Short story about all this, I was watching a stream, got up to get some water, stretch my legs, human maintenance stuff. When I came back, a different stream was playing. I had no idea what happened to the previous stream & was really confused. I had to go to the VOD and check the end to realize the streamer I was watching finished early while I was up.

With hosting, I would have seen the chat say goodbye & that the streamer has hosted over to another channel. With raiding, I return to a stream that's not the one I left, and no indication as to why. The system you have implemented has made the situation more confusing. It is actively failing at the goals you have set. Please bring back hosting.

You know, the thing I keep getting hung up on the most with the removal of hosts is the fact I raid streamers from my dashboard. How when I do that, I don't get feedback that I've raided someone, and what's more is that I used to open the stream of the person I said via the hosting link that shows up after I raid. Now I can't do that, I have to pop open twitch and rifle through my follows to try to find who I raided to go to, or in the odd case search for a link to someone's stream that I don't follow yet. It's actively a worse experience than before and it's absolutely stupid that you suggest removing it was a good idea.

Bring back hosting, it is a way to bring community together. Out of all the things that are confusing for newcomers, this is not one.

What a stupid idea getting ride of hosting. I too once was a new person to twitch and I figured out how the features like hosting worked so to say it’s confusing for new people is rubbish we all have worked it out and the new people will too. Everyone who I’ve meet through twitch in streams have been more than helpful with any questions I might have and guess what it came through raids and hosting who would have thought. Don’t be stupid this is a feature that makes twitch great just put it back on.

This ticket has a comparable number of votes to *every other ticket in the category COMBINED*. And in the entire site, it is the second-highest voted piece of active feedback. Twitch Users want only *one* thing more than the return of Hosts.
So, naturally, @darkstorm on behalf of Twitch has to crush it underfoot like the skull of an annoying rodent.

There's only one thing for it: keep submitting the ticket.
Everyone copy-paste the ticket and make a new one.
Don't let them sweep this under the rug. Don't let them forget this discourse.

@MightManny it's the latter, I assure you

RAIDING is confusing. If I want to add to the persons metrics, which i do if i have stuck around, i apparently have to manually remove the referring url??? It doesn't make any sense. This is something that has made the site actively harder for me to use as a disabled person and ya'll really need to undo it.

@darkstorm are you even reading these, or do you guys just don't give a ****?

I'm afraid that darkstorm's response does not take into account what a single person in the comments had to say. It repeats the lie about host mode somehow being confusing to people, and does not so much as acknowledge a single person who says otherwise or even offers solutions (increasing clarity, that is) - each from their own experiences.

In addition to them, I also found host mode helpful for two reasons: showing other streams without the issues associated with raids, and reaching new streams from familiar streamers. GreatSphynx mentioned the GDQ example as an issue with raiding. Another one is simply when I'm offline, and wanted to have something running on my channel in the meantime; in other words, I wanted to have a place for people to visit when I'm not streaming. On the viewer's side, this was highly beneficial. I am not aware of a single case of confusion from host mode, especially with the banner that clearly read "Now hosting Streamer".

I like to assume good will until proven otherwise, although this is near-impossible when combined with Twitch's history of removing the desktop client, removing auto-hosting, and now removing host mode entirely under what amounts to directly lying to users about their own experiences - gaslighting, in other words. I am supremely disappointed with what comes off at this point as deliberate contempt for Twitch's user base. I will restate that it is still not too late to reconsider, but please keep in mind that streamers - and their needs - should at the core of a streaming website.

I think i know why it beacuse Zach Bussey on twitter tweeted back at sep 6 2022 they plan of removing host on oct 3 , why they made the decision to deprecate the featrue beacuse the experience it delivers to viewers doesn't match their expectation when they come to twitch.

please return hosting command.
twitch told us it is not effective for the community but it is still neccessary for streamers who wanna support other streamers.
after twitch remove hosting, i did raid command once and twice but now i never do it. there are some reasons.

1st. when i stream at night time, some of my viewers are fell asleep or afk
i wanna type saygood bye chatting and express thanks to them in chat

2nd. raiding move twitch viewers to other streamers stream, maybe i like that streamers. but if that streamer raid another streamers again and if he is not recommendable for me. One day when i raid some streamer at night, next day he said he awoke because of twitch streamer's shouting and noisy music.
i raid someone who are very calm and play classical bgm but after stream he raid to another streamer who are very active and shouting. it was not my intention.

3rd. i wanna give a chance to select stream to my viewers. i can recommend some streamers. some viewers wanna go there and watch stream there. but someone do not wanna go there or watch a little in my stream and go there if they think it is cool enough. when i end stream when they are afk, they dont have any right to select stream.
if someone was lazy to click move to someone's stream at hosting mode, even i raid him to another stream, he never doing chat or doing communication. so i think it is nonsense.

i think raid is also good option to recommend streamer friends, but some streamers are also need hosting.
twitch need not judge it is useful or not, streamer will do it and doing their favorite command.

That's ridiculous, why not just make it MORE obvious a channel's hosting someone? 😑

@darkstorm can you guys provide literally ANY evidence that hosting was confusing to ANYONE??? I've been streaming on twitch for 6 years and I've never seen anyone say that ever. Either show us some proof that this was an actual issue or tell us the truth.

Over the past 2 years twitch has removed a bunch of features that actually give streamers control over their channel, and help growth. First autohosting (not algo driven) and then hosting. You obviously are not reading any feedback or listening to any streamers, so tell us the real reason why you are removing these features that actually help grow channels.

Right now it's "very confusing" for my viewers that I don't have control over what displays on my page when I'm offline. I keep telling them that the ALGORITHM knows what is best for them to watch, and that Twitch keeps assuring me that it's better this way. However my viewers disagree, because they are no longer able to chat together when we watch large public streams. The ones that we can't re-stream because of all of the copyrighted music etc.

My idea is really simple, we have a command called HOST that lets you display whatever other channel's stream while retaining your existing chat. So that a community + streamer can continue to interact with each other while watching another channel.

There are many added benefits to this type of feature. First off it fosters a community and increases interaction with small streamers. It doesn't have the pressure of hosting on other streamers, and it allows a chat to engage with each other instead of being dumped into a large chaotic chat where no one can communicate. What's also great is you can still continue to show ads on the stream just like you always were.

I understand that just like me not having control over my own channel, this hosting might cause some confusion in a HANDFUL of new users. Personally I think it is easy to show them what hosting is by just simply having dialog at the top of the screen when HOSTING someone, and maybe even a pop up dialog the first time someone sees a hosted stream.

I think this feature would really push Twitch forward and make it a much better place to BUILD A COMMUNITY AS A STREAMER.

Believe it or not, streamers don't like not having control of what is being shown on their page!

I look forward to the automated staff response to this in a few months time that confirms they didn't look at any of the feedback on twitch uservoice!

Thanks :)

I have met streamers *only* through the hosting feature, removing it serves no purpose and is honestly rather disrespectful to smaller streamers who just want to host their friends. Did Twitch forget that timezones exist?

Just deprecate UserVoice too, it's not like you listen to what feedback we have to say anyway. Just get rid of it all, Twitch is declining in popularity, you don't want us on the platform anymore because "too expensive to run Twitch", it's pretty clear.

Twitch with their official feedback has just shown how deaf they are to their user community. Hosting was not confusing to most users, especially once they got used to the Twitch platform. The answer to new users seeing that ambiguity is not to delete the feature, but to make it more obvious as to what they were being shown.

The "new tools" are not new but rehashing of things we've all had. Shoutout was universally used in chat by almost everyone. The new decorations on the slash command do not substantively change its use or usefullness.

Suggested channels we already had, and were already ineffective at being able to lead people to a desired channel that followed someone's guidance. Its 'ok' and should continue to exist, but it is not a good trade for hosting.

Just rehashing the original press release that brought about a user complaint of this magnitude is not a good way of handling unhappy users.

At least allow us to keep our chat available when someone is being algo-hosted. If you're offline and manually click chat (something there is ZERO confusion over what it's doing) any video that was playing through the algorithm or raid just disappears, making the chat useless. You guys don't even use our understand your own platform, no wonder you thought people thought it was confusing, Jesus. You just keep making the site more unusable and don't listen to all of us. I hate this ****.

Good thing you can shout out when you're offline and you have manual control over auto hosts. Oh wait that's right, you can't do either of those things. At least bring back the random auto host list without it being algo driven so we as streamers can at least PRETEND to have some control over what shows up on our channel when we are online. Also God forbid we want to host special events or streams with our own chat. It's definitely WAY LESS confusing to just drop your 70 person chat into the 15k mess of something like the game awards. This is seriously so stupid. You guys made the entire experience more confusing and less consistent with this mood, and made it harder for small teams to support each other. This is one of the most voted on things here and it gets a canned response. It's shameful, I hope whoever came up with this gets fired. What a joke.

Darkstorm, your reply is full of lies. It doesn't confuse viewers (if you're hosting, you either made light of it before stream was cut, or the viewers willingly came to the channel after you went offline); the shoutout function is nice, but the community literally made bots that had that function as part of its feature set on top of moderation and viewer interaction functions; the "suggested channels" is, as you pointed out, literally just a rename of the autohost function, and therefor not a new feature at all, merely a bow attached to a prior one; and whether or not you personally look forward to new suggestions, your bosses don't, and are happy to ignore us for whatever plans seem to make the shareholders the most happy in the upcoming quarter, userbase be damned.

With the removal of hosting, you've shot off parts of the streaming community's legs by removing a tool small streamers used to send their couple viewers on to other streams, or by letting a streamer's community have a place to chat among themselves without being drowned out in a larger streamer's chat (see: the prevalence of people hosting Games Done Quick during their two biggest marathons, and how many hundred posts a second GDQ's chat goes through, and how much of that is memes, copy pastas, and comments that require moderation activity, and thus why anyone functionally can't raid them -- you'd be dropping a literal cup of water, cup included, into white water rapids, and watching it vanish). But yes, go on and tell your bosses you gave us the stock answer sheet from the support article, and closed the suggestion like they told you to.