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The Wannabes auto hosting discussion

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Denferok:
Hello everyone, a new Twitch feature was just released; auto hosting. What makes this a big deal is the fact that you can automatically host people that are in your Twitch team. I think this could be the perfect opportunity for us to strengthen our brand and help further support the smaller streamers in the community.

You can read about autohosting here https://blog.twitch.tv/grow-your-community-with-auto-hosting-e80c1460f6e1#.oobsqw3o0

First off, a bunch of questions pop upp immediately and I'll try my best to answer them.

The reason why I think we should do this is because once again this will significantly strengthen our brand and provide more of a reason to actually care about the twitch team. I'll be honest, right now the team feels rather meaningless, it's just there to show people that you're "hot stuff" or something. For example, if someone with next to no viewers is feeling bad then a massive host train could possibly cheer them up! Not to mention the other numerous benefits this would give.

Since this will increase the value of being in the team, I think we'll also have to make the team requirements more strict and overall require more professional attitude. Here are a few suggestions:
- Removal of inactive members (basically those who no longer exist within the community)
- Those who come back would not need to reapply and are able to rejoin instantly
- Make the whole "watchable stream" rule more strict
- Spend more time deciding whether the person in question is suitable to join (a small group of community managers would be great)
- Require english to be the broadcaster language (I.E the setting in your twitch dashboard, multiple language streams are still fine)
- Heavily discourage the use of follower alerts
- Heavily encourage all members of the team to use the autohosting

This is meant to be a discussion thread and this is not something that is set in stone. Please share your thoughts and this thread to get as many involved as possible, we need as many opinions and thoughts as we can get before we decide to pull the trigger on something as big as this. If you have any questions about this please post right away and we'll do our best to answer them.

Sudnep:
I don't see any issue with pruning inactive members / members who don't stream frequently. However I do think there should be exceptions for certain people. As an example: patrickgh3 shouldn't be removed from the team since he provides irregular content that other streams don't provide such as game-making and it's not reasonable to have a consistently active stream of in development work.

he 'no follower alert' should be as self-explanatory as 'don't call out lurkers'. If anything is a requirement, having a non-obnoxious stream layout should be it and a follower alert should fall under the category of being obnoxious.

I don't have any comments on the rest.

tehjman1993:
Hello all,

I want to comment on some of Den's points that are up for discussion, as well as comment on the auto-host feature.

First, on the subject of the auto-host:

There is no "bad side" to auto-hosting that I can think of. Auto-hosting is just one of a variety of ways we can promote other team members. Auto-hosting has been used by other communities via a bot for quite some time now, this is nothing new for Twitch. I do believe that auto-hosting can get a little stale after some time if the same broadcaster is being auto-hosted for weeks or months at a time from your channel, however, there still is no "downside" to it. Auto-hosting cannot lose you viewers - you're already offline! Although I am skeptical of Twitch's claim of an "average of 10% increase of viewership for 50% of participants" (which is already poorly worded in a small case study done over a short period of time, red flags everywhere), I think this is an overall positive change for us to adapt to in the community.

On the topic of new team "requirements" and suggestions:

I believe inactive members should be booted from the Twitch team at this time. However, I also believe if these inactive members become active again, a re-application to the team should be accepted immediately.

Den is quite vague on "increase of requirements", so I'm not entirely sure what is meant here. This could mean a higher bottom-line for skill (I am against this), more streaming experience (stream quality comes to mind, I am for this), or being more-known in the community (potentially suggesting a higher follower/average viewer count, I am against this). Clarification would be great on this point, but I think the 3 areas I listed here are probably what comes to mind under this new requirement, along with my stance on each.

A removal of members who do not meet requirements sounds a bit shifty. This will probably not apply to the "skill" portion of the requirements, and probably doesn't meet the "known" requirement (since you really can't be less-known ... I think), so this probably refers to streamers who have downgraded in quality of stream for a variety of reasons. Although I am not completely against this, I believe this needs to be treated on an extreme case-by-case basis. I really haven't observed anyone who "fell below" the requirements, other than inactivity, which has already been discussed above.

I do believe English should be the primary language of streamers on the team. However, I wholeheartedly support streamers who use 2 or more languages on their stream in an attempt to reach other communities. I have met many wonderful streamers from the French community who played Boshy and some wonderful streamers from the Russian community who ask questions about Kamilia constantly, among others. Many of these streams you will see with [EN/FR] or [EN/RU], or something similar in their title to signify that they are essentially running two communities in their stream at the same time. This should be encouraged, and opens up our team to a wider audience.

Banning the broadcaster on the team from using any alert is simply an overreach of power. Den cited streambig, a popular site for streaming tips by iateyourpie (great variety streamer). Although many do not like follower alerts, this is no reason to ban. A majority of people don't like strawberry ice cream, either - so you can't eat it on stream? Simply put, this is way too far of a requirement. I personally no longer use follower alerts after seeing how they did not benefit me as much as I liked - but that's not to say I shouldn't be allowed to use them.

I'd like to hear more community input on these matters, as I hope I'm not the only one who holds some of these opinions!

klazen108:
There's been some rumor and speculation flying around, so I'd like clarification on a couple of points:

1) Does the Twitch Auto-Host override a manual host you perform? If you are hosting a non-wannabe, in my mind it is not ok for the auto-host bot to decide when that host period ends. The only time it should be allowed to switch your host is when you are offline, and you have not chosen to host anyone, as that is literally dead time.

2) Can people be added to auto-host lists that are not on the team? If someone decides that sometimes they want to auto-host their friend who is not on the wannabes, should that be allowed?

Otherwise, I'm generally in agreement, except for a couple of points:

1) No follower alerts. I totally agree that they aren't necessary, and a lot of times I've not followed a stream to avoid the alert, but if someone wants a follower alert I don't think it should preclude them from being on the team.

2) English only. I agree with the general consensus that having non-English-speaking streamers on the team can only widen our audience. If you're concerned about language barriers, maybe ask that those streamers mark the languages in their title as most do, and also remember that you can specify your stream language on twitch itself, which handily notifies viewers what language they can expect in the stream.

The concept sounds good! I truly hope the introduction of this feature brings back some of the value offered by twitch teams.

Smartkin:
Hello to anyone who reads this.

Though I'm not the most active streamer if at all but I have a lot of experience with Twitch so I'd still like to present my opinion on this. It'd be quite nice to have auto-host as a thing and as TJ already said there nothing bad about. Myself I do watch a bunch of fangame streams and it'd only benefit me so I don't have to find another stream when auto-host will do it for me :atkHappy:

On topic of team requirements I strongly support the "no follower alert rule". Many lurkers will find it disgusting and imo not only they don't benefit but make the stream look worse and sound worse when suddenly there is some random picture and sound mid-gameplay part and I wanna enjoy the stream not getting distracted by some random notification that I don't care about and only provides info for the streamer rather than the viewers themselves.

In terms kicking out inactives maybe that should be done but as again TJ mentioned some members provide quite an original content of their own. All in all should be kicked the completely "dead" people.

In terms of language I encourage English only because double language creates a complete mess in chat and on stream. Yes that maybe nice to get in people from many communities but at the same time half the stuff won't be understood because of language barrier. And I doubt streamers will translate literally everything to one language :p.

As a conclusion I guess auto-host should be a thing and new rules such as "no follower alert" and "English only" should be included in order to join the team.

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