There was a notice put out about hosts becoming deprecated next month.
This is an awful idea. Do not do this.
The reason given for doing it is clear and obvious deflection; it's false. No one with average viewership under like 6000 uses twitch chats as a community server; when someone is offline, that's it. Their attention is off the chat and elsewhere. The idea that hosts prevent interactions with streamers is complete bull.
Moreover, raids are not a direct replacement for hosts (most people don't even -know- this because this fact has been so thoroughly obfuscated,) because of the referral ID causing a viewer to not count to the raided channel for ad or partnership metrics. Hosting was an incredibly useful -community building tool- on twitch; you host into another channel, that user notes you down, they host into you and share their audience in a way that actually contributes useful numbers beyond "was a viewer". Raiding does not do this. Raiding is an anti-growth tool. Viewers might follow and check someone out again following a raid, but many are there primarily just because a streamer raided them over and have no interest in staying; hosts, because they required active interaction with the hosted channel were more likely to stay because it tested viewer interest.
Hosting was and still is an invaluable community tool. To remove it and not provide its actual functionality to raids is extremely anti-user.

We have an official game channel on Twitch -- we have tons of streamers that play the game, but (of course) most are variety streamers.

We'd love to autohost some of these folks playing our game, but it'd be awkward if we autohost them and they randomly play :any game that's not our game:. After all, it's the official game Twitch channel!

This would be useful to any themed streamers or gamers that only play x or y game. There may be variety streamers that play MOBAS but a LoL Twitch channel would autohost their friends only when they're playing that particular game.

Game name is already in the meta data, seems like it'd be minimal effort to implement!

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.

Currently, if you visit a Twitch link on your phone, and that person is hosting someone, there's no way to see the original user's profile. This means that you can't see their info, you can't follow, you can't subscribe, etc.

With a huge amount of traffic coming from other platforms like TikTok, Twitter, etc. this means that many people are unable to follow a user if they visit a Twitch link on their phone.

The only way to get to the original user's profile is to close the video player, and then manually search for them again within the app. Essentially, links to a profile are useless if that user is hosting another person. It seems strange that there's no way to access a user's profile on mobile when they're hosting another user.

It would be awesome if you could allow people to see the ORIGINAL user's profile, follow them, etc. on the mobile app/site!

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.

I've been trying to figure out why host notifications are no longer displaying in my stream's chat. During a recent exchange with a Twitch tech support rep, I was told (in part):

"Please keep in mind that hostings under 5 viewers will not be displayed as a notification/alert. If a creator is offline-hosting your channel, no hosting alert will be created either!"
"Unfortunately, it's not possible to enable hosts notifications for offline hosting at this time. Our system is unable to fetch the required information when a creator is hosting offline."

This is most discouraging, because the majority of fellow creators that host me tend to do so while either they are offline or they have few to no viewers. I want to be able to notice and acknowledge ALL creators that host me and thank them for their support, regardless of their online status or audience size. Is this something that can be fixed or implemented?

EDIT: What about introducing a control to allow creators to set their own threshold for host notification generation? External stream support apps like StreamLabs and StreamElements allow for this.

There are times when I don't want to load in to a new stream after the one I was watching is over.

Some examples are when I am alt-tabbed and playing a game.

For me personally, while playing a game I will always experience a spike in bandwidth usage while the new hosted stream loads in.
Not all streams will use the same bitrate either, which is a concern, however I've not had issues with that problem so far.

Another example is when I am away from the computer, viewing twitch as it were actual TV.

Then inevitably having my ears blasted off by a hosted streamer with much higher audio settings.

I overall enjoy hosting as a feature, but there are times when it's not appropriate to have.
At least not now while stream-to-stream settings across twitch are not standardized in any way.

This idea of deprecating the Host and Auto-Host feature coming this October 3rd is quite ridiculous, and WHO even asked for this? Being able to Host and be Auto-Hosted by others has been a huge staple of supporting and growing channels. At least that WAS the case when Auto-Host ACTUALLY worked but you killed that off early 2019 and around the time of the Twitch database hack, and everybody just put down to just manual hosting channels as a way of supporting channels they like and want to see grow.

You're killing off a useful support feature for channels all to replace it with something called "Suggested Channels" now? A lesser feature version of Autohost, except Autohost never worked properly and stopped working as mentioned before in early 2019.

Hosts and Autohosts has been a hugely useful and widely used feature since 2014, but now you want to remove it because in your words;

"We made the decision to deprecate this feature because the experience it delivers to viewers doesn’t match their expectations when they come to Twitch. Viewers want to interact with a streamer when they’re live and host mode blocks this from happening. Preventing viewers from interacting with the streamer they’re watching also limits a streamer’s growth potential because they’re not able to build meaningful connections with those new viewers."

What do you ever mean by "doesn't match their expectations" ? Are you trying to assume what people like and don't like? or do you mean to imply that when a channel that is currently LIVE is being hosted by another channel that the viewer is missing out somehow? Which would be quite ridiculous and weak reason if that's your reasoning, and second it's really not that hard to click on the channel name that's shown as being currently hosted to go TO that channel that is currently live to become a viewer of said channel. It's as simple as clicking on it, there's no 2 step-process, since it takes you straight to the channel without interruptions. -- IF anything showing that the channel is currently being hosted on the channel COULD have been made better by making it more obvious that the channel shown currently live is being hosted, thats probably the main problem is that it doesn't always make it obvious unless you look down at the channel icon and channel name text at the bottom of the video player. Wouldn't be that hard to show a bounding box around the videoplayer with a tag overlay saying "Channel is currently hosting: <channel_name>" and a button on that tag overlay where you can just click to go to straight to the channel.

To follow up further on this you mention on how to support streamers you go on to say the following;

"Give them a shoutout to help them gain more followers*. Use the chat command “/shoutout [channel]” to share a follow button in chat so that your viewers can follow them without leaving your stream. If the streamer has a stream schedule set up on their channel, the shoutout will also highlight their next scheduled stream with a button to set a reminder to watch."

As if hosting said channel wasn't enough? This excuse is just laughable at best, what did you think Hosts and Autohosts did before you decided to kill it off? They WERE the best way to support a channel, but to have people go back to their channel page just to issue a "/shoutout [channel]" command seems to be counterintuitive to what "/host [channel]" already provided. Also by the fact that most if not all people who actively use Twitch use browser plugins such as FrankerFaceZ which can add a [Host] button ON the channels the viewer is currently on to host them at a click of a button. A lot of people are grateful for plugins like FFZ for existing because it UNDOs all of your poor decisions for the site, and adds enhancements which doesn't exist by default, as well as enabling old features that was either removed completely or changed for the worse, like when you removed the colored text when people did "/me [message]" command, which yet once again something nobody ever asked to be changed or caused an inconvenience for anyone, pretty sure in fact nobody ever complained about it, just like how nobody ever complained about Hosts and Autohosts, except for the fact you deliberately disabled Autohosts early 2019, people complained a lot and you didn't listen.