[bgammon]

I hope Twitch chat never becomes more of a police state than it already is. Streamers consistently demonstrate the ability to create the chat environments they want with the scarce tools Twitch has provided them. That seems good enough to me.

The problem you are describing is easily solved by simply joining a different chat room while watching the stream. For example: I'm a member of more than one "<streamer name> civil-chat" chat room which I can hop over to if the main stream chat is a bit too cancerous for my veteran eyes.

Echoing sibling comment sentiments about enforcing a top-down moderation policy: it's a bad idea. One of the most important things that watching Twitch and playing online games with notoriously toxic communities has taught me is that fun is unmotivated.

If you don't understand how someone derives pleasure from an action you find repulsive, it's because you're not meant to. Stop considering other's motivation and suddenly it becomes much easier to enjoy yourself, now that you're not raging at how dumb everyone is.

[panic]

I hope Twitch chat never becomes more of a police state than it already is.

This isn't a great analogy. Twitch doesn't use physical violence against people chatting on their website. The normalization of racism and bigotry through ironic edginess has much more potential to cause real-world violence than chat moderation.

[ygaf]

There's nothing wrong with the analogy (except being dramatic).

edit: this isn't agreeing with the parent poster, as a police state is about the level of control, not whether violence is used which is a fact of policing anyway.