Twitch to Disable Chants Chat Feature on Feb. 2
Twitch will be turning off the experimental Chants chat feature on Feb. 2, 2022, the American video live streaming service company announced Tuesday.
After being initially announced back in May as a limited-time experiment, it appears Twitch has found that the feature does more harm than good.
? On 2/2, we will turn off Chants.
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) January 25, 2022
While this feature was popular, we observed negative impacts to minutes watched for significant groups of creators.
Experiments help us test new ideas in real time, and decide what to build next. Thanks for sharing your feedback with us!
Crowd Chants were a new way for communities to "chant" during hype moments on stream.
Creators and mods could use "/chant" to suggest messages (with text and/or emotes) in chat, which would then allow viewers to see a private callout with the chant and either dismiss or participate.
For instance, while I was watching an Apex Legends streamer win a game by ripping the final opposing team to shreds with the Rampage LMG, a mod started a chant that went, "rampage go brrrrrr."
Before I knew it, the entire chat was filled with "rampage go brrrrrr," and I joined in as well simply by hitting the "Chant" button that popped up.
Unfortunately, according to Twitch, while the feature was popular, they seemingly observed a trend in which Chants negatively impacted minutes watched for significant groups of creators using it.
Before long, many replied to the announcement on Twitter, from those sharing their experiences about Chants being a positive addition, to other skeptical about the feature could lead to lower viewership.
"Once again I feel this could have been added and been an optional feature for streamers," @VaughnWhiskey said on Twitter. "I've seen some really wholesome and great things come from the chant feature and those who used it in a negative way maybe should as a creator step in and disable it."
"Literally what correlation could chants have to low viewership?" @memmyygrace added. "People see chants and hate them so much they leave?"
The Twitch Support Twitter has since put out another statement.
"To clarify, we randomly generate test (those w/ access) and control (those w/out) groups to compare impact on things creators care about. In this case, the decrease in viewership for channels with access to Chants was significant, specially for small and mid-size channels."