Your complaint is the equivalent of striding into a concert for 12-20 year olds, and then complaining about the loud noise.
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.
> Your complaint is the equivalent of striding into a concert for 12-20 year olds, and then complaining about the loud noise.
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.
> 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.
Have you considered that twitch might be that "elsewhere" and people who wish for politically correct chat are perceived as invasive species?
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.
How is that related to my post? I did not refer to race in this context. Of course I am assuming that white people can also wish for or demand PC chat and thus this is not a race-specific or minority issue.
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.
It's not impossible at all, lots of channels with many thousands of viewers do a decent job of moderation. The problem is twitch doesn't care about moderation and has shitty tools. That problem will go away once it's clear that cancerchat costs them more $/views than it attracts.
Different audience. 10k kids watching a Hearthstone tournament is different than a carefully cultivated, grown-over-the-years audience of daily viewers. You ban one to ten people each stream and you're golden.
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.
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!
But I didn't say I expected the conversation to be good, I said I expected it not to be racist. This isn't really any different from what occurs at stadiums for club sports. If you start loading shouting racist abuse whilst spectating at a soccer match in the UK you can expect to be escorted from the premises and given a match ban.
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.
You're free to just ignore the users that are being racist though. You just click their name and hit a button - you'll never see their messages again.
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.
Plenty of countries have laws against different types of racist behavior. Sweden has them for some types of speech. A rare exception to freedom of speech in our laws.
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.