A Streaming Saga
An autobiographical piece reflecting on my experiences with Twitch streaming, community building, and activism.
Greetings, friends, and welcome to the stream! April 24th, 2021 was the day I first went live on Twitch.
Star Wars: The Old Republic was the game of choice, and I had spent months hanging out in the chat who had become a close friend, Marcus.
I had been active in his chat, engaging his audience, playfully roasting him, and keeping everyone entertained, as (what I quickly became) a moderator.
Streaming was something I had wanted to do for years, even more so since the pandemic started. I saw it as a way to socialize with others remotely for myself, and a way to entertain others since I seem to have a knack for lifting people’s spirits.
My PC was far from up to the challenge, and Marcus had used computer parts from his last upgrade that he offered to sell me. I gladly accepted. So with a new PC put together, on that April day, I clicked ‘go live’ for the first time.
It was nerve wracking, terrifying. There were so many things that had been put in place, settings, adjustments, tweaks. Nothing was quite the way I wanted it, but Marcus assured me that that was ok. Nothing would ever be, not really, a content creator was always evolving, always pushing their brand and style forward, and if you never started, you would never start.
So, on Twitch, there’s a thing called a ‘raid’. This is where one streamer who is currently live sends all their viewers and chat to another channel, the same way a TV station will pass you from one show to another. This is generally seen as an exciting thing, because it’s a boost to most of the metrics that make a channel thrive. Yes, generally, more on that later. I pressed ‘go live’, and within minutes, Marcus raided me with dozens of his viewers.
Everyone I had been chatting with for months as a moderator was now in my channel as a viewer, and they were following my channel, and supporting me. It was exhilarating. I didn’t even get to my actual gameplay for a good several minutes as I processed and thanked everyone and caught up with the emotions.
One of the benchmarks that Twitch streamers aspire to is ‘affiliate’. This is when they get to monetize their channel with subscribers, and things called bits – which are microtransactions that viewers can buy and use like virtual confetti. You need: a certain number of followers (50), have gone live a certain number of consecutive days in 30 (10, if memory servers), and a certain average viewer count of 3 or higher.
The first two bars are easy to clear. Going live 10 consecutive days is simply pressing a button. Getting 50 followers is a little more difficult, but if you even bother to socialize a bit and build community, as Twitch is intended to be, then that is not difficult either. That third metric – 3 average viewers – though, that means that averaged across your entire live time, your number of active viewers was 3 or more.
According to the last numbers I saw, ninety percent of streamers never hit that mark. It’s a flooded space, there’s so many people out there, doing the same thing, the same way. Add on to that the fact that Twitch itself favors *cough*certain types*cough* of people to be boosted and elevated over others.
What ninety percent of streamers are unable to reach, I did in a month. For the longest time i told myself that Marcus carried me, especially after we parted ways, but I came to the realization literally as I right this that even though he brought them there, I kept them there. If I had not been good, I could not have kept the viewers there.
While I streamed in SWTOR (Star Wars: The Old Republic) I was able to hold steady at around 12 average viewers over around 6 months. I evolved my channel, designed new things for it, and put the effort in to not just grow myself, but connect and engage with the community as well.
Then later that year everything changed, the ‘hate raids’ happened. Little did I know they’d been happening for awhile to BIPOC streamers but given that I was a) new to streaming and b) white, I had no idea. I am, however, openly and visibly LGBTQ+. Queer and transgender. Part of what I built my channel around was queer and disabled visibility, so that more people can see that we exist and get to know us and what we’re like... that we exist. Because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned, it’s that people in general are much less likely to hate a class of someone if they know someone of that class.
Speaking of ‘in general’, remember earlier when I said raids are “generally seen as an exciting thing”? Well, there’s a thing called Hate Raids. This is when – using scripts, bots, or other sorts of coordination/automation, toxic people will raid a twitch streamer and bombard their chat with hatful messages, symbols, and emoji.
It became so widespread in late 2021 that it was getting articles, interviews, public calls to action, petitions, etc. I got hit with one. In a span of 15 seconds that felt like an eternity, my chat got flooded with three hundred plus people, all spamming transphobic slurs and hateful messages, including calls to kill myself and nazi terms/symbols. It took me a few seconds to react and try to stop the stream, but the system was lagging from all the activity, and the controls were frozen. I’m grateful that I had a dear friend and moderator there to start manually banning the people one-by-one. Until I was able to get my composure and get control back. It took a few more minutes, but we got the chat cleaned up, and the stream stabilized.
Even though I had an hour left in my scheduled stream, I wanted to end it there. But my mod, my spouse, and over a dozen other people were there and encouraged me to keep going, to not let the trolls win, how much they cared about me, and most importantly, mocking the trolls. I did ultimately finish the night out, and it felt good. It was a victory. It also changed things.
I started looking into what had happened, and why. This is when I discovered that while queer people were targets, we were not the primary targets, and that BIPOC people were getting hit often multiple times per stream. And Twitch did nothing. I began to speak about what I was finding to my viewers and my community while I was playing, looking for ways to inform as well as entertain.
My viewership began to decline. Ultimately, I was left with a few core friends that also joined my Discord server, so I discontinued my live streams on my channel as I turned my attention fully to activism and advocacy with non-profit orgs, which I still do today. I hope to return to game streaming at some point but fear I won’t enjoy it as much. The ‘shut up and play’ attitude, whether explicit or implied was obvious, and I just can’t reconcile it. The only exception to that was within the Star Trek Online community, who in general, continues to be inclusive and outspoken, and quick to eject bigots.
That’s all for tonight, friends. Until next time; Have fun, be safe, and don’t set yourselves on fire!