Twitch Chat - The largely unaddressed dark side of gaming

When streamers like Ninja are pulling in the likes of Drake and breaking viewing records on Twitch, the impact of Chat is more significant than ever as the first touch point many non-gamers will have to interact with our community. The community shouldn’t need to wait for a pro player to have their career significantly destroyed to realise that Twitch Chat is a largely under-addressed aspect of gaming culture that has very few positive contributions.

[BlackDoomAx]

First of all, the 'community' of all the mainstream site on the web is composed by trolls clones. Concerning real time chats, twitch one in particular, the more the people, the less it become interessting. Thats's why i go on channels with 50-100 viewers in them. Interaction and sociability is what is interesting, and you can't have it with 1000+ persons spamming a chat.

[stokedAF]

Yeah it’s asinine at that point. Whenever I’m watching a livestream like E3 or something I always turn the comments off. Who can even read that fast lol?

[subtenko]

the the point at that point anyway?

[stokedAF]

@subtenko
lol come again? I assume you mean “it’s asinine at any point” but correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t know but a couple of users have explained their fondness of interactivity in smaller rooms. I always hide the chat so if that’s what you are saying then I agree lol.

[Wrex369]

Yeah it's the potential interactivity of twitch that really makes it unique, without that you're basically just watching a sponsored clown play video games that were given to him free lol

[Vanfernal]

Unless it's a low profile channel I don't even understand the point of chat when it's thousands of people. Messages literally disappear almost instantly and the streamer won't see them unless someone is spamming the same message.

[NarooN]

Twitch chat is very seldom even worth acknowledging. When you have a significant amount of peeps in there, it's just the most low-effort memefest emoji spamming garbage because everybody's egos go wild and they want to get their shit in for a chance of being noticed or whatever. It's stupid and when you have so many people spamming the chat every nanosecond, you can't even read anything.

[Knushwood Butt]

Hardly ever watch streams.

Would much rather be playing.

[PapaBop]

You've gone glorified cam girls with half their boobs hanging out, grown men raging like children, grown men faking raging like children.. lets face it, in terms of image, Twitch is a lost cause. It takes every negative stereotype ignorant people associate with gamers and puts it on full display.

[WalkerFTW]

There are plenty of great communities and streamers on twitch. People could try supporting them instead of the ones you say perpetuate the negative stereo types.

[rainslacker]

Unfortunately, despite there being plenty of people who probably want that, the people on the internet in general don't really care to go through the effort. That makes a lot of the other places which are more reasonable pretty boring to hang out in. Twitch has the advantage of maybe having a focused stream which can keep things interesting, but the more popular something becomes, the more chance that it just ends up being the same old crap that people are trying to get away from.

[ABBAJESUS]

People have to cry about everything.. What you think happens when 50000 people chat at the same time.

[xtheblackparade]

"Twitch Chat is a largely under-addressed aspect of gaming culture that has very few positive contributions. "

So, we have a market that wouldn't exist without it's viewers, but someone calls those consumers it's most dark aspect? Well why don't we get rid of the viewers than, see how Twitch does without them.

[Brian7655492]

There is a huge difference between being a viewer and those who spam the comments with hate speech and dumb comments. There needs to be better filters, that's all.

[rainslacker]

If it's anything like YouTube's comment section...then yeah, I'd say it's the worst aspect of whatever good exists in the community.

Not that they're all bad of course, just that the stupid and idiotic tends to shine through and be raised up above the norm....thus becoming the new norm, and essentially making it toxic.

Dark aspect is a bit extreme though. It's just vitriolic, not evil like "dark" implies. The toxic twitch community is about as effectual as the toxic aspects of the N4G community, or any other community out there. They're just annoyances that drive away any positive discourse, so everything becomes stupid and idiotic.