Twitch introduces new tools to make community moderators' jobs easier

Twitch have released some new tools into the livestreaming wild today, aiming to make it easier for community moderators to keep those chat boxes free of bad actors.

Streamers and their chosen mods will be able to keep better track of people who are chatting away by viewing information like the date of their account creation and any previous timeouts and bans, as well as leaving notes about their behaviour for one another to read.

These tools were first announced at TwitchCon back in October, and now that they’re actually implemented they seem like they’ll be a pretty handy suite for those who donate their time to keeping streamers’ chats welcoming. Being able to see whether someone is a repeat offender removes a lot of the uncertainty about whether or not to take action, for example, and though they won't prevent banned users from creating new accounts just to jump back in, they do at least make it easy to tell when they have so that you can re-squash them.

Still, as long as Twitch is, well, Twitch, there will still be a ways to go. This week, for example, Kotaku reported on the company’s failure to close some fairly glaring loopholes that allow people who have been banned to follow streamers around the platform anyway, in order to harass them via their friends and communities.

Twitch themselves admit that this is only one step in a much more complicated process, saying in their announcement that they will “continue supporting channel moderators by making updates based on…feedback.”

The company is also currently celebrating Black History Month by highlighting black streamers and raising money for Code2040, an organisation aiming to help black and Latinx people in the tech industry. Hopefully these changes will go some way towards making the platform a better place for them to stream.