If there’s one thing that every single person who uses the internet can agree on, it’s that Twitch chat is universally awful. With a new moderating tool, released today, the people who run Twitch are taking another step to help fix that.
This morning, the popular streaming site launched AutoMod, a tool that uses the power of automated filters and word recognition to help clean up terrible comments. Twitch streamers can toggle AutoMod in their settings pages, and if the service works as promised, it will filter out both awful words and clever facsimiles of awful words using numbers to replace letters.
Says Twitch in a press release:
AutoMod is a unique moderation tool that does more than filter inappropriate chat. When a user sends a message that AutoMod flags as potentially inappropriate, the message is held in a publishing queue awaiting moderator approval. AutoMod also enables broadcasters to adjust the degree of filtering in the event they are more or less conservative about the type of dialogue they want to see in their chat. Beyond identifying inappropriate words and phrases, AutoMod can detect potentially inappropriate strings of emotes and other characters or symbols that others could use to evade filtering.
Will any of this make Twitch chat worth reading? Probably not. But at least the company is putting more effort into making things a little more pleasant for those who stream video games — and cooking shows — every day.
Comments
One response to “Twitch Releases New Tool To Fix Their Awful Chat”
Long overdue, and hopefully a sign of companies providing services like this realising this needs to be baked-in from the start. It’s their backyard, they need to keep it clean.