Twitch is struggling valiantly to ensure that, as a platform, it doesn’t drop off and become an absolute cesspool.
As an industry leader in terms of streaming platforms available online (by a monumental margin, last we looked) there lies an impetus squarely on the shoulders of the giant to frankly blaze a trail in terms of community curation and guidance without ever appearing too tyrannical in its methodology.
Twitch also moves in tandem with its community as a matter of necessity: Twitch streamers build communities around them on Twitch itself that can often step into the world of Discord channels so like-minded fans can gather.
There are very few people who actually want to spend time in a cesspool, empirically speaking, but there are also a sparingly few people that want to feel as though their every move in being monitored and checked.
This leads us to the current events, where Twitch staff-members are stating that the words ‘simp’, ‘incel’, and ‘virgin’ are now against the current Terms of Service on Twitch; knowingly breaking Twitch’s TOS can result in a ban.
Twitch now says that you can no longer call others 'simp', 'incel', and 'virgin' as they are now against TOS, along with any emotes relating to the term simp
Twitch baby, what is you doing?
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) December 16, 2020
please don't call me a simp i will report you to the twitch police and internet authorities, thanks
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) December 16, 2020
That this morning’s Twitch Town Hall was crafted to address the growing rift between Twitch and the community that they are attempting to serve (and needs to survive as a business) and ended up inciting even more frustrations between the two, is a fantastic moment of irony.
Twitch's town hall was meant to address important pressing concerns from the community (DMCA) and all it managed to do was frustrate and piss off everyone even more. truly impressive work from CEO Emmett Shear and COO Sara Clemens
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) December 16, 2020
Some are noting that the banning of the term ‘virgin’ seems to somehow discredit those that haven’t had intercourse yet, furthering the usage of the term as primarily derogatory.
Twitch has stated in a later announcement that intent and context matters, although Forsen’s recent banning on the platform (a ban for erroneously opening an image on stream, and then immediately deleting the VOD) throws a bit of suspicion towards that statement.
Twitch’s definition of the perfect streamer: pic.twitter.com/V9vDHyWP8c
— adept. (@adeptthebest) December 16, 2020
This can also annoy a few of the more adult-themed streamers that are on Twitch, that reference themselves as ‘Turbo-virgins’ or ‘super-simps’ is now a bannable offence with little respite available for the streamers.
Now that these three specific words have been, for all intents and purposes, banned, it brings up an entirely different question: if Twitch is banning specific words, than are the words currently not banned viewed as objectively ‘better’ than ‘incel’, ‘virgin’, or ‘simp’?
The announcement seems to stem almost from a place of disillusionment about how the platform should work, and that is noted as very much on par for the company. There’s also the ability to scare away everyone from your platform onto one of the very many competitors.
