Recently Twitch may have pushed an update so that raid alerts only activate if there are at least 5 people in the raid. People only learnt about this after a streamer sent a support ticket in about the issue for their own channel, and was responded with "You will need more viewers for the notification to be sent out." On top of this, they may have also pushed an update that ignores hosts of 1 person in the past. Since we only have a mans word and a few pictures to work with, there's no guarantee that this is a real update. However, if these changes are real and pushed without our knowledge, both of them need to be reverted.

Why was this changed in the first place? Raiding is a way of saying "Thank you for joining me, lets go watch this person now that I'm done my stream". It's an invitation for people to meet someone new, usually someone the streamer is friends or a fan of. Many streamers have events that happen when they are raided, such as a thank-you song or a daily conversation question. Most of the twitch community that streams usually raid with less than 10 viewers, and missing out on any raid notification means the streamer can't thank or invite viewers for joining, since there's no way for them to know. Without small raids showing up, it leaves a lot of our community unable to grow their own communities!

What about larger streamers that get dozens of small raids and hosts in a single stream? Well, they've already had ways to get around this issue for many years! Most streaming alert applications such as the ones used through Streamlabs and StreamElements systems have a built-in minimum host/raid system so that users can set their own minimum raid/host amount for alerts to be played. There are also custom alert settings, so people could use different alerts for a different amount of raiders. If streamers never wanted an alert to pop up, the can just get rid of it on their own!

Instead of taking away an ability that was controllable and diverse, why not upgrade it for the larger streamers who do want their activity feed & dashboard cleaner & more manageable? Twitch could add a system to the activity feed on everyone's dashboard that could filter out any unnecessary alerts, and add a filter for minimum number of viewers in a raid or host! Any alerts that "would" have gone through could then be sent to a filtered activity feed, so if need be streamers can check and see what was taken off of their main feed.

Forcing a minimum number for smaller raids affects smaller streamers the most, affiliated or not, and larger streamers already have ways to set their own raid & host alerts to a minimum amount. This was never a major issue, and already had it's workarounds for the people that needed it. We want you to remove minimum raid & host alerts and stop hiding the small streams that are sending their viewers to someone new. This is not what helps build a community, it keeps the people on top up there, and hurts the smaller streamers trying to grow.

There are several streamers I watch that struggle to make it past a handfull of viewers. It needs to be reverted back.

Totally Agree! tons of us smaller guys always raid others in our communities to help out, we count too!!!!

This is just normal for Twitch suppressing smaller streamers and communities. To them, you don't matter until you make them more money.

I 100% agree with this. It makes it hard as a small streamer.

As a super tiny streamer I completely agree. My wife usually only has two or three viewers when she raids me and vice versa. Why are we being treated as less important than huge streamers?

As a smaller streamer I feel like this is horrible. You are working so hard to put yourself out there and when you raid....even if it is with one person, it should be counted as such, not a Host with one viewer. That doesn't tell the person you raided that is why you came over. And I feel like that makes the streamer look stupid when you are typing in their chat that you raided but the notification says you hosted them. Bad business call.

As a small streamer ANY RAID IS WELCOMED! We LOVE raids! Even if its small, its the gesture that someone went through the hoops to raid YOU, they brought their community and their viewers to YOU because for one reason or another, your energy brought them in, and it truly means so much to me when it happens. I love being able to thank those who interact with my stream and if I can't see it and thank the person, I just feel awful about that.

Really makes you wonder if Twitch actually gives a **** about their streamers, because they seem to really be going out of their way to ********* over lately.
They make decisions without asking their community first. What's your game Twitch?

I guess I just don't see the point in this? Why is Twitch changing this to even be a thing? It seems like a waste of time and like it's clearly just going to upset creators who are small and trying to raid friends and creators who might be a little bigger with small friends raiding them.

When someone raids me whether it's 1 viewer or 100 viewers I want to thank them and have a conversation with them about their stream they just finished.

Completely defeats the purpose of a community-building feature.

At least one of the streamers this move was supposedly made to protect handed Twitch a better solution, allow streamers to set a threshold themselves so that if they're being targeted by bots they can defend against it, without hurting those that aren't. Not to mention if the harassing bot creators are willing to make two bot accounts to spam raids, they'll just up it over 5 or whatever the threshold is, especially if it's a global flat amount. Further complicating the issue is that I certainly didn't receive any notification of this change, nor has anyone else I've spoken with, this really is the kind of thing people should at least know about so they're not throwing out raids and having them be pointless.

Agreed. This is discourages smaller channels from raiding and takes away all streamers' ability to recognize raids in the way they choose. Please put more consideration for the entire Twitch community (rather than just partners with large channels) into decisions moving forward - recent updates have been showing a deeply concerning disregard for the smaller communities on Twitch.

Destroys smaller streamers like myself and multiple other streamers that I support. Bad move on Twitch’s part.

This is a very stupid change. It just hurts much smaller streamers, like myself, who are lucky if they break 5 viewers a stream.

This literally destroys tons of smaller streamers working to share the support and love... If you desire the ability to limit notification limits then put it as a channel option and allow it to be 0 = any or a set value for a minimum alert threshold... would handle the problem and not impact those that feel this is a complete waste of time making such a change.

Anyone that raids my channel is welcome and deserves to be recognized. The impact of this decision disproportionately impacts new streamers and smaller communities. If Twitch cares about building online communities, this decision goes directly against that stated goal. This policy needs to be reversed. Or, at the very least, streamers should be given the ability to toggle this on or off.

Co-signed. Allowing large streamers to set a higher threshold to prevent spam is fine, but this breaks things that were working fine for a broad portion of the community.

Why would you implement a rule that hurts so many people knowing full well that your doing it. Complete ********.

It’s obvious they don’t care about any streamer that ain’t “partnered” just a bunch of stupid new **** to hurt small streamers and a bunch of crooks that won’t change it cause like I mention twitch don’t care unless you’re “partnered”