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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

aka twitch chat

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 :)

(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.)