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Twitch has been undergoing a lot lately. With many prominent streamers leaving the platform for YouTube Gaming, things have not been in Twitch's favor. Furthermore, with non-stop hate raids and other issues streamers are facing on the platform, they see no other choice but to look for alternatives.
However, it seems like the Amazon-owned platform is considering streamer problems, as it has issued a new set of guidelines recently.
In accordance with this, Twitch streamers will now have more authority over viewership and access that people will get to their Twitch channels and Twitch chats.
Twitch introduces new features that give more control to streamers over their audience
According to the new guidelines, streamers can choose to have email or phone verification for members of their chat. They have the option of getting all their viewers to verify their email IDs or phone numbers or selecting a specific set of viewers to verify their identity.
If they choose to do so, streamers can exempt their subscribers and VIP members from verification. The initiative was taken to ensure streamer safety on Twitch, which has become a raging issue of late.
Connections have been drawn between the #ADayOffTwitch movement and the implementation of this new feature
Upon the announcement of this feature, Twitch users couldn't help but draw connections between the #ADayOffTwitch movement and this new feature. The campaign took the internet by storm when it occurred, with prominent streamers refusing to stream on their channels for a day. This was done in solidarity with all the streamers who had been victims of hate-raids on their channels. These streamers are often members of the LGBTQIA community and people of color.
The movement had a decimating effect on the platform since its viewership was greatly affected. Furthermore, the trend could not have happened at a worse time for the platform since many big streamers were also jumping ships from Twitch to YouTube during the time.
These factors forced Twitch to take prompt action against these hate-raids, albeit those attempts seemed rather feeble to people.
After the Twitch community expressed their dissatisfaction with this response, the platform announced its action plan to combat the problems of hate raids and abusive comments in the chat. While announcing these plans, Twitch mentioned that those methods were only temporary while the developers worked on more concrete strategies to prevent these issues.
It seems like the new verification method is one of Twitch's concrete features to put a halt to hate raids on Twitch. While several people in the community are satisfied with this feature, others still seem to be skeptical.
For instance, one Twitter user pointed out that the email verification method did not make much sense since Twitch did not have one account per email policy. Therefore, trolls can simply create another account and get back to it if the account gets banned.
Similar questions were also raised about the phone verification method that Twitch has come up with.
These are all very valid questions and feedback, and the platform needs to acknowledge and answer these questions to put its community's mind to rest about hate-raids. While this is by no means a fool-proof method to combat issues like hate-raids, at least it's a positive start.
