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Who Moderates on Twitch and What Do They Do?: Quantifying Practices in Community Moderation on Twitch

Authors:

Joseph Seering,

Sanjay R. KairamAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 7, Issue GROUP

Article No.: 18, Pages 1 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/3567568

Published: 29 December 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Volunteer moderators are an increasingly essential component of effective community management across a range of services, such as Facebook, Reddit, Discord, YouTube, and Twitch. Prior work has investigated how users of these services become moderators, their attitudes towards community moderation, and the work that they perform, largely through interviews with community moderators and managers. In this paper, we analyze survey data from a large, representative sample of 1,053 adults in the United States who are active Twitch moderators. Our findings -- examining moderator recruitment, motivations, tasks, and roles -- validate observations from prior qualitative work on Twitch moderation, showing not only how they generalize across a wider population of livestreaming contexts, but also how they vary. For example, while moderators in larger channels are more likely to have been chosen because they were regular, active participants, mods in smaller channels are more likely to have had a pre-existing connection with the streamer. We similarly find that channel size predicts differences in how new moderators are onboarded and their motivations for becoming moderators. Finally, we find that moderators' self-perceived roles map to differences in the patterns of conversation, socialization, enforcement, and other tasks that they perform. We discuss these results, how they relate to prior work on community moderation across services, and applications to research and design in volunteer moderation.

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Cited By

DURMUŞ ŞENYAPAR H(2024)A Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingA Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingInternational Journal of Management and Administration10.29064/ijma.14172918:15(75-100)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.29064/ijma.1417291
Bulat BWang HFujimoto SFrey S(2024)The psychology of volunteer moderators: Tradeoffs between participation, belonging, and norms in online community governanceNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241259028Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241259028
Atreja SIm JResnick PHemphill L(2024)AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User AppealsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36372968:CSCW1(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637296
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Index Terms

Who Moderates on Twitch and What Do They Do?: Quantifying Practices in Community Moderation on Twitch
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 7, Issue GROUP

GROUP

January 2023

414 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3578937

Editor:
Jeff Nichols
Apple Inc., United States

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Copyright © 2023 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 29 December 2022

Published in PACMHCI Volume 7, Issue GROUP

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Cited By

DURMUŞ ŞENYAPAR H(2024)A Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingA Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingInternational Journal of Management and Administration10.29064/ijma.14172918:15(75-100)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.29064/ijma.1417291
Bulat BWang HFujimoto SFrey S(2024)The psychology of volunteer moderators: Tradeoffs between participation, belonging, and norms in online community governanceNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241259028Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241259028
Atreja SIm JResnick PHemphill L(2024)AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User AppealsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36372968:CSCW1(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637296
Cai JPatel ANaderi AWohn D(2024)Content Moderation Justice and Fairness on Social Media: Comparisons Across Different Contexts and PlatformsExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650882(1-9)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650882
Merayo NCotelo RCarratalá-Sáez RAndújar F(2024)Applying machine learning to assess emotional reactions to video game content streamed on Spanish Twitch channelsComputer Speech & Language10.1016/j.csl.2024.10165188(101651)Online publication date: Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2024.101651
Wang S(2023)Why do female audiences subscribe to these types of streamers? An empirical study on the motivations of Chinese Huya usersFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2023.124745114Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1247451
Han CSeering JKumar DHancock JDurumeric Z(2023)Hate Raids on Twitch: Echoes of the Past, New Modalities, and Implications for Platform GovernanceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35796097:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579609

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