Summary
Twitchhas seen various changes to its platform since it was founded in 2011 and will likely see plenty more as the site continues to experiment with different features. After Amazon bought the platform in 2014,Twitchquickly became a mainstream media platform due to its gaming streams and wide variety of entertainment categories. Though competitors such as YouTube and Kick have entered the scene, Twitch is still pulling in a solid 140 million monthly users, based on statistics from Backlinko.
While Twitch is a dominant streaming platform, the site has seen its fair share of criticism over the past twelve years.Rivals like Kick have proven to be controversial, but policies and attributes of the Amazon-owned site haven’t always been well-received either. For example on August 31, the company announced it would be removing the Community Moments feature, which sparked a good amount of backlash from some of its user base.
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Community Moments May Not Have Been Marketed Properly
Originally, Community Moments were designed to gift viewers unique badges for being present on random occasions. A clip of the moment would usually come about via typing a command in chat or pressing a specific button. Distinctive awards such as badges andemotes are often highly coveted on Twitch, and some people were so proud of them that they would go so far as to “portfolio their moments”, according to Twitter user TrikSlyr.
Unfortunately, though the Community Moments beta was only introduced a few months ago, Twitch announced it would be rolling it back on October 3 of this year. This isn’t the first time thatTwitch has removed something controversial from the siteas it happens fairly regularly. However, this choice was so shocking to some because several streamers had already expressed that they enjoyed using the feature and progressing their “Community Moments” shelf with viewers. While there were some debates that this created FOMO for some viewers, it’s likely that badge stacking helped increase streamer engagement.
The original tweet from Twitch cited “limited usage from the Twitch community” as a reason for the shutdown. The comments were quickly flooded with people baffled as to what a Community Moment was because they’d never heard of it. Others such as user EsfandTV wrote, “Almost no one had access to it, of course, it had limited use”. The idea thatCommunity Moments are being removedbecause no one was utilizing them was especially a point of contention for some, as people wanted to use them but simply couldn’t.
As a solution to this issue, there are those who think Twitch should keep the beta idea and roll it out to everyone. There’s a belief that if the idea was marketed better, it might have performed to the company’s expectations. However, some streamers who did have access to it said that the UI for it was confusing. This might have led people to forget to use the feature because of how tedious it could be.
Though there have been a few ideas as to how Community Moments could remain, it’s uncertain ifTwitch will issue another statementfollowing the varying responses. If nothing else, perhaps the platform could take some time to review the feedback given and adjust accordingly. It seems that several people think commemorative badges and rewards are a good idea, so if Twitch plans to bring it back, an alternative method could prove more successful.
