Temporary Sub-Communities in Twitch Chat

Sammanfattning: Since the inception of Twitch and the early stages of the growth of live streaming, it has been imperative to maintain interactivity between the broadcaster/streamer and the viewers. Interactivity separates live streaming as a media consumption format from traditional media consumption formats such as television or on-demand videos. But due to the exponential growth of Twitch the number of concurrent viewers on streams have increased as well. This higher viewer count decreases interactivity as the chat gets crowded and it is virtually impossible to get your message across to either the streamer or the other viewers. This study investigates how the interactivity can be increased between viewers by categorizing them into smaller sub-communities. The sub-communities in the context of this study mean temporary sub-chats which have a relatively lower number of viewers. There are various factors upon which the categorization of viewers can be decided. During this study three possible approaches were discussed which include categorization based upon an automated topic identification system, manual creation of sub-communities and geo-location categorization. The results indicate that an automated topic identification system that generates temporary sub-communities is a probable solution to increase inter-viewer interactivity and the best approach to implement this feature is the automated approach. The results also state that the hyperpersonal mode of communication encourages viewers to engage more with other viewers, hence it needs to be maintained even after the implementation of the sub-community feature.