An insight into the world of high-profile Twitch chat moderation has highlighted just how much hard work the Twitch community can be.

A report from Polygon focuses on a former Twitch employee and professional moderator (going by the alias of Kanthes) who said that the true pain of moderating Logan Paul’s first Twitch stream became apparent very early on.

“We wanted to have control of the chat from the very beginning,” Kanthes said. “That first hour went just fine, really. We did a lot of fine tuning of the moderation bot that we use and figured out a lot of what the community was going to be like.

“But once the stream started — actually, about five minutes ahead of start — chat started getting more and more active. To the point where neither chat clients nor the moderation bot could actually keep up. It started lagging behind. So things that would have normally been filtered by the moderation bot, were getting through. That is when we started having the issues.”

Hell is other people

An assortment of measures were implemented including backup bots and the activation of slow mode, but ultimately the only step that stemmed the torment was the switch to follower-only comments which “allowed chat to get down to a manageable level of activity again, the bot could catch up, timeouts were being issued in the correct timeframe”.

Kanthes added that while his Paul experience was stressful, it did not compare to his previous work trying to moderate a Feminist Frequency stream.