Controversy Sparks with GDQ's Sub-Only Chat

Controversy sparks when Games Done Quick, a speed-run centered charity organization, implemented a paywall in order to participate in the organizations live stream chat.

On Twitch, the live streaming service, channels can enable a "sub-only mode." Doing so will only allow those who pay a subscription fee to post in the chat. While subbing to a channel has a number of other benefits, this particular feature is the one relevant to this issue. GDQ had this to say about the decision.

"We take moderation seriously and want to maintain a positive atmosphere in all of our events, especially as we are representing the charities we are benefiting. As Games Done Quick has grown over the years, our channel has now been averaging between 100k-150k concurrent viewers, and moderating a channel of this size has been extremely difficult. Were currently exploring options to alleviate the situation and have opted to make the chat for AGDQ this year subscription-only. All GDQ subscription revenue in January will be donated to Prevent Cancer Foundation."

This prompted the creation of alternate channels being created with the sole purpose of hosting GDQ's stream while allowing anyone to chat. The creator of a channel called GDQ_Poverty made a statement on Reddit when his hosting channel gained traction.

"I just made this account on a whim in order to avoid having to (ridiculously) pay for a subscription to the official GDQ channel in order to chat with everyone else. For the first half-hour or so it was very nice, everyone was civil and excited to be able to use their favorite emotes. Word of the channel spread quickly, though, and soon the chat became a constant flood of emotes and spam. Things were impossible to discern through the stream so I introduced a 3-second slow mode, which seemed to work for a while.

Eventually things became so hectic that I had to introduce the moderation polls in order to quell the herd. These did an okay job of reducing the spam, but the more the spam got reduced, the more the hate started to spread.

To my dismay, the chat log began to be filled with racist and hateful remarks towards GDQ, runners, and random groups of people. It was right around this point that I had to drive home, which was going to take me two hours.

. . .

Honestly I'm really not surprised that this happened. The chat at certain points was pretty appalling, and people were just feeding off of one another. That kind of atmosphere wasn't what I intended to create when I made the channel, but in this situation it was probably (unfortunately) inevitable."

The channel would eventually be banned by Twitch Admins for hate speech. Twitch has clarified that hosting the channel for this purpose is absolutely fine, as long as they do not breach the Twitch guidelines, of which hate speech is not allowed.