Twitch bans words “simp” and “virgin”
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
This 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.
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).
Oh shit, why was I banned?
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.
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.
But as long as it's not on their platform is all that matters.
Incentives.