Over the weekend, thousands of Twitch streamers and their devoted fans descended upon San Diego for TwitchCon 2024. This year was a bit more intense, with protestors calling out Twitch’s Chevron sponsorship and streamers acting weird on camera to farm clips. But there was also more of what we expected, like announcements of new changes coming to Twitch.
At the opening ceremony, Twitch CEO and chill dad, Dan Clancy, revealed their product roadmap, which was packed with information about what was to come. In late July, Twitch remade their perfectly functioning Twitch mobile app into a buggy mess that makes finding streamers incredibly difficult. According to the blog post, Twitch has heard complaints and is working on making the platform easier to use, with the Following tab getting a rework in October that adds thumbnails and the ability to resume watching VODs where you left off.
Twitch is also working on a few new features, like the Clip Carousel, which will allow streamers to quickly check through their clips after a stream to see what video clips and moments they think are worth sharing with their community, and Enhanced Broadcasting, which increases the quality of a stream up to 1440p from 1080p.
One of the more chaotic announcements was Shared Chat, which combines the chat rooms of streamers that are co-streaming into one homogeneous blob that’s easier for them to check and read. Mods from both streamers will be able to do their jobs in a shared environment, which will either make community moderation much simpler or create double the headaches for them to sift through.
My favorite announcement had to be a change in how Twitch informs streamers of their Community Guidelines violations. In the past, streamers who received violations only had a vague sense of what they did wrong, with Twitch only sharing what section of the Terms of Service they broke. As someone who has covered Twitch for years, it’s always been frustrating to report on these cases because one would always have to guess why a particular streamer was banned.
With this latest update, when a streamer receives a violation, they’ll know exactly what they did wrong. If a message in chat led to the ban, Twitch will share the excerpt in an email. Though the feature is not ready yet, if a violation happens on stream they’ll send a clip of the infraction.
There’s also a change to strikes, which in the past were permanently attached to an account after a suspension or a warning. “Early next year we’ll begin expiring strikes over time depending on the severity of the violation,” Twitch wrote in their blog post.
Overall, these announcements are welcome and a bit needed for Twitch to stay relevant. The platform has been dealing with stronger competition from YouTube and even Kick, and the purple streaming platform needs to find ways to stand out.
