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Twitch vs Speedrun Community Drama (update: Twitch officially responds)

sibarraz

Banned
Just recently knew about this

Here’s the deal:

Horror is a lead Twitch admin who happens to be a gay furry. He made his boyfriend’s fursona into a global twitch emote which pissed a lot of people off because it is considered inappropriate for twitch (the created emote for the fursona is also underage btw). He has also been very arrogant, disrespectful, and egotistical towards streamers and viewers in the past.

Anyway, speedrunner Duke_Bilgewater made a comment/joke to Horror that said:
“Hey Horror, what’s the easiest way into your pants so I can get a global emote too?”

Horror proceeded to IP ban him from Twitch.

This set off a chain of reactions that resulted in a lot of streamers and viewers preaching “Remove Horror”

Cyepher (maybe spelled wrong) also got ALL of his emotes banned simply the weren’t considered “appropriate” even though they are 100x more appropriate than Horror’s.

As a result, popular streamers Werster and Peaches also got banned and had their accounts removed for supporting the “Remove Horror” campaign. (Peaches and Werster appear to be IP banned as well, but there is no confirmation on this that I know of yet).

Peaches created controversy by naming his stream “Using my keyboard to remove Horror” and it was changed to “Using my keyboard to remove” by Twitch staff member Jason. Jason threatened to remove Peaches if he changed it back. Peaches changed the stream title to “Using my keyboard to remove Horrific zombies” and was later banned after his stream ended.

As of right now, streamers are being banned left and right, too many to even name in this document. A few others that have been removed are Cruxit, Dugongue, and ChalkedJanitor.

Now, everyone is becoming super pissed at Twitch and the blatant disrespect and unprofessionalism of Horror and his rampant banning. Also, Twitch staff member Jason has also said that he sees no issue with Horror’s actions and will not remove him from Twitch.

And just to clarify, nobody, including myself, is hating on Horror for being gay or for being a furry. He can live any lifestyle he chooses and that is of no concern to me or any of us. What we are pissed at is his behavior. The way he disrespects viewers and abuses his power is what is pissing off all of us.

So far, that’s the story.

This links to an image that shows some of Horror’s behavior and some of the story in picture form.

http://imgur.com/k7Awa7V

Well, don't know what to think, overall the situation could had been handled a little better I think. Also, for once I found funny, that the FGC is not related, I could imagine the shitstorm now


Edit:
Official Twitch response
We at Twitch apologize for our role in what has been an unfortunate and ugly chapter for the streaming community. We'd like to repair the damage that has been done to the relationship between Twitch and the Speedrunning community, in particular.

For context, here is a summary of the events as Twitch understands they occurred:

Twitch discovered that copyrighted images had been uploaded as emoticons to cyghfer’s chatroom on Twitch. Twitch policy clearly forbids unlicensed images from being used as subscription emoticons.
One of our staff members, Horror, notified cyghfer of this violation and removed the emoticons. Additionally, of the three emoticons which were removed, only two were actually unlicensed. One of them was actually licensed under Creative Commons and should not have been removed. We have notified cyghfer of our mistake in this matter.
Several Twitch users begin looking into our general policy for emoticons on Twitch, as they felt this policy was being enforced unevenly. One discovered the NightLight emoticon, a globally available emoticon, had been promoted to global status as a personal favor. It was clearly a licensed image however, as it had been commissioned explicitly as an emoticon for the Twitch site. The NightLight emoticon should not have been approved as a global emoticon and has been removed by request of the channel owner.
In reaction to this discovery about the NightLight emoticon and the previous emoticon removals, many users began to make jokes and other much less funny derogatory and/or offensive remarks in chat. Additionally, many of these users began harassing our staff and admins outside of Twitch chat using other social media channels.
Horror then banned many users from the Twitch site for this behavior. Harassment and/or defamation of any user on the site, including a staff member, is clearly against the Twitch terms of service. Some of the banned user’s remarks clearly cross this line, and those users were correctly banned. Other users made more innocuous remarks and should not have been banned. Horror was too close to this situation and should have recused himself in favor of less conflicted moderators. Being personally involved led to very poor decisions being made.
This whole situation began blowing up outside Twitch, including but not limited to Twitter and Reddit. One of our volunteer admins took it upon themselves to attempt to censor threads on Reddit. This was obviously a mistake, was not approved by Twitch, and the volunteer admin has since been removed. We at Twitch do not believe in censoring discussion, and more to the point know that it’s doomed to failure.

We take this incident very seriously and apologize for not better managing our staff, admins and policies regarding community moderation. There were several key mistakes made by Twitch in this process:

We failed to provide a valued partner with proper support when we needed to remove their unlicensed emoticons
We allowed a questionable emoticon to be made available in global chat
We failed to properly train our staff members to recuse themselves from personally involved situations, and as a result poor moderation decisions were made.
We did not have the structure or training in place in our moderation policies and training to deal with this episode properly.

What we're doing now and in the future:

Twitch users who were unfairly banned due to this incident are being systematically unbanned today.
The Twitch partners who were banned due to this incident have been provisionally unbanned pending investigation.
The NightLight emoticon has been removed.
Disciplinary action is being taken with regard to Twitch staff and members of the volunteer admin team who overstepped their authority.
Due to this incident, we are embarking on a full review of Twitch admin policies and community moderation procedures.
Horror has voluntarily stepped back from public facing moderation work at Twitch, as right now pretty much every moderation issue will be tainted by this episode.

In Our Defense:

Note that harassment and defamation (as opposed to criticism) of Twitch employees, partners, users, broadcasters, and humans in general is strictly prohibited by our terms of service and remain grounds for removal. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated. Users who committed acts of harassment or defamation will remain banned. Feel free to complain, protest, petition, etc. if you feel Twitch is making a mistake. Don’t harass or defame people.
Twitch staff did not ask any reddit moderators to remove or censor any threads.
“Twitch Administrators” are volunteer moderators who are not employed by Twitch. The activities depicted here and being falsely attributed to Twitch staff were undertaken by a volunteer admin who has since been removed from the program.

If you have further questions or comments, feel free to contact us directly via email at support@twitch.tv. Due to high expected volume, please be patient with us for responses in general on this topic.
 

Yawnier

Banned
Peaches, one of the most entertaining speedrunners on Twitch is IP banned.

WTF, hopefully this gets sorted out.
 

Lost Fragment

Obsessed with 4chan
which pissed a lot of people off because it is considered inappropriate for twitch

The way it's described here makes me think they just didn't like it because it was a furry thing. Since when are people so concerned about "inappropriate" things?
 

K.Sabot

Member
Free Werster, Free Peaches

Remove Horror

Good luck finding me I'm behind 48 proxies.

But yeah, real stupid drama and terrible judgement from twitch staff. I do think Horror should be removed or at least reprimanded for abusing power, but twitch staff seems to be protecting him as of now.
 
It's more "Horror vs everyone" with the rest of Twitch 2scurred to actually take action against one of their most famous admins.
 
That seems pretty stupid. Twitch makes all this headway into being the premier videogame streaming site and they're willing to risk it all over one guy who can't control his behavior?
 
I have watched a few of Werster and peaches stream, that's pretty shitty. Werster was averaging 1000s for his pokemon runs too.
 

Kandrick

GAF's Ed McMahon
Horror has been known for abusing his power by banning people because they didn't share the same opinion.
 

Pappasman

Member
There has been a bunch of bullshit from both sides ever since this started last night. Horror has a reputation as a bad mod, but the way some people have been acting about this whole thing has been really dumb. IP bans were far too much for a situation like this, but also people shouldn't have been starting twitch campaigns around hating this guy.
 
It'd be fucking hilarious if adam_ak got banned too. "Let's ban the guy speedrunning the most popular video game series of all time!"
 

blamite

Member
This is the emote in question, right?
nrtF4vO.png
 

LeleSocho

Banned
I was waiting for this thread actually because i don't think i understood everything about what is happening.
Edit: I read on trihex's chat that Werster has been unbanned actually.
 

K.Sabot

Member
The personal side of this drama is somewhat irrelevant at this point.

The crusade against the mod has come from the IP bans that have been handed for no other reason than criticizing a twitch mod. Whether or not some tiny little global image emote was made from furry porn is unimportant now.
 
I can't believe what I just read, wow. I know he's an admin and all, but they're seriously letting him run free? They're seriously putting there sites reputation at cost for one person?
 

dumbyugi

Member
Duke's joke was probably inappropriate but he should have just gotten a normal chat timeout, not an ip ban. Werster and Peaches being banned is super shitty as well. Some of the speedrunning community has acted really poorly after the bans but Twitch is in the wrong here.
 
I'm not even old at all and I feel like I'm too old to understand these darn kids with their 'fursonas' and their twitches and their rock music.
 

Data West

coaches in the WNBA
Twitch also holds popularity contests to let users change their names to inflate their viewership.

Twitch seems like it's run by a lot of amateurs that don't realize they're such a global thing now.
you're going to have to explain to me why it matters if an emote is underage, and why that little fox face is inappropriate.

Only certain people have twitch emotes. A select few who are usually consistently popular and usually well-liked get them. And usually it requires a facial expression during stream that's memorable. Some of the biggest speedrun streamers DONT have one, but this shmuck got one because of who his boyfriend was. That is the main issue.
 

Azull

Member
Holy crap that emote. Man that's pretty messed up. By the way that isn't the one in question, click the imgur link and go down about half way. Btw what the hell is a furry and fursona? I just found out what a brony was so don't judge me.
 
the average stream monster comment on twitch is more offensive than what was said. they should just ban the whole community!
 
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