Indirect Streamer Interactions to Maintain a Twitch Channel: Moderators, Bots, and DEERE

• In Event: Designing Live-Streaming Ecologies: Learning in and Across Synchronous Media

Abstract

This paper explores how drag queen and LGBTQ+ streamer DEERE sustains a Twitch channel. Using activity logs and an inductive research strategy, we examine how DEERE leverages bots and moderators as interconnected tools to connect with her audience and maintain boundaries of her channel. Although bots are often leveraged for self-promotion and other money-making endeavors, we are interested in how bots contribute to the co-construction of boundaries on Twitch.

Seering et al. (2019) article “Beyond Dyadic Interactions: Considering Chatbots as Community members” categorizes bots as antagonistic, archivist, authority figure, dependent, clown, social organizer, or storyteller (8). However, we found the role of bots was none of these tasks and instead served the role of regulator and notifier. As a notifier, the bot will welcome new subscribers, simultaneously notifying streamers of the new subscriber, by ringing a bell or making a sound. As a regulator, bots ensure that the viewers were adhering to the rules of engagement and discourse for that stream.

Using an online digital ethnographic approach, we used Zoom recording feature to screen record live-streams of DEERE’s streams to capture moderator-deleted comments and participant interactions. We analyzed the recordings using activity logs and organized the content by codes informed from Seering et al. (2018) paper “Social Chatbots” which deductive codes that identified the general purpose of the bots: sharing information, engaging users, running mini-games, promoting the streamer, and promoting another streamer. Building off this literature, we were able to refine the list and add more. These codes informed both our methods and findings.

The data we collected are recordings of DEERE’s streams on 4/19/2020 and on 4/24/2020. Screenshots taken from the recorded streams; we also took field notes and made activity logs which are organized by 2-minute intervals to provide more detailed descriptions of the chatbox and the streamer.

Moderators, who are actual users, maintain the appropriateness of the stream, heavily contribute to chat and game, and delete malicious comments. Moderators keep the channel a positive and educational digital space for those involved in and interested in both LTGBTQ+ and drag culture.

MoDEEREator, a bot, serves as a notifier and regulator. As a notifier, MoDEEREator informs DEERE of who has contributed positively to her channel by subscribing, tipping, or following her channel. MoDEEREator also serves to promote community engagement within the LGBTQ+ community and Stream Queens. As a regulator, MoDEEREator teaches the channel norms -the use of the rules, specifically on advertisement and self-promotion for individuals participating in it.

Moderators and bots are essential in regulating the boundaries in place by the streamer, and to sustain digital queerness by keeping the channel as a welcoming, identity-affirming space that educates users who have not previously encountered this content. Bots serve to teach these boundaries and notify DEERE of users who contribute to her channel. The indirect cybernetic practices employed by DEERE highlights the cross between the digital and the analog world. Our findings have implications for how young people leverage tools and technologies to design online spaces.

Authors

• Jasmine Ayromlou

• Sandra Jacobo, University of California - Berkeley

• Edward Rivero, University of California - Berkeley