I am not going to talk about everything that is wrong with Twitch, because my list is quite long to discuss all that, but lets talk about two things I recently noticed.
Twitch IRC login - Why could I not log in to Twitch IRC anymore some days ago? Why did I have to spend about an hour to find out what was wrong? Is it really that hard to send your clients a notification about changes that have been made? So I was searching Google to finally find this link that explains why I could not connect anymore.
http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1302780-twitch-irc Not sure why this change was needed and to be honest, I don't even care anymore. I am kind of fed up with all the changes we have to deal with and to be honest, things do not even seem to get better, just worse or smartly hidden. Next time just come with some official announcement or at least send a notification to your clients!!!
Twitch R9K spam filter - Say what??? Yes, R9K chat spam filter. Some stupid, buggy and for Twitch totally useless crappy spam filter for the Twitch chat. This is a filter that tries to match identical or similar messages being sent to the chat if containing more than 9 characters. This spam filter is still in beta development and based on the ROBOT9000 project which is used in 4chan. This bot is basically trying to reduce the 'signal' to 'noise' ratio. I won't go into full detail on how this bot actually works, but I do not believe that any spam filter can actually control big Twitch channels and make chat coherent and chatters behave. Having R9K will most likely turn it into a game of its own, making things even worse. I do feel that the broadcaster and moderators have a task here in the first place anyway since we are dealing with 'humans' (usually) and they have to set an example on how the chat is supposed to behave. Channels that lack competence in this will end up having a terrible chat which no bot can fix in my opinion.
What I noticed the last few days is Twitch admins joining some of the bigger channels and turning on R9K mode without letting the broadcaster know. Next thing is viewers/chatters who notice messages not being sent resulting into negativity and questions. Then a discussion starts about this R9K mode and broadcasters/moderators actually not having a clue what is going on or how to turn this 'chat mode' off again. Supposedly there should be a way to turn it off, but I have not been able to find any information on how to accomplish this. Chatters now start trying out this 'chat mode' resulting in a totally off-topic chat next to the stream. Since this R9K mode is buggy in the first place, a lot of messages are not being sent. All-in-all, once again, some STUPID move on Twitch's behalf. No notification or announcement on any of the official pages or whatsoever. Sneaking into channels to turn them into some 'test case' and not even a way to turn this stupid - prolly meant to be great - new feature OFF again.
I truly miss the good old days where we were still a great community having a feeling we were all working on making it even better TOGETHER. By now the community has completely separated from the staff with their 'we don't give a fuck what our community thinks' attitude.
If only there was an alternative ...
