When the notorious Logan Paul launched his Twitch channel last month, the streaming platform’s moderators were ready.
“We wanted to have control of the chat from the very beginning,” said “Kanthes,” a freelance moderator who chose not to use his real name when he told Polygon all about moderating Paul’s first Twitch stream.
Paul, of course, initially gained recognition on YouTube, where he’s had a rocky start to 2018. Though he’s still active on the video platform (it’s where he announced his first Twitch stream and filmed the moments leading up to it on April 9), he wanted to expand his exposure and money-making horizons with an account on the gaming platform, which he titled LoganPaulWasTaken. In his first day on Twitch, Paul amassed over 190,000 followers.
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“The chat is going crazy right now,” Paul said in the April 9 YouTube video where he bided his time before playing Fortnite on Twitch. Meanwhile, Kanthes was standing by.
“About five minutes ahead of start,” he told Polygon, “the chat started getting more and more active. To the point where neither chat clients nor the moderation bot could actually keep up… So things that would have normally been filtered by the moderation bot were getting through.” One of the first obstacles Kanthes came up against was a number of emoticons that resembled male genitalia. He failed to prevent them from making it into the chat.
Since the moderation bot wasn’t able to do its job, Kanthes had to turn to back-up measures like using slow mode, which limits how frequently people can post in the chat, and filters that block certain messages. Finally, he turned to follower-only mode, which restricts chats to only people who have been following the stream for a set amount of time. The last attempt ultimately made the chat “manageable.”
Kanthes described moderating Paul’s stream as one of his more “stressful” experiences working on the gaming platform. There have been plenty of contenders. Kanthes called the Feminist Frequency stream “the most stressful,” owing to the fact that its founder, Anita Sarkeesian, was one of the main targets in Gamergate. Kanthes has also moderated streams of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
“That is what allows me to handle a situation like Logan Paul,” he explained. “I have the experience to know how to react to what chat does.”
Paul currently has 696,000 followers on Twitch, where he’s accumulated over 2.2 million total views since launching his channel in mid-March. He’s mentioned plans to only allow subscribers into his chats once he becomes a Twitch affiliate, which Kanthes says will both make a moderator’s job easier because it decreases chat activity, but may serve to alienate some of Twitch’s regular users. Then again, alienating people seems to be one of Paul’s specialties.
