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.
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.