Twitch made a major blunder by giving a community participation award to an honest-to-goodness bot account, and it quickly became the most memed moment from the entire awards stream.
Whether it was the fact most people had to spend the majority of the year inside or something else, 2020 was a record-breaking year for Twitch no matter how you look at it, with more people tuning in than ever before
At the end of the year, Twitch announced they would be holding a “participation ceremony” in January to recognize those users who went above and beyond to make the site into the community we know today. Apparently, you didn’t even have to be a real person to be eligible for an award, either.
Awards were given out in all kinds of categories, but the one that stuck out was for “most raids performed in 2020.” Raiding is when a streamer sends their viewers to another channel, usually done at the end of a stream. It’s a great way to give smaller channels some of the spotlight.
One of the hosts, Twitch streamer Elspeth, excitedly announced that the user who had performed the most raids in 2020 was none other than “electricallongboard” with over 1,000 during the course of the year.
There’s just one problem here though, as chat and other streamers watching almost instantly pointed out, electricallongboard is simply a bot that automatically hosts other channels, it’s not a human or even technically a member of the community. Although a human of course set up the account, it’s not a streamer in the traditional sense, and hosts channels automatically.
“That’s just one of those stupid bot accounts that raids you,” streamer Zach Bussey laughed while watching it play out. “That account should be banned from Twitch, oh my god, what kind of world do we live in.”
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Obviously, electricallongboard didn’t have anything to say on their big win since they’re a non-sentient program completing an assigned task, but it’s a big win for Twitch bots of all types without a doubt.
Along with this slip-up, there were also issues with the moderation, or lack thereof, during the stream, with viewers “spewing hate speech and harassing the guest streamers.”
There's more than 42,000+ viewers watching the Twitch Participation Ceremony on the offical @Twitch channel now. Users in chat are spewing hate speech & harassing the guest streamers. 3 mod names in the chat list but since I've been watching, have seen ZERO messages get deleted.
— Emme Montgomery (negaoryx) (@negaoryx) January 23, 2021
Twitch hasn’t replied to either of these situations as of yet, but bots and hate speech were two of the site’s biggest issues in 2020, successful as it was, and it seems like there’s still some work to be done on both.
