The “block” function is the greatest exercise of power in chatting on twitch. This feature has the function of eliminating spam bots, political propaganda, and other obviously harmful entities that make comments knowing that they will be blocked.
However, I think there is another side to this feature. This is the “monster-making machine” aspect. First of all, except for comments that are intentionally blocked as mentioned above, the first thing a blocked person does is to create a sub-account. I’ll skip the discussion of whether this in itself is a good thing or a bad thing, as that is not the purpose of the message I want to convey. First of all, we can see here that the “block” function does not work at all. The detailed mechanism will be explained later, but at this point, the user feels as if he or she has been attacked in some way. At this point, users can either say, “I did something wrong, so this block is reasonable to some extent,” and start chatting normally again, or they can say, "This block is unfair, and I’ll stick to this distributor and attack him. In the case of the former, the person will chat again without worrying about the block and with some degree of remorse. In the case of the latter, the person will continue to sticky and attack the distributor until he or she is satisfied.
But there’s more to it than that. One day, the former person’s account will suddenly stop, and a notice will be sent to his email address, stating that his account has been suspended for "repeatedly circumventing chat bans. The user who felt attacked for free will now get a follow-up from the management. Twitch uses every conceivable kind of bot to prevent people from “repeatedly evading chat bans”. They can even identify a sub-account just by changing the email address link. The reason for this, I assume, is to prevent the creation of sub-accounts for “people who are obviously harmful and know they will be blocked,” as mentioned above, but the effect extends to people who have been blocked for mere comments.
In this way, Twitch has built a system to chase down people who have been blocked over and over again. By chasing after people who have been chatting with some degree of remorse, they have succeeded in creating the “this block is unfair, and I’m going to stick to this distributor and attack them” monster mentioned above.
Now, let me explain why people feel attacked by this block function. First of all, people other than the “obviously harmful and knowingly blocked” people mentioned above are not intentionally misbehaving, for example, if they are tempted to put up ASCII art in the chat room and play a prank, or if they are hungry or have a fight with their girlfriend and are in a bad mood. For example, if you’re in a bad mood because you’re hungry or you’ve had a fight with your girlfriend, you might react to an attack that you would normally overlook and end up fighting in chat. Of course, this is not the only case where people violate the community guidelines, but there are many other cases where people violate the community guidelines not intentionally, but because they have to. This may seem intentional from an objective point of view, but the people themselves act in such a way because they have to. And even though the probability of this happening is low in twitch, which is watched by tens of millions of people, there is a certain number of people who act this way because the denominator is large. There is no malicious intent on their part. However, the twitch system does not consider whether there was malice or not. If you are blocked, you can’t even see the comments. In other words, it means that you are banned from the community. Users enjoy not only the delivery of the distributor, but also the sense of community unity and chatting with the community. It means a permanent and almost irreversible ban from all of that. (There is a recently added feature that allows you to request to be removed, but it’s so limited that very few people actually do it.) No matter how sorry the user is, no matter how much he regrets his actions, the result will be the same. No matter how sorry the user is, no matter how much he regrets his actions, the result will be the same: he will be locked in the same blocking cage as the spambots and political propaganda accounts, with little to no chance of getting out. Blocking deprives you of the greatest enjoyment of streaming with the community. When someone who has been watching for months or years is blocked, the sense of loss is immeasurable. You have to admit that the loss is your fault. I think it’s not hard to imagine that there are few people who would continue to watch a feed where they can’t comment or chat. There is such a heavy meaning to not even showing comments. Now that you’ve seen this, I’m sure you understand why you might feel attacked.
Also, psychologically speaking, if you ask people to choose option A and option B, 80% of them will choose A, while the remaining 20% will choose B. This has been proven in various experiments. This has been proven in various experiments. In other words, even if you tell people to follow the community guidelines, 20% of them will not do so without any ill will. Banning them permanently from the community without any extenuating circumstances is too extreme in some respects. In addition, there are almost no people who read the community guidelines thoroughly before commenting, and the rule of twitch is "follow common sense. However, common sense varies greatly by region and backbone. In other words, common sense differs greatly from person to person. Even in the case of failures due to these cultural differences, Twitch’s answer is
The response to even a failure due to such cultural differences is permanent banishment from the community with no room for extenuating circumstances, which also feels extreme. These make users who are not “obviously harmful and commenting knowing they will be blocked” feel attacked.
Here I would like to suggest some alternatives to blocking. First of all, while keeping the name “block” intact, the function could be changed to a one-year ban at the very worst, and a system that determines whether the new “blocked” person’s expression is an excessively malicious spambot or something else, and if so, block the person as before. Also, instead of blocking people out of the blue, the new system allows users to create sub-accounts for a week at first, then a month, then a year. If the system encourages users to reflect on their actions and structure their accounts, rather than forcing them to create sub-accounts, it will make people who violate the rules without malicious intent reaffirm the rules and reflect on their actions. In addition, the blocking feature of not being able to see comments is excessive in some respects, because in the state of excitement after being blocked, the reaction of the chat at the moment of being blocked may cause rage, so not letting people see comments for an hour after being blocked, or even permanently, is It is excessive. It would also be effective to make the unblock request in the form of a chat so that the user can show remorse and reconfirm the rules, rather than just once. It would also make a big difference if there was a cushion, such as blocking those who attack the distributor or moderator.
The above is my opinion, and I’m waiting for feedback and reactions from those who read this.