Twitch has asked us to hold them accountable and we have been met with a wall of silence accompanied by shadow changes like the ones made to auto-hosts.

Twitch must communicate to creators with transparency about the plans and the data that leads to them. Without streamers there is no Twitch. We deserve to be able to ask questions and voice concerns about potential changes to the platform that we make possible.

These are the changes we would like to see:

1. Allow for comment periods in advance of finalizing rollouts of changes to existing features.

2. Provide open access to data from studies that lead to changes to the function and features of Twitch.

3. Communicate clear timelines for rollouts of new features and changes to existing features to allow streamers adequate time to prepare.

4. Provide a roadmap of expected changes to Twitch so that creators can understand the trajectory of the platform that many of us at least in part make a living on.

We’ve heard feedback from the community that it can be difficult to understand when and why a Hype Train appears in a channel. To improve this experience, we are experimenting with a new feature that lets communities know when a Hype Train is near, and communicates how many support events, including subs, sub gifts or Bits usage, from unique users are required to kick it off. The “Hype Train is Near” notification appears in chat when the community is within one to three actions of kicking off a Hype Train, depending on the kickoff threshold set by the streamer. The notification also includes a timer that counts down the time remaining to kick off a Hype Train with that number of actions. If those actions are fulfilled, the notification transitions directly to the Hype Train experience. If not, the notification disappears until the next time a Hype train is near.

Have thoughts / questions? We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions here. Thank you for your ongoing support and feedback!

Auto Hosts NEED to be on the "Live" in order for them to work as intended.

Basically auto hosts won't have any effect on viewer count as they are now after the changes. I had a group of underrated streamers on mine that could have really felt the impact of the dozen or so hard lurkers that always have my channel page open. This just makes it even harder to support small streamers, and HURTS discoverability. On the flip-side of this I had a few REALLY big streamers/ YouTubers that had me on their auto host list and literally every stream I would get people to come in and tell me they found me from an auto host from one of them. Not to mention if I host someone at the end of my stream and then 20 minutes later they end their stream all of those viewers that are left on my page go literally nowhere.

I don't care what your research showed. I have streamed for thousands of hours and KNOW how these changes have affected people since the changes to auto host. None of it is good.

Issues have arisen on Twitch lately that have been the result of some security holes/exploits in how the site works as well as a lack of knowledge by newer streamers on the platform (through no fault of their own) on best practices to keep themselves safe.

A solution that may solve both problems - new accounts that wish to receive a Stream Key should have to complete Creator Camp courses on a selection of topics. The key could be rendered immediately or on a 24-48 hour delay.

Twitch gets a win out of it, because it doesn't hamper the experience of viewers who come to this site just to consume content. Bad Actors (the kind without SAG cards) cannot immediately engage in /hosts or /raids without completing these prerequisites, and it's a great way to get more mileage out of creator camp content you've already made.

The streamers get a win out of it because the information they need to keep themselves safe is presented in an unavoidable format, plus it doesn't have to be all doom and gloom content.

This hypothetical course could be mandated on new accounts that wish to stream, and on existing accounts (you can decide an arbitrary threshold for doing it retroactively) you could flag it that it must be completed within 30 days.

Can you please explain your reasoning for the choice to make raiders not count as true viewership and how you suggest smaller facets of streaming like small art categories such as the miniature painting streams, who make up a large portion of streams but do not draw massive viewership because of the niche market, yet we struggle to meet your hidden criteria for partnership. What does it actually take to get partnership and how can you help those of us in smaller communities to reach partnership? Also, when the select few of us in smaller communities reach the 75 concurrent viewership, can you please be more transparent on what needs to be done to earn partnership after the fact?

We are experimenting with a new feature that adds chat animations to Hype Train level achievements. When Hype Trains are close to reaching the next level, unlockable emotes will begin to simmer up from the community highlight at the top of chat. Viewers who contributed toward the Hype Train will receive these emotes as level milestones are achieved. When a given level reaches 100%, emotes will rain down from the Hype Train animation at the top of chat to mark the moment and add to hype in the channel. Should viewers prefer a more muted experience, they can lower the intensity of these animations via the Hype Train balloon at the top of chat.

As we’ll be testing multiple versions of these animations, your feedback will help us improve the feature if we decide to launch more broadly. Have thoughts / questions? We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions here.

Thank you for your ongoing support and feedback!

Wish there was a way to find out a channel's founders--whether it would be only accessible to the streamer or to any viewer. One simple way would be to make a "/founders" chat command that would list all of the channel's founders just like /mods command. Another way is to create a place within Stream Manager for the streamer to have access to the list of their founders.
The subscriber list you can download as an Excel file from Channel Analytics helps, but it does not list all of the founders. If a founder is not a sub for that specific time, the list would not include them.

I have noticed that the recent changes made to auto hosting has appeared to have removed auto hosting stream team members, this isn't a good look, as many of us liked being able to have other team members featured on our channels when we're not live, and depending on how many members are on the selected team, allowing us to have somebody auto hosted with virtually no gaps, which really went far with helping smaller streamers on the team get some degree of spotlight, and even a slight bump up their directory if hosted by a streamer who still had a handful of lingering lurkers who have gone to sleep hours ago.

If this isn't brought back, then being transparent on why it was removed would be nice.

Baiting Twitch users to pay money on behalf of their favorite streamers to boost discoverability is a bad idea and an unethical idea. It only unfairly furthers an existing advantage over other channels by exploiting community members’ good faith willingness to pay to support the streamer, and it does not make up for any deeper existing discoverability and usability failings. There is a consensus on social media that users understand this is a detriment to Twitch overall. If it doesn’t work as intended, they are wasting their money. But if it does work as intended, it greatly compromises the integrity of the platform.

This appears to be a feature designed based on the propensity for already paying users to pay more. It capitalizes upon the money-making potential of the already more successful minority of channels, with poor chances of making any meaningful growth impact whatsoever to other communities. If, as of now, anyone can earn channel points on an equal playing field, it only turns money into leverage for those willing/able or susceptible enough to spend it. The paid boost itself seems intended to take advantage of people with a willingness to pay extra for the mere theoretical possibility of supporting a streamer’s channel with more exposure.

Exposure alone is not valuable. Historically, it’s not worth channel points, and it’s not worth wagering real-world currency. Increasing impressions will often not make a difference across most KPIs. Presumably, it will not meaningfully increase unique viewers, based on how users traverse the site. And by extension, it certainly won’t lead to sustained increase in concurrent views, new follows, nor an eventual paid subscription. The vast majority of users who are exposed to a boosted stream, wherever or however they see it, are no more likely to click on it because it was “boosted.” Even if they know why it’s boosted, what is that supposed to mean from their perspective? This is assuming they are even made aware of it among other options presented to them. And that would be the best case scenario.

The more likely scenario is that the paid boosts result in no meaningful increase in impressions, and even more likely, no meaningful increase in clickthrough rates. What difference does boost make already? Apparently none, according to many streamers and viewers alike, but expecting users to pay is expected to make it work better in some way? Users who “test” this feature will have thrown away their money in the hope that maybe their money will make a difference. Some users will hope for the best, while most will probably avoid it, but relatively few users will recognize exactly how small the yield will be and why.

The value of their “support” cannot be meaningfully correlated to money spent, which makes encouraging them to spend their money difficult to justify. Or, alternatively, if hypothetically, the boost feature did consistently work as intended, ensuring that success could be bought or bid upon on the platform is entirely unethical and can irreversibly undermine the integrity of the platform. Just the notion of this “feature” alone is damaging, and a nearly unanimous and emphatic community reaction on social media has hopefully made that sentiment known. Twitch users have been voicing they don’t need this change and they don’t want it.

Making it possible for users to pay for what is normally a free feature is certainly not a convenience. It’s certainly not an improvement to it, nor a solution to its shortcomings. When users say they want the boost to be more effective, they are not asking for it to cost money out of their pocket. When users say they want the boost to be more effective, they are trying to tell Twitch that this “feature” is not working, and needs to be fixed; when Twitch’s idea of a “solution” is to make users pay, it is sending the message that users have to fix it.

Suggestion: cancel planned testing/launching this change as it favors paid inorganic growth over organic growth in ways that hurt the community as a whole. Explore iteration of existing channel points boost with user facing experience that demonstrates transparency and fair play, while investigating optimizations to underlying technical mechanisms that power it in order to make it more effective. User recommendations must be based on user engagement and presented with transparency to encourage trust and in order to be effective.