Next week, streamers plan to move away from Twitch for a day in an effort to combat how the platform continually leaves creators marginalized.
Earlier this month, streamers gathered around the hashtag #TwitchDoBetter on social media, where reports of terrible user experiences on the platform proliferated. Many of the posts revolved around how Twitch has offered lukewarm protections against sustained harassment. In particular, hate incursions—In which bad-faith viewers use the platform’s “raid” function to massively flood a channel with insults and vile language – not only are they possible, but they become a daily nightmare for people using the service. live broadcast. And because it’s almost effortless to create an account on Twitch, trolls can sign up for a bunch of accounts. It is absurdly easy to circumvent any prohibition, at least until measures such as account verification using phone numbers are implemented.
How The Washington Post reportedAccording to Twitch streamers, the problem has only worsened in recent months, possibly the result of the platform expanding your list of tags to include 350 tags classified by “gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, skill, mental health and more.” On the one hand, this allows creators to find a community more easily. On the other hand, it has greatly facilitated the possibility of racist trolls finding and harassing creators.
Also, Twitch has a solid percentage of subscription revenue, with half going to streamers and half to the platform (which Amazon bought for about $ 1 billion) in 2014). Streamers he said Kotaku the division should lean more toward content creators, closer to a 70/30 breakdown. If streamers have to continually endure shit, I suppose they would at least get a good chunk of the pie, right?
Read more: Streamers are concentrating behind “Twitch Do Better”
“It’s very heartbreaking to see all the stories of marginalized people on the platform being attacked by something out of their control like their skin color, gender identity, sexual preferences or anything else,” streamer Rek It posted, Raven !, which originated the label, he said Kotaku by email at the time of the #TwitchDoBetter campaign. “We shouldn’t be afraid to press ‘live.'”
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He #DayOffTwitch The campaign, hosted by Raven along with streamers LuciaEverblack and ShineyPen, is scheduled for Sept. 1. Essentially, it will be a total shutdown of 24 hours: no transmissions, no viewing, no logging in to chat. Spectators are also encouraged to participate.
After the #TwitchDoBetter campaign, Twitch quickly launched improved chat filters, per The Verge. And last week, the company announced would implement detection for channel-level ban evasion, but did not provide a timeline for the launch of this feature. The hope is that one day with a reduced commitment on a large scale will force the company to take note and, ideally, to take additional action.