As reported by kotaku.
Despite ample resources and longstanding conventional wisdom surrounding large Twitch chats’ tendency to turn toxic if they’re not properly moderated, publishers, Twitch, and E3 have all managed to mishandle Twitch chat. Things got off to a particularly egregious start on Saturday with Ubisoft’s conference, which opened with a lengthy preshow. During this preshow, there was a segment about gamers with disabilities. Chat was not kind.
“To make things worse though, people were being ableist and racist,” Dominick Evans, a streamer who consults for Hollywood on disability and LGBTQ issues, said on Twitter. “A friend who is Black and Deaf was signing about Ubisoft’s commitment to accessibility, and people were saying things like is he Deaf because of a gang fight? They also said sign language was gang signs.”
Perhaps as a result of this, or possibly as part of a premeditated plan, Ubisoft ended up basically disabling chat during its actual show. On Twitch, it activated subscriber-only mode so that anybody who hadn’t paid money to subscribe couldn’t chime in. On YouTube, it removed chat functionality altogether.
Other publishers, like Square Enix, also found themselves confronted with chaos and spam, ultimately deciding to take away chat’s ability to use words by activating emote-only mode midway through the stream. Over the weekend, Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards channel, which has been co-streaming events as part of the Summer Game Fest event, attempted to rein in its own unruly chat in a similar way, only to fail. It activated subscriber-only mode, but whoever was running the channel neglected to turn off a feature called channel points, which allows viewers to briefly bypass the sub-only wall by spending points they accrue simply by watching a stream. As a result, even with restrictions in place, chat remained a cesspit of spam, with walls of the word “SEXO” obliterating nearly all discussion.
Despite ample resources and longstanding conventional wisdom surrounding large Twitch chats’ tendency to turn toxic if they’re not properly moderated, publishers, Twitch, and E3 have all managed to mishandle Twitch chat. Things got off to a particularly egregious start on Saturday with Ubisoft’s conference, which opened with a lengthy preshow. During this preshow, there was a segment about gamers with disabilities. Chat was not kind.
“To make things worse though, people were being ableist and racist,” Dominick Evans, a streamer who consults for Hollywood on disability and LGBTQ issues, said on Twitter. “A friend who is Black and Deaf was signing about Ubisoft’s commitment to accessibility, and people were saying things like is he Deaf because of a gang fight? They also said sign language was gang signs.”
Perhaps as a result of this, or possibly as part of a premeditated plan, Ubisoft ended up basically disabling chat during its actual show. On Twitch, it activated subscriber-only mode so that anybody who hadn’t paid money to subscribe couldn’t chime in. On YouTube, it removed chat functionality altogether.
Other publishers, like Square Enix, also found themselves confronted with chaos and spam, ultimately deciding to take away chat’s ability to use words by activating emote-only mode midway through the stream. Over the weekend, Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards channel, which has been co-streaming events as part of the Summer Game Fest event, attempted to rein in its own unruly chat in a similar way, only to fail. It activated subscriber-only mode, but whoever was running the channel neglected to turn off a feature called channel points, which allows viewers to briefly bypass the sub-only wall by spending points they accrue simply by watching a stream. As a result, even with restrictions in place, chat remained a cesspit of spam, with walls of the word “SEXO” obliterating nearly all discussion.
