I have a problem with repeat offenders returning to my chat to harass me with multiple accounts sometimes. When I asked admins/global mods about it, the only answer I got in return was “well if they’re causing trouble in your chat, just ban them”. Here’s how the situation plays out if I ban: if they are banned for “doing nothing wrong” but are in reality banned for skirting the lines in an attempt to get your control and force you to play head games with them, they have more ammunition because their dialogue is reopened in your chat and they know they have your attention. You are not only forced to ban them again, but you are forced to explain this new situation that has arisen to your audience, disrupting the broadcast. Doesn’t matter if you specifically say “don’t discuss bans in chat”, because people are going to wind up discussing bans anyway. It becomes incredibly difficult to obfuscate and draw attention away when the problem user comes back and uses more plays to hurt your interaction with your audience. Banning these particular individuals causes more problems than it helps, and they are VERY clever to exploit it, as much as I would hate to admit it.
As a broadcaster, I find that it is important to have options to shut out hecklers and harassers, especially if anything and everything an individual has to say to interact with you is either a backhanded compliment, sarcastic, or passive-aggressive. I would really rather not encourage other people like them to force my hand, especially when I have the center stage and I’m the biggest voice in the room.
I’m believe that the logic behind disabling the Ignore function is completely anecdotal and that nobody actually asked for it. Before it was instated, it was my ace in the hole for dealing with trolls who I was 100% convinced were trying to hook my attention for a long-con and waste my time, breeding toxicity in my chat. My twitch broadcasting experience is just as personal to me as it is to my viewers, so I need to be able to handle the interaction experience thusly. When you ban someone, you’re just interacting with one user, but you risk a slippery slope that destabilizes the chat, and I need the ability to deprive a user of stimulus completely.
In how many events has one or two moderators ignoring a username gotten a particularly nasty individual past a whole team of moderators? When it’s only the broadcaster in particular that is being targeted, why should the broadcaster be FORCED to interact in order to fix the situation? I’ve spoken to multiple other large broadcasters about this, and the ones who used the ignore function (or even never considered the application of the ignore function before) agreed that removing it is not a move that adds to the productiveness of a channel’s moderation team. It’s actually detrimental because it removes a huge card from the broadcaster’s hand for dealing with chat.
Making them unignorable ultimately forces broadcasters and moderators to directly deal with problem chatters instead of passively discouraging their continued presence in a channel. It is not always appropriate to “just ban” someone if they are giving you trouble, especially when a problem user’s main target is the broadcaster. The only way to bait them into making a stupid mistake is to remove their stimulus (and thus their battle plan) completely, and have moderators ban them if they turn on the audience.
When someone who is really doing things to make you angry and get your attention (wherein it is their goal to do so in a pathetic display of attention seeking) isn’t doing things to exactly get banned, they will resort to other plays such as making other accounts. They’ll harass and ask why they got banned (in an attempt to turn the chat against the broadcaster/mods) and further open options to harass the user and mods. The only solution (until there is some kind of solution for the flawed email verification in place) is to deprive ban evaders of stimulus. Having to deal with these individuals is a literal waste of time especially when I’m attempting to work on content. If they make multiple accounts specifically to come after me, (as I would be encouraging him to do by banning him, he can’t tell when I’m using the ignore function on him) it’s even more annoying to alt tab out of my game to tab over to my mod chat and tell them to report multiple users for ban evasion.
I realize that my post probably sounds very disorganized and I probably repeated a bunch of details, but I’ve seriously put a lot of thought into why the ignore function should not be disabled for broadcasters and moderators and am actually very very drained having to deal with these people again. If Twitch won’t fix it, is there an alternate chat client that will allow this, if this cannot be reinstated?