Having consumed a lot of twitch content over COVID, this is 100% a rule to be selectively enforced to protect certain classes of streamers and remove the other "brand risk" kinds of streamers.
This is already done with their arbitrary bans where "context matters", yet two streamers doing the same action can result in no punitive action for one and an indefinite ban for another.
I'm not familar with twitch, but that's how any sane discipline system works. Context always matters, regardless of whether its being a troll on the internet or if you're in court for murder charges and anything between.
That's not to say rule makers can't abuse their discretion. They certainly can. But having discretion is not the same thing as abusing it.
And in other news twitch users pick some other random term to use pajoritively...
Having maintained a list like this it’s amazing the words that get banned, and it’s a potential arms race. I’m not sure how you combat the kind of toxicity that I imagine twitch attracts, and I don’t envy the engineer that has to deal with it.
As always when this topic comes up, I’m reminded to say, thanks Dang for all your efforts here.
Well simp as a word kind of embeds an ideology that threatens twitch's profits. If twitch users started using cheapskate as the new pejorative maybe that wouldn't be the worst outcome ;)
Word blacklists are probably one of the worst examples of using a technical solution to try and solve a social problem. Language is full of redundencies. You'll never be able to ban the expression of an offensive idea by just banning words. There's infinite variations someone can use. You need the computer to understand context. Good luck with that without full-on strong AI.
I didn't really follow streaming closely, mostly I just used to watch Day9 because I was familiar with him from the early Starcraft days and a few other small streamers so I never really understood how toxic twitch is, but when I started to look at the popular categories honestly it was way worse than what I even thought.
From people trying to trigger a woman who has tourettes to disguised n-word spam, it's way worse than even your average comment section. Not really sure how to fix it either. One big problem I think is this feature that streamers have figured out where you let viewers pay a few bucks of money and then they can use it for text-to-speech. It's basically designed to give trolls an outsized platform.
I am under the impression that the toxic userbase generates the most spending and engagement (not surprising if you think about it...) Therefore we are probably in feature-not-a-bug territory here.
I don't know about twitch, but from my experience with other internet places, often the least mature people who you are sure must be some 15 year old asshole, turns out to be 40, and some of the most mature members turn out to be surprisingly young. I don't think we should assume all trolls all teens.
It’s worth noting for comparison that many sports have a similar problem with their spectators - fans getting into fistfights and riots is far from unheard of.
One big problem I think is this feature that streamers have figured out where you let viewers pay a few bucks of money and then they can use it for text-to-speech.
"You can set up text-to-speech donations on Twitch through a widget called an 'Alert Box.' With text-to-speech donations enabled, viewers can attach messages to their donations, which will then be read aloud on your stream."
It notes: "You can also set up a blacklist of words that the text-to-speech robot won't read."
I wonder if the robot understands phonetics. As a rambunctious pre-teen, I figured out how to make the Billy Bob speechbot (not stage performer) at Showbiz Pizza say curse words by using alternative spellings. The tech of the time likely could only combat this by increasing the size of the dictionary of words not to say. Now it should be able to detect such homonyms but did anyone think to set that up.
It should be noted that most streamers have mods (internet janitors) that pre-screen TTS. It ranges from tips to berating to sometimes hilarious jokes.
A common TTS would be something like "Go back through the door on the left you missed the best weapon in the game you single celled organism 777777777777777777"
. A mixture of helpful, berating, and spam.
This is overblown. It's no worse than radio shows teens used to listen to. Idiots would call in and say all sorts of crap. Twitch viewership is young so there's a lot of "edgey" channels.
There's tons of streamers that don't allow their chat to be a disaster. For others, allowing chat to go nuts is their MO.
The funniest thing to me is utterly un-insteresting "tit streamers" wearing as little as they can to avoid violating ToS.
IMO twitch is just a reflection of the differences in viewing tastes. There's an extremely wide range of channels and personalities. Something for everyone.
> "One big problem I think is this feature that streamers have figured out where you let viewers pay a few bucks of money and then they can use it for text-to-speech. It's basically designed to give trolls an outsized platform."
It really, really depends on the community the streamer creates. I spent a lot of time watching a transwoman who is a high-level MOBA player. She had a very active mod base who banned toxic or wanna-be edgy people.
She had automatic notifications that would post user-submitted messages across the screen. They were almost uniformly positive. Because of the community she fostered.
On the otherhand, there was a streamer of the same game who had a toxic community who would abuse text-to-speech. What was the difference? He himself was a toxic player, which attracted a toxic community trying to out-meme one another.
Alternatively: people have finally said enough to having their ability to use the internet gated on their willingness to accept abuse from other users.
Have you seen the response individuals get to calling out bullshit behavior? It takes guts to willingly put your name on any action to reduce the spread of abusive content. The people who do become victims of doxxing, swatting, unending abuse on all social media, including being sent porn, torture imagery, death threats, child pornography.
Then someone say that they're the snowflake? They're not the babies having a tantrum over not being able to call people intentionally abusive names.
Because offending each other tends to make everyone angry and bitter. Being angry and bitter is generally not fun. Many online communities are joined with the intention to have fun, so it kind of defeats the point.
Of course, that's not always the point. I doubt anyone joined 4chan due to its reputation for being a "nice" place.
>Because offending each other tends to make everyone angry and bitter.
Not necessarily, you can get funny banter or a viewer-streamer interaction where all is made in good fun. The issue people are having is that twitch poorly understands or support this kind of nuance.
A huge percent of Twitch revenue is from desperate young men obsessing over (and throwing money at) scantily dressed female streamers, so literally from simps. It makes sense that Twitch would ban people for mocking this pitiful behavior. Mocking is a good method of social norm enforcement, and every simp set straight is less money for Twitch.
Don't even need to be a scantily dressed female streamer these days. Just get a moving anime avatar and a voice changer. People are flocking to these new anime avatars that aren't even synced up properly (edit: talking about the trenders hopping on the train, not the Hololive cast).
Many streamers either fall into collecting simps, or collecting simp-bashers. There are a few middleground streamers that make it without streaming popular things, but it is a little telling many rising talents are either glorified cam girls or loud, boisterous memers. If you don't fall into either of those extremes, you're fighting for a much smaller audience and it is very likely you'll hit a hard ceiling around 50-500 viewers with very few exceptions (especially people that don't have a huge legacy from the early 2010s).
For those that actually read the article - they aren’t banning any words. They’re just updating their policy to recognise those are words that are often used to harass people. Harassing people is always against the ToS for these sites.
I wonder if the people who constantly scream about oppression and free speech realise the damage they’re doing to their cause when they latch on to bad reporting like this.
A lot of the men decried as "simps" are really mentally ill, socially isolated people caught in exploitative parasocial relationships. This documentary on parasocial relationships is a must watch:
40 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 39.2 ms ] threadThis just feels like pr/political.move to just show they are doing something.
This is already done with their arbitrary bans where "context matters", yet two streamers doing the same action can result in no punitive action for one and an indefinite ban for another.
That's not to say rule makers can't abuse their discretion. They certainly can. But having discretion is not the same thing as abusing it.
Having maintained a list like this it’s amazing the words that get banned, and it’s a potential arms race. I’m not sure how you combat the kind of toxicity that I imagine twitch attracts, and I don’t envy the engineer that has to deal with it.
As always when this topic comes up, I’m reminded to say, thanks Dang for all your efforts here.
Any developer can implement in under a day.
Other solutions can take weeks to decades.
From people trying to trigger a woman who has tourettes to disguised n-word spam, it's way worse than even your average comment section. Not really sure how to fix it either. One big problem I think is this feature that streamers have figured out where you let viewers pay a few bucks of money and then they can use it for text-to-speech. It's basically designed to give trolls an outsized platform.
There’s people who have endless time (teenaged trolls) and there’s people who have endless money (lonely middle aged techies)
The teenaged trolls (incels) provide the engagement, and the lonely middle aged techies (simps) provide the spending.
I had no idea what that meant. Found this article that explains it: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-set-up-text-to-speech...
"You can set up text-to-speech donations on Twitch through a widget called an 'Alert Box.' With text-to-speech donations enabled, viewers can attach messages to their donations, which will then be read aloud on your stream."
It notes: "You can also set up a blacklist of words that the text-to-speech robot won't read."
A common TTS would be something like "Go back through the door on the left you missed the best weapon in the game you single celled organism 777777777777777777" . A mixture of helpful, berating, and spam.
There's tons of streamers that don't allow their chat to be a disaster. For others, allowing chat to go nuts is their MO.
The funniest thing to me is utterly un-insteresting "tit streamers" wearing as little as they can to avoid violating ToS.
IMO twitch is just a reflection of the differences in viewing tastes. There's an extremely wide range of channels and personalities. Something for everyone.
It really, really depends on the community the streamer creates. I spent a lot of time watching a transwoman who is a high-level MOBA player. She had a very active mod base who banned toxic or wanna-be edgy people.
She had automatic notifications that would post user-submitted messages across the screen. They were almost uniformly positive. Because of the community she fostered.
On the otherhand, there was a streamer of the same game who had a toxic community who would abuse text-to-speech. What was the difference? He himself was a toxic player, which attracted a toxic community trying to out-meme one another.
Have you seen the response individuals get to calling out bullshit behavior? It takes guts to willingly put your name on any action to reduce the spread of abusive content. The people who do become victims of doxxing, swatting, unending abuse on all social media, including being sent porn, torture imagery, death threats, child pornography.
Then someone say that they're the snowflake? They're not the babies having a tantrum over not being able to call people intentionally abusive names.
Of course, that's not always the point. I doubt anyone joined 4chan due to its reputation for being a "nice" place.
Not necessarily, you can get funny banter or a viewer-streamer interaction where all is made in good fun. The issue people are having is that twitch poorly understands or support this kind of nuance.
But as long as it's not on their platform is all that matters.
Incentives.
Many streamers either fall into collecting simps, or collecting simp-bashers. There are a few middleground streamers that make it without streaming popular things, but it is a little telling many rising talents are either glorified cam girls or loud, boisterous memers. If you don't fall into either of those extremes, you're fighting for a much smaller audience and it is very likely you'll hit a hard ceiling around 50-500 viewers with very few exceptions (especially people that don't have a huge legacy from the early 2010s).
I wonder if the people who constantly scream about oppression and free speech realise the damage they’re doing to their cause when they latch on to bad reporting like this.
Oh shit, why was I banned?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vD_CAYt4g
People should be angry at the women exploiting these men for financial gain