Twitch moderators are the backbone of the platform

OoeyGooe will start a video game whenever she is live on Twitch. Animals PartyThen, she sits with her viewers to have a chat or watches a movie. Many people watch her live broadcast, and chat along with it using Twitch, the famous platform where entire communities are born or die.

Twitch chat allows viewers to connect and build relationships with both streamers as well as other viewers. Twitch chats can become chaos if they lack structure. Streamers often rely on moderators, who are mostly volunteers, to help set the tone. Moderators help keep the community safe by removing those who spread hate or harmful material, as well as answering questions in chat and interacting with other users.

Joseph Seering is an assistant professor of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He says that moderating involves more than just banning people from chat. “People often think about moderation work as just about removal, but it’s often much more about community-building,” he said. “Moderators help shape and curate the space, partly by removing problematic content but also by welcoming new members, setting a positive example for behavior, and keeping the community engaged.”

We call them moderators, but they’re so much more — often the backbone of Twitch.

For Ooey, who has six highly active moderators out of a team of 16, moderators are usually viewers who find themselves falling into the role: “What drives my moderators is their love for the content and the community,” she said. “They step up not just for the power to moderate but because they genuinely value the channel. Their dedication shines brightest during tough times, ensuring our space remains positive and respectful.” Others, like Twitch streamer kedapalooza, ask viewers or anyone else interested to fill out an application.

Sometimes, moderators come from disaster: Ooey pointed to 2021’s hate raids, a horrifying time when Ooey, who is Black, was one of many marginalized people subjected to the bigoted practice of hate raids. The hate raid campaign is an organized effort to send hateful messages into the Twitch Chats of marginalized streamers, which are often driven by bots. “Imagine hundreds, if not thousands, of bots flooding my channel with hateful, racist, and homophobic comments,” she said. “It was overwhelming.”

The community rallied around her, and people volunteered to serve as moderators – even temporarily. “Having a reliable moderation team is nothing short of a blessing,” Ooey said. “They allow me to focus on creating content, knowing the chat is in good hands. Without them, managing the chat’s health becomes distracting, pulling me away from the entertaining atmosphere I want to create for my viewers.”

Twitch introduced several features to fight hate attacks, such as optional phone verification chat. This requires that viewers have their phone verified before they can contribute. Moderators have access to tools on the platform that make it easier for them, and there is also an AutoMod function, which marks messages as needing moderator approval. These tools can’t replace a good moderation team, but they can support one.

The majority of moderators do this sort of work for free — and hardly see it as work, despite the emotional labor of it all. KingArgaroth, Twitch moderator and streamer, told Polygon that some moderators are paid. This is especially true for those who work with streamers earning a lot of money and have a large audience. These positions are rare. Seering said that it’s more common for moderators to get paid for their work on Twitch channels owned by businesses; it’s not common enough, however. According to him, the use of Discord servers by businesses is increasing.

“For 99% of moderators, we do it for free and simply to help out the creators who have made our lives better,” Seering said. Pally.gg is a popular tool that allows streamers and moderators to share donations. Kedapalooza uses Pally.gg, offering a way for Twitch chat viewers to show their support for mods: “I’ve been able to set up a mod tipping page where people can go in and tip the mods for a job well done or just as a thank you. When I have some money left over, I usually go into the Pally myself and add onto that month’s tips.”

The reality of Twitch is that it’s not easy to make money livestreaming; only a select percentage of streamers are earning the millions that make headlines, let alone a decent annual salary. For the majority of streamers, Twitch is more hobby than job — making it hard to pay community members that step up to moderate. That doesn’t mean that moderators don’tThe question is how. Seering’s current research, he said, focuses on different compensation models for moderators on Twitch and elsewhere. Seering said that there are pitfalls to some of the more common suggestions, like that a platform itself should hire and pay moderators — this option would put a lotModerators are pushed out of their positions, and the others become dependent on the corporation that they work for. Seering said moderators he’s interviewed aren’t interested in losing the autonomy they have in managing communities, which is at risk when an outside entity makes moderation decisions, not a streamer directly.

“It’s important to remember that a lot of these moderators are really doing it because of the joy they get from shaping a social space for people like them, and that’s not the type of joy that would be likely to survive corporate control,” Seering said. Seering’s idea that companies who host Twitch or other communities pay for moderation was a good one. After all, moderating is a lot of work and can sometimes be draining emotionally.

“It’s incredibly important to have a good moderator team because I believe they’re also an extension of you and your values,” kedapalooza said. “There’s that phrase ‘you are the company you keep,’ and that reflects when you’re interacting with them during [the]The way the stream interacts with the audience is also important. I want my community to feel safe with the people that are meant to keep their experience as safe as possible, including voicing concerns offline.”