Kappa – The Kappa emote is actually a black and white image of the head of  one of Twitch’s early engineers. When you see it, it’s basically denoting sarcasm.  For example, if a streamer is playing a game and loses badly, someone might post in chat, “Wow, you did awesome. Kappa.”

PogChamp – In the somewhat crazy world of Twitch Chat, PogChamp is generally called in as a legitimate means of congratulations or praise.

PJSalt – The viewers hit the PJSalt emote in chat if and when the Streamer gets frustrated and angry at something in the stream or on the game they’re playing . It is sometimes accompanied by some variant of “gitgud” — meaning, “Get Good” or “You need to get better”.

A large part of the appeal Twitch has is its interactivity, this interactivity is driven through chat. In Twitch chat, a large part of the dialogue is handled through “emotes” – basically custom emojis. Twitch has provided a large variety of custom emotes. Many of these have taken on a life and meaning of their own within the Twitch community.  The number of custom emotes grows daily.  There’s some degree of just “rolling with it” as the internal understanding and usage of those emotes shifts over time.

Cheering a Channel or Streamer requires bits; a sort of currency and emote all in one.  You can buy bits – which are independent of a subscription, then use them for putting special emotes in the chat.  These will usually trigger a signal for the streamer to know they’ve been cheered and who cheered them. Most streamers will acknowledge a cheer live on the stream.  Others even enable a text-to-chat feature when a cheer is done, letting the cheerer send an audible message not only the streamer, but the whole audience.