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The Internet Games

Twitch Streamers Are Taking September 1st Off In Protest of Bot Attacks (theverge.com) 31

Posted by BeauHD from the #TwitchDoBetter dept.
New submitter Chaldean42 shares a report from The Verge: On Wednesday, September 1st, a number of channels on Twitch will go dark as streamers participate in #ADayOffTwitch, a walkout designed to bring attention to the ongoing hate and harassment that's plagued the platform for the last several weeks. [...] A Day Off Twitch was born out of the #TwitchDoBetter movement, a hashtag created by streamers affected by the hate raids that have exploded across Twitch in recent weeks. Though the action of bombing a streamer's chat with racist, sexist, transphobic, and generally abusive messages is not new, the phenomenon has seen a dramatic increase, thanks to users employing bots to overwhelm chats with hundreds of automatically generated messages. In response to what they thought was Twitch's slow response to the abuse, streamer RekitRaven created the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag to urge the Amazon-owned streaming platform to deploy better tools to stem the tide of harassment.

Twitch has promised that fixes are forthcoming, but in the meantime, streamers are left to contend against the hate raids with community-developed tools and resources. [...] The responses to A Day Off Twitch have been varied, even among its supporters. Because of Twitch's endemic hold on the streaming community, it's just not feasible for some smaller streamers, arguably the population most affected by hate raids, to take a day off. For some creators, Twitch is their only means of income. Users trying to make or maintain affiliate or partner status -- designations that grant creators access to many different methods of monetization -- could jeopardize their finances or the health of their channel by taking even one day off. There are also contractual obligations like advertising deals or partnerships that prevent streamers from skipping a day. Other streamers oppose A Day Off Twitch for more philosophical reasons. To them, the people behind these hate raids are working to bully marginalized streamers off the platform, and taking a day off is giving them exactly what they want. Continuing to stream and speaking out against the abuse is therefore the best way to counter trolls who might not otherwise face repercussions for their actions. A spokesperson for Twitch told The Verge, "We support our streamers' rights to express themselves and bring attention to important issues across our service. No one should have to experience malicious and hateful attacks based on who they are or what they stand for, and we are working hard on improved channel-level ban evasion detection and additional account improvements to help make Twitch a safer place for creators."
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Twitch Streamers Are Taking September 1st Off In Protest of Bot Attacks More

Twitch Streamers Are Taking September 1st Off In Protest of Bot Attacks

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  • This was actually posted before Sept 1 was over. Well 3-6 hours before.

    Never seen a Twitch Stream, or an OnlyFans stream.

  • Join #ALifeFreeOfTwitch, it's not hard - do your part.

    -brought to you by #TwitterFreeForLife -and- -Facebook blocking for better internet

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Twitch has some interesting content. Personally I mostly watch edited down versions on YouTube but I understand the appeal of having it on "in the background", and in participating in the live chat.

  • Because of Twitch's endemic hold on the streaming community, it's just not feasible for some smaller streamers, arguably the population most affected by hate raids, to take a day off. For some creators, Twitch is their only means of income. Users trying to make or maintain affiliate or partner status -- designations that grant creators access to many different methods of monetization -- could jeopardize their finances or the health of their channel by taking even one day off. There are also contractual obligations like advertising deals or partnerships that prevent streamers from skipping a day.

    Wasn't aware Twitch was another platform people used for monetization.

    Maybe the streamers who are seeing a lot of hate and harassment in their chat streams are being targeted by other Twitch streamers. Flood their chat with hate and harassment to turn off viewers which could lead to affiliate and advertising partners to seek out new Twitch streamers to partner up with.

  • And twitch is crashing to the ground, ohhhh the banality, the banality.

    And nothing of value was lost.

  • Oh, the irony... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Asking Amazon to police the malicious bots on Twitch that are probably powered by AWS.

  • And nothing of value was lost.

  • I like watching some SC2 casts sometime, this is going to cause a lot of cringy value signalling for casters to prove they are on the right side of history. Sigh, oh well, price of entry I guess.

  • Someone isn't saying what they mean, or doesn't mean what they say. *phobic comments would not, by definition, be "hate speech" but "fear speech", because that is what a phobia is. Saying, "I am afraid of you", is not the same as, "I hate you", even if that fear is expressed in those exact words because the motive behind it is not actually hate for the person but hate for a terribly unpleasant fear response. For example, when an arachnophobe says they hate spiders, they really hate being paralyzed by ter

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Gender is not a social construction. It is biological and inescapable.

      Actually that's not true. Most social mammals and birds have homosexual and/or transgender-acting individuals. It seems to be a useful hereditary trait when it's at low frequency and they have located some of the genes involved in several species. Gender seems to be less a fixed point than a sliding scale, and sometimes genetics slides that marker far to one side or the other. Culturally it might make you uncomfortable, having been brought up under the repressive Abrahamic religions, but other cultures

      • None of what you just said contradicts that statement in any factual way, so you have not shown that it isn't true. What you have shown is that to you, gender seems to be a scale. Why? And if you're right, why do men and women behave basically the same across cultures? Why do men prefer women who display traits indicating fertility while women prefer men who display the ability to protect and provide? You bring up gender roles, which are a different topic but fine - Why aren't half of Scandinavian engi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Of course gender roles are culturally defined, look at any remote peoples for very clear examples. In two adjoining valleys in New Guinea the tribe to the (IIRC) north the men butcher the meat and women are the potters, in the southern valley the opposite is true, and both sides consider the other heretics. These norms change too, sometimes very rapidly, in the Arabian Peninsula prior to the imposition of Islam family units were polyandrous with one woman ruling a household with as many as seven husbands,

  • OMG, I'm devastated. How can I live without a day of twitch?

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