You're right of course. I just wonder with things like this, if Valve/Twitch/YouTube etc. were to ban all of those idiots/kids spewing crap on chat, what would that mean for their platform? Would Twitch without the Twitch chat still be as big as it is today? I should not have said anything about Dota however since I don't know anything about Dota. My bad.
You don't have to apologize. Some aspects of toxicity in Dota are overblown, while other aspects are not understood by players who don't play the game enough. So you are both partially right and wrong.
For example: In my experience, it is rare for people to flame on voice chat. In lower/average matchmaking levels, people don't usually use their mics, and if you start the conversation by talking on the mic, people are more likely to come out of their shell and respond back if they have a mic. Most of my solo victories occur when I'm able to talk to my teammates on the mic. A person's also less likely to flame using their voice because it adds a touch of humanity/identity to it. People tend to flame way more in text chat because it feels so impersonal.
The biggest hurdle/cause of toxicity is being matched with teammates who don't speak your language. In US servers, it is not uncommon to get matched with Russian/Peruvian/Latin American players. Usually these players don't understand English and you won't understand their language. So you're left with communicating via pings, the in game chat wheel, or the text chat. The lack of communication leads to worse performance in a team game, and players tend to find someone to blame. That's why the most common insults are common English terms like 'retard', 'idiot', 'feeder', 'bitch', 'report', 'gg ez' etc. Common English words that all the cultures seem to understand. To a player new to Dota or competitive games, this can seem overwhelming, but after a certain point, you tend to filter these insults out, and it can make you think of the other player as a bot, something less than human, because of how tired and redundant these phrases can get.
It also leads to decent human beings becoming casual racists. You might be indifferent to Russia or Russian players, but after a 100 matches of playing with players who don't speak your language, you tend to credit your losses to them and start making stereotypes in your mind. The next time you come across someone with a cyrillic gamertag, your mind goes into defeatist mode and you're already hating that player for existing and losing you the game before the game even begins. I've seen this happen to friends of mine.
I do not think the game is good for solo players who want to avoid toxicity. Solo play in Dota 2 requires really tough skin. I almost exclusively play with friends because the game is really fun with friends even when you're losing, and we are usually matched with other stacks of players, which tend to be less toxic than individual players. I don't condemn general taunting, trash talking. We usually take jabs at each other after flashy kills but we also pause for players if they disconnect, commend good players ,etc. That's how 90% of our matches go but we've reached the average skill level. The climb to that level can still be really bad, especially if you're playing solo.
Valve can't instantly solve these problems because of the team aspect of the game, as well as the language barrier between players. Valve can implement a matchmaking system that only matches players who speak your language, but they already have something like this and it doesn't stop players who don't speak English from selecting English as a choice.
Regarding Twitch chat, Dota 2's twitch community is the least creative, stupidest, meme/pasta spamming community I've seen. There are 3 big causes for this in my opinion:
- No slow mode, lax moderation in Dota 2 streams. Which means messages scroll by too quickly for any proper conversation to take place.
- Many non-English speakers, who find it easier to regurgitate memes/twitch emoticons than think of original statements.
- Most chatters are low skill, on again off again players who watch more than they play, and this is their primary social outlet.
Sorry for the long, rambling, off topic post.