Twitch chat is good and does not need major changes.

[lethal hazel]

It’s the start of a new year and the subbathon is done. It’s that time where people are dropping their criticism docs once again, which means of course, more people dragging twitch chat through the mud.

I think people need to keep in mind that Swarm chat is an order of magnitude larger than the chats other streamers people in swarm like to watch like Ellie, Mini and Cerber. It cannot and will not function the same. You simply cannot have a meaningful conversation with 100s of people. Despite this Swarm chat still manages to find a way be part of the narrative of the stream.

Chat is fun. The spams are often funny, they change frequently, and they let chat convey a cohesive sentiment. It gives the swarm a voice as a collective, which I think is key for a community who likes to spontaneously organize.

Just look at graphs of subs vs time for the subathon. There is very little sub gifting in between hypetrains, we do it all at once. We make big fan mv collabs, develop games with multi-person teams, create a system to organize D&D one shots in subbathon live stream chat, organize our own canvas initiative. Of course chat’s gonna copy each other, it’s another way Swarm works together.

Plus, it should be noted swarm is incredibly effective at handling hate raids in its current form.

People will always say that things need to change, but sometimes newer isn’t always better. I hope we can all come to appreciate chat.

[stark iris]

The spams are often funny, they change frequently

Are we talking about the same chat? The chat that only stopped spamming alex copypasta because mods blocked it and which spammed SAMOURAI or MISSED LEGENDARY (insert random shit here) whole subathon? This chat?

Also don't really understand what the hypetrains, mv collabs and so on have to do with chat.

And being effective at "handling hate raids" because you overspam the raid is not the dub you think it is.

[pine moon]

so are we just gonna ignore negatives?
and never try to be better?
chill streams constantly get derailed by spam cause people find it funny to get timeout from sisters
bringing other streamers unprompted constantly
spam is not changed frequently as you claim

Just look at graphs of subs vs time for the subathon.

this whole segment have nothing to do with chat no?

[smoky burrow]

I can agree that the spam can be funny but it does get annoying I feel like there is a time and place where spam can be good but like how chatters have said above chill streams see a lot of useless spam but like in karaoke there is spam that fits with what's happening.

Also what's the point that your trying to make in the 4 paragraph with community event/projects. That's off chat stuff don't know how that fits with twitch chat.

I think there need to be a balance of spam and actually chatting. Bigger streamers that us have more readable chats than we do. Is there a fix for this IDK but its surely possible but whenever something is done there is always going to be complainers

[lethal hazel]

I ignored the negatives because people don’t like to read long things and tend to react viscerally when their points are rebuffed.

You are assuming that without chat spam people won’t bait for attention by saying other things ment to provoke the twins.
Now admittedly it might be harder to do that and reduce the severity of the problem, but is it really worth the trade off?

I think there is a lot of assumptions that if you clamp down on long spams suddenly you’re gonna get a lot of interesting things said, when it will likely just be short and shallow oohs and ahhs. I would almost reckon it’s probably easier to pick out interesting things in the chats current state because you just have to look at the more unique messages instead of trying to pick through a lot of unique but dull riffraff.

I dunno how well a streamer like Vedal or an AI like Neuro can pick through the chat, but honestly I think a chat that repeats its major sentiments is gonna be easier for a viewer to interpret in a meaningful way than anything else we could reduce chat down to at our size

The spam changes every few minutes. How frequently do you need?
Now some things come back every now and again, but a reoccurring joke isn’t the same as chat not changing, even if you think it’s gotten stale.

Paragraph 4 talks about the way swarm acts, which is as a group, and it is logically that they have a similar collaborative, highly group oriented mentality in twitch chat.

As for bringing up other streamers, I wouldn’t consider that a major change to how chat operates so I wasn’t really talking about that.
I will say that that is a fair and valid point and a logical change to make, which in a perfect world we should make. I’ll just posit that we need to have sufficient enforcement to make this actually worth it because it comes with the downside of making us look like massive hypocrites.

Sometimes it’s better to leave things how they are when they work well enough then to mess it up to change to strategies you have no proof will work better in the hopes of achieving perfection.

And frankly I think the good things I listed about Twitch chat in its current state outweigh the the bad ones.

[toxic basalt]

I think the chat needs to ban Forsen emotes and have the twins timeout for at least an hour or longer. Obviously the spam will be less annoying when they return since we will go back to the regular schedule; But even then the chat needs to be more regulated. Chat lately spams more unrelated stuff that is not part of the stream because "chat is bored". That needs to be fixed in my opinion as well.

[neat glade]

Don't worry it won't hurt. Chat won't even realize they are being filtered

[hallow onyx]

chat is bored because chill stream is stale
chat spam gets funnier when something actually interesting happens to bounce off of

[prime tendon]

chat spam wouldn't be as bad as it is, if it didn't affect the twins as much it does. It would be good to have some way for them to ignore them

[signal pelican]

We've already lowered the length of messages, and are now mass-killing all raiders who dare commit the grave sin of copy-pasting their raid messages in chat, because we're way more restrictive than all other streamers. But we're just going to ignore the fact that the copy-pasted messages are way shorter than they could be a year ago, and that maybe it's actually an increased number of people genuinely enjoying the chat hivemind experience. See you in the exact same thread in yet another year.

[pine moon]

chat is problem only in chill streams so it goes back to thread about giving sisters a lot more moderation tools

[lean coral]

About chat spamming, its just a preference, some people like it, some people dont. Right now half of the people are complaining about "unreadable" chat, etc. But changing it would mean the other half would complain that chat is now boring, so its a lose-lose situation.
(there are even examples of that, when sometimes mods put R9K and slowmode, some people are happy with that, and some immediately start complaining )
I could be wrong, but i remember Vedal saying that he likes chat as it is, so i doubt mods will eliminate spam completly.

And about chat ruining chillstreams, its just mods fault LULE Twins dont have any tools to punish chat, 10 min timeout is a joke and people want to be timeouted because they get personal message from twins. All it takes is for mods to nuke emote from chat for 5 min, when twins are talking about same one emote for more than 10 min. For example, Neuro being confused and asking over and over again "what does doc_2026-01-08_07-48-27 means?", or Evil saying 27x times in a row " evilsocute? dont call me cute im Evil"

[neat glade]

Why do you keep talking as if chat were going to be affected? If a filter is implemented, it will be for the twins it won’t affect spam or the chat in any way

[pallid marsh]

chat is absolute garbage and the stream suffers every time when it partakes in it. i want to watch neuro not some dumb unfunny wall of text that gets toxic really fast a random made up 2 months ago getting spammed for hours every day until one mod eventually bans it

im glad the tts for highlighted messages was already removed

but mods will not ever change the fact that the chat is cancer because they are allergic to doing something and fental cant make a decision even if his life depended on it

[toxic basalt]

An actual good take from Nesus

[fiery needle]

The days of brandy and cheese conversations in twitch chat is long over. Install chatterino and filter out the trash. For the twins, they probably could rank messages better or something.

Community growth exploded and it's not about you. Never was really.

[proud yoke]

incredibly schizo take incoming:
I enjoy the spamming soley because it was inviting for me as somebody who was first coming to twitch and kinda didnt know what was going on. I was able to ease myself in by just joining in with spam and then eventually I stopped participating in spam as much and then started actually trying to use chat. Once i started trying to use chat as an actual chat, it sucked. Im sure I'd have more good interactions if chat weren't so spammy, but I don't think its as bad as people say. Also big communities can have good chats. Look at dougdoug for example. He has comparably sized stream, but a much more tolerable chat.

sorry for editing my message like 500 times im an indecisive little guy

[lean coral]

dougdoug chat is overrated, simply because a lot of his youtube videos include chat, but its heavily edited - everytime i watched his streams, chat is either: saying same 3 jokes ( talk shit about neuro chat all you want, at least we get a new meme every month or so LULE ), or saying "trans rights" or something like this in dono which makes chat spam "transgenderpride" or other pride emotes for 5 min straight without anything else - at least our spam is sometimes funny and relevant to the stream LULE

[proud yoke]

I agree with all of your points. Though dougdoug's chat feels a lot more like an actual chat. While they do tend to default to the same 3 jokes, at least they arent walls of text copy and pasted 4 times with emotes in between like our chat is. It is a lot easier to talk directly to the streamer or chat memebers. Part of that issue is that 2 of our streamers aren't human so just inherently harder to converse with through the medium of twitch chat, and the one that is human also doesn't look at chat very often.

[lean coral]

i see your point, but i think its just a difference between spamming the same thing 4 times in one message like in our chat vs spamming the same thing 1 time in one message like his chat - at the end of the day its a same thing

Part of that issue is that 2 of our streamers aren't human
fun thing, twins are more likely to respond to normal messages than spam, so people spamming means you have a higher chance for them to read you message, so its a positive

[lethal hazel]

I don’t agree with the similar size thing.
Doug Doug gets an average of around 5,000 viewers on his streams with peaks of around 7,000

Neuro gets around 7,000 - 10,000 viewers when alone and around 12,000-15,000 when with Vedal.

(I’m using ranges because these numbers can go up a lot during subbathon. Expect the lower end during the rest of the year, though it’s yet to be seen if all the subbathon attention will result in permanent growth in the western audience)

Big events like 3D debut or the start of subbathon draw around 22,000 viewers.

The channel has peaks of a whopping 40,000 viewers

Doug Doug was streaming during one part of the subbathon. We had over 4x the viewership.

It may not seem like that much more by a matter of ratio, but the actual number of chatters is more important than the ratio. So even if it’s only like 2000 more viewers from a Neuro solo to a Doug stream that’s a BIG difference.

[dire portal]

My two cents on this entire discourse is that trying to wrangle twitch chat in general is a snipe hunt, it will be what it decides to be, you can take moderator actions based off established rules and ban bad actors, sure, but especially with something of this size, the community culture dictates what the chat is like, not the streamer.

Short of taking actions that just make the experience more cumbersome for everyone, at least (ie, slow-mode, sub-only, etc.)

TL;DR leave it alone, you're shouting into a void

If chat is too chaotic for you use other channels

[lethal hazel]

Even if it’s only 2x instead of an order of magnitude bigger it make a huge difference to chat dynamics.

[lethal hazel]

Yah, another important point. Reused messages which are talking about the same thing being identical to each other and looking distinct from other messages actually makes it easier to find unique and interesting messages easier to find, not harder, if you employ any sort of filtering mechanism. Like chattarino, or being an AI.

I kinda suspect Vedal has some sort of software that splits up the spam into one thing for him to read and more unique messages into another, and he can choose to look at whichever one he cares about at the moment, which is how he can seemingly pick out a random interesting message from a chat at a million miles an hour.