Emotes & Bits

Posted on by Natasha Vijji

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.

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Twitch Basics

Posted on by Natasha Vijji

Twitch is a website dedicated to all things gaming, it offers a platform to run live broadcasts for hundreds of gamers playing , plus the ability to chat with and send messages to other users. Children can follow their favorite broadcasters for free and subscribe to their channels for a monthly fee. This subscription fee runs anywhere between 5-25 dollars a month, the bigger the audience, more money can be earned.

By subscribing  to a channel the viewer not only shows support for a streamer, but also gets access to ad-free content and a range special Emote’s to use in the chat window. But not everything about twitch is fun and games. Since it involves live streaming you can’t predict what you’ll get, so watch out for gamey violence and racy or rude comments plus the membership fee that can stack up as you need to renew it on a monthly basis. Due to lack of an auto renewal system, it becomes unpredictable as to how many subscribers a streamer can sustain in the long run.

Twitch originally focused entirely on video games but has since expanded to include streams dedicated to artwork creation, music, talk shows, and the occasional TV series. In 2014 Twitch was purchased by Amazon and it remains one of the highest sources of internet traffic in North America.