At last week’s Austin Dreamhack tournament, Hearthstone pro Terrence “ TerrenceM ” Miller took second place, but all anyone seems to care about is the racist slurs Twitch chat hurled at him. Vowing to fix the problem, Twitch and Blizzard announced a collaborative effort to try and fight some of Twitch’s toxic sludge this morning.
Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, told Polygon yesterday, “We're extremely disappointed by the hateful, offensive language used by some of the online viewers during the DreamHack Austin event the weekend before last, One of our company values is 'Play Nice; Play Fair;' we feel there's no place for racism, sexism, harassment, or other discriminatory behavior, in or outside of the gaming community."
According to IGN , Twitch and Blizzard are working on a pilot “programme” to “combat livestream racism, harassment, and abuse.” Twitch already bans the use of specific hateful words and links in chat, so if users want to say terrible things they have to be creative. Emotes like Minglee, Trihard and Anele are all spammed instead of slurs, but they have come to mean the same thing.
As I wrote about yesterday, Twitch chat is its own organism with its own rules. Moderators, who try to keep chat members in line, often become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of terrible things being said. There’s not much 12 unpaid volunteers can do when thousands of people are typing messages every few seconds.
Solving the toxicity problem on Twitch chat isn’t easy. It’s been the Wild West out there for so long that reforms could alienate its user base. Twitch is already a much better place than it was a year ago, after they updated the terms and conditions to limit people who weren’t playing games or using Twitch like a “boobie streamer cam site.”
I wish Blizzard and Twitch the best of luck, but this is a serious problem that won’t get solved easily.
