moderation rule. That's how you kill vibrant communities and subcultures who are the top 10% who make Twitch fun, and streams' finances sound. If you find memes and jokes crude for some stream, go to some other and support their streams.

So many games and communities have been killed by topdown approach to content moderation.

They need to provide tooling to enable moderation, not necessarily enforce it. Forsen's chat isn't going to change, you will still get your gachi on, but official tourneys need a way to stop the insane racism. Look at TerrenceM's comments about how he hoped his parents didn't see the chat while they were rooting for their son in his first competition - it shouldn't be that way, and Twitch (and Blizz/Playheartstone) is failing streamers and competitors by not providing anything in this area.

It is difficult because even if you ban racist words, people will still find a way. The old BrainSlug emote is a perfect example of this (for those who don't know, it was the face of a black streamer. He was so sick of people using an image of his face to be racist that the emote was changed to a Futurama-esque actual brain slug).

It's tricky. If someone in chat is spamming ANELE ITS JUST A CLOCK BRO ANELE, it certainly has racial connotations, but is the statement itself racist? I don't know. I don't like it but I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable with someone being banned from chat because of t.

But do they find a way that is still relevant to the public?

I doubt he would be as embarrassed if commenters spammed 88, as opposed to more openly, well known racist terms. If they want to speak in a secret code, then there's already a long history of racists doing that which isn't unique to online.

>ANELE ITS JUST A CLOCK BRO ANELE

Realistically how different is this than people going on /b/ just to type the N word? MingLee spam whenever there is an Asian on screen, TriHard HE SAID IT when someone says 'nei ga' in Mandarin on a Chinese cast or ANELE spam when someone of Indian/Middle East descent is on screen etc. etc.

Surely it's a conscious choice of companies if they don't have moderation, when ordinary streamers manage to set themselves up advanced bots? I'm not saying it's not a good idea for twitch to provide bots out of the box. But if PlayHearthstone can organise a tournament, stage it, and broadcast it, I don't believe they're unable to deal with the chat.

  If streamers want to moderate chat some way, let
  them do it

In a match between two world-class players, one of whom was putting all their attention on the game and one of whom was splitting their attention with chat moderation, wouldn't the guy who was concentrating win every time?

Most streamers have fans/volunteers who are given moderation powers. No need for micromanaging while they're actually playing.

I hope Twitch chat never becomes more of a police state than it already is. Streamers consistently demonstrate the ability to create the chat environments they want with the scarce tools Twitch has provided them. That seems good enough to me.

The problem you are describing is easily solved by simply joining a different chat room while watching the stream. For example: I'm a member of more than one "<streamer name> civil-chat" chat room which I can hop over to if the main stream chat is a bit too cancerous for my veteran eyes.

Echoing sibling comment sentiments about enforcing a top-down moderation policy: it's a bad idea. One of the most important things that watching Twitch and playing online games with notoriously toxic communities has taught me is that fun is unmotivated.

If you don't understand how someone derives pleasure from an action you find repulsive, it's because you're not meant to. Stop considering other's motivation and suddenly it becomes much easier to enjoy yourself, now that you're not raging at how dumb everyone is.

I hope Twitch chat never becomes more of a police state than it already is.

This isn't a great analogy. Twitch doesn't use physical violence against people chatting on their website. The normalization of racism and bigotry through ironic edginess has much more potential to cause real-world violence than chat moderation.

There's nothing wrong with the analogy (except being dramatic).

edit: this isn't agreeing with the parent poster, as a police state is about the level of control, not whether violence is used which is a fact of policing anyway.

Your complaint is the equivalent of striding into a concert for 12-20 year olds, and then complaining about the loud noise.

You've got to consider the target audience for video games like HearthStone, as well as the amount of users that will be there.

No amount of "moderation" will solve that. Ever. If you expect a good conversation with tens of thousands of people at once... you need to adjust your expectations.

> Your complaint is the equivalent of striding into a concert for 12-20 year olds, and then complaining about the loud noise.

Certainly you're right that if I go watch a random stream of a match full of teenagers I shouldn't expect the chat to be mature.

But should I expect that chat to be racist, or sexist? Should I resign myself to that? I don't think so. There is a difference between a conversation that is immature and a conversation that is, say, racist.

"No, it's the children." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYAuR5bkIlQ

Second part of my post covered the second part of your response:

Try moderating, in real life, 10000 people talking at once.

Impossible.

If you're just there for the game: watch the game and hide the chat (there's a button right next to it).

If you're there for a good conversation: you're in the wrong place. There's 10000 people there.

But I didn't say I expected the conversation to be good, I said I expected it not to be racist. This isn't really any different from what occurs at stadiums for club sports. If you start loading shouting racist abuse whilst spectating at a soccer match in the UK you can expect to be escorted from the premises and given a match ban.

Does Twitch have a policy against racism in their chat? Yes. Do they enforce it? No. I'm not suggesting they moderate 10,000 people talking at once: I'm suggesting they target their enforcement to encourage people to stop...which is what's done in real-life sports today.

Racism is not illegal.

Even if it was, citizens of China and Europe (e.g. France) are far more racist than the United States and no law can change that.

Plenty of countries have laws against different types of racist behavior. Sweden has them for some types of speech. A rare exception to freedom of speech in our laws.

I would work on fixing those draconian laws before going after Twitch for letting kids blow off steam with their peers while watching games.

You're free to just ignore the users that are being racist though. You just click their name and hit a button - you'll never see their messages again.

That's the big difference with an in-person event.

Anyway, I'd rather have 10,000 racist people in my Twitch chat than one special person who has to be guarded from hearing anything that offends them. People who constantly need to be guarded are doing way more harm than good for society IMO.

Also, that type of moderation never works the way it's intended. I've been to plenty of sporting events where I've heard racist remarks from people that didn't get in trouble for it.

It's not impossible at all, lots of channels with many thousands of viewers do a decent job of moderation. The problem is twitch doesn't care about moderation and has shitty tools. That problem will go away once it's clear that cancerchat costs them more $/views than it attracts.

Different audience. 10k kids watching a Hearthstone tournament is different than a carefully cultivated, grown-over-the-years audience of daily viewers. You ban one to ten people each stream and you're golden.

E-Sports have global marketing teams that drive viewership. Having to ban thousands... no matter what the tools, there will be collateral damage.

Only way to fix that is to charge for chat attendance - an option Twitch already offers with subscriber only mode.

> Different audience.

Sometimes but not always.

> Having to ban thousands

This is a massive exaggeration, the number of people driving cancerous chat is quite small.

> Only way to fix that

Citation needed. It seems to me there are plenty of things twitch could do to contain chat cancer besides subscriber mode.

> Sometimes but not always.

Always. Even if it's just because this crowd is anonymous, and didn't have to pay to gain access. So they behave differently because there's 0 investment.

> This is a massive exaggeration, the number of people driving cancerous chat is quite small.

It's not. I moderate channels with between 10 and 12500 concurrent viewers. Around 5000 there is a turning point where chat becomes difficult to manage, and above 7500 it becomes nigh impossible unless you have subscriber only mode on, which effectively cuts the audience down to a small percentage.

For reference, have a look at channels like https://www.twitch.tv/nl_kripp (not one where I moderate) which is full of constant spam. That's also how the hate and racism filled chats work. One person does it, and if they get banned, there's EXTRA incentive for others to post the same spammy lines. Herd mentality takes over.

> Citation needed.

Alright, perhaps not the only way, but the only one I've seen work so far, in similar situations. Would love to hear the other ways though.

Currently, "charging for chat access" is the only method Twitch offers that actually works. It ensures people have something invested in the channel which you can take away.

The only other way is censorship, manually (admin/moderator corruption is a huge issue already for Twitch) and programatically (this WILL go wrong too).

.edit: coming back and thinking about this a bit - perhaps there's a way to only allow accounts "in good standing" (above X rating) to post in these chatrooms. How X is determined would be up for discussion.

Thanks for continuing this discussion, it's brough me some light that I might use elsewhere by making me think through this more than I otherwise would've!

> There is a difference between a conversation that is immature and a conversation that is, say, racist.

You seem to be oblivious to teenagers using racism, or really anything that is considered offensive, for the sake of being edgy, whether they share those opinions or merely don't care either way.

This is quite evident in 4chan culture. For example "nigger" is used anywhere from positive ("my nigger", "nigger earned his bike") to a catch-all insult ("fuck off nigger"). Similarly the suffix -fag (from faggot) is used in the same way -person could be used. newfag is an insult to throw at people who stick out from the crowd due to lack of subcultural knowledge while drawfag is a neutral to positive term describing anonymous artists creating original content with their skills.

Whenever business and banking is the topic then the involved people will be called jews, regardless of whether they're actually of jewish descent.

"two nukes were not enough" will even be used on boards that actively consume japanese culture to express a very low opinion of something particular.

I don't get why people get so worked up about racist and sexist insults specifically. They are just easy to use because they target large groups. Simply calling people retarded is a classic, but yet far fewer people bat an eye over it using disabled people as a negative. Country stereotypes are also a thing. Anyone with brown skin or near-eastern clothing will be called a mudslime (muslim). Why? Because the group is large. Nobody is going to use satanist as an insult, simply because the group of satanists is tiny and nobody will care to get worked up to defend them.

I'm not saying there are zero racists among the audience. It's just that there is a non-zero and potentially large fraction of what you're perceiving as racism is actually just people spamming things for shits and giggles. In other words, it's immature. It's easy because it offends many people.

To adapt hanlon's razor: Never attribute to hatred that which is adequately explained by indifference and edginess.

You're right, but so what? "Go be edgy elsewhere" is a valid response.

Have you considered that twitch might be that "elsewhere" and people who wish for politically correct chat are perceived as invasive species?

On a less confrontational note, I think options for moderation should lie with the individual streamers, not twitch as a platform. But then people call on the streamers to use those tools and at that point I think it should be noted that faulting them over "not doing enough" is silly. Moderating chat is not their raison d'être. And it's just chat. Maybe they are just indifferent or have other priorities than those who demand a different atmosphere.

At some point chat starts moving so fast that people can't have decent conversations anyway, at that point its value drops a lot where someone might simply not care.

And for the viewers twitch probably should make it easier to disable and hide chat completely. If they deem it not useful or even offensive it should take just a single click to remove it and use that space for the video instead.

I'm aware that some places regard nonwhite people as an "invasive species", but that is normally recognised as the unironic racism it really is.

How is that related to my post? I did not refer to race in this context. Of course I am assuming that white people can also wish for or demand PC chat and thus this is not a race-specific or minority issue.

I'm talking about website (sub-)communities. Different places have different standards, and frictions between communities can be seen as a turf conflict, an invasion.

This is an underhanded reply

> before I can be convinced this is a good thing.

And that's the beauty of it, they don't need to convince you. They're already winning. Your suggestions would kill the soul of the platform.

Twitch chat is what makes Twitch so enjoyable. Moderation is probably the surest way to kill what makes it so great.

Perhaps optional or opt-out filters should be in place or something. I also watched the Hearthstone finals last year and the racism did bother me quite a bit, but it's hard to argue whether something should be done, or what that would be.

It's also a super fascinating study in how memes and culture evolves. The memes slowly morph and take on different forms, it's seriously like watching evolution before your eyes. So interesting. The anarchy is what makes this.

I am the exact opposite. Twitch chat is the item I hate most about the experience. For smaller names, the chat is slow and enjoyable, but for streams like those that Twitch is signing deals with, the chat is nothing but emotes and memes. Completely pointless and annoying. It feels like going to a concert where everyone shouts the entire time.

I feel that Twitch chat greatly enhances the viewing experience, and if it was changed or removed I would have no reason to watch something on twitch compared to any other platform. Take for example the Bob Ross marathon. Without chat I could have just watched that on Youtube or Netflix, but chat is what made that special. 50,000 people watching together, seeing the memes evolve as the stream went on, hello bob, RUINED, SAVED, goodbye. I don't think its pointless or annoying and the fact it feels like going to a concert is the best part!

  $(".chat-container").remove();

...has served me well for as long as I can remember.

I pop out the chat and put the video in theatre mode.

You can close the chat window if you want, but I'm normally watching things where the streamer is engaged with the chat and volume is fairly low.

Good streamers (shoutout to Grubby) will actually read the question they're answering out loud before they answer it. Means I don't have to wade through the insane chat myself, but I still get to experience both sides of the Q&A when he picks out something funny or interesting to respond to.

Yeah for the most part that works, but I'm also often itching to give my own feedback to the streamer, and that is difficult to do without having it open :D

I will say, in the circles I move in, many content creators are also running a discord along side twitch. Some will even invite people into their voice chat to talk with them on stream.

I much prefer using discord in those situations, but that may be partly due to the higher barrier to participation that using discord immediately entails.

Or just use livestreamer software to watch just the bare stream in a media player of your choice, without all the web crap that comes with twitch interface.

And if you for some reason want to participate in chat, there is irc.twitch.tv, where you can simply join channel #streamname in IRC client of your choice, again without all the web crap, and without all the inane twitch emotes.

I've been doing that for a few years now, much more pleasant experience than their web interface.

> they haven't figured out how to do well in moderating live chats with thousands of people

This is surely the case. Blizzard has tried various moderation techniques as you have mentioned and they don't seem to work. If I watch streams on twitch I don't look at chat ever (mobile/tablet).

They apparently launched an ML-based auto-moderation tool:

https://blog.twitch.tv/moderators-are-the-sword-now-automod-...

>Twitch chat is notoriously atrocious; rampant with trolling, vitriol, spamming, and terrible behavior.

aka twitch chat

What solution do you think there can be for a stream with thousands of people watching?

They can definitely improve upon it by message-limiting and message-length limiting (maybe they already do that? I always disable the chat)

Really, the people who care about the chat I imagine are under 20 and hence take internet communication with strangers seriously. I had great fun in my day being a total dipshit online while playing computer games, it was part of the fun for me.

What they can do is have multiple chats, some free-for-all, some moderated, etc. Except, I don't know who's running Twitch but they could've done a thousand and one things to improve their platform and I haven't seen anything, so. It is what it is :)

It's frankly plenty good enough for me. I've written an app for iOS that lets me know when more than X number of people are watching a game (GameWhen on iOS App Store) I'm interested in so I don't miss the big tournaments, outside of that, the streams don't lag, the tournaments are bigger than ever, life's good :)

No, the demographic is 18-25.

I'm 30+ and I love Twitch Chat. It's the only reason I prefer Twitch over YouTube.

From my limited sample, that seems to be tied to the communities, not the streaming platform the event happens on. When Hearthstone events move somewhere else, a large part of the community follows. Do others really have better tools do deal with this?

For what it's worth, I just turn off the chat. Exceptions are less popular streams where I know the chat is great. Pro-players also often hang around other pros streams, so you get to interact with not only the streamer but their friends too.

Like real life, chatrooms around us are full of all sorts of people. Unlike real life, there are literally thouthands screaming at a time. It's wierd to expect everyone to conform to your standard, it is unproductive to be offended when they don't, and pretty out of touch to expect someone to shut them up, so you can "feel safe".

(I am always amazed how typing "when game starts?" results in couple of whispers and (at) mentions with polite answers even in most crowded chats.)

How is this a problem for them?