Gamers like Richard Tyler “Ninja” Blevins are becoming celebrities in their own right and how they reached their fame is through a website called Twitch    

    For those outside of the gaming community, Twitch.tv is a live streaming platform. On the site, streamers or for a more general term, content creators, use the site to showcase their game-play to the public.

    Typically what can be seen on a streamers page is a live video feed of their game-play and off to a corner of the screen a small window that shows the person playing the game. In addition, there is a chat box to the side of the main video for the Twitch community to communicate with the streamer.

    This interactive feature introduced by the chat box is one reason for Twitch’s success. It fosters a stronger sense of belonging for the community who use the platform and it’s also what brings many of the viewers back for more.

Yet there are downsides that come with free speech on the internet.

“People are stupid and racist. There are just a lot really bad things,” said Marcus Nikaido, a 3rd year computer science major and avid Twitch viewer.

The luxury of being behind a screen grants viewers the ability to say rude and vile things to the streamer or anyone else in the chat. This “toxic” behavior is the major downfall of the messaging feature.

There are some ways that this problem is remedied. Twitch streamers can kick and ban viewers from their stream for poor behavior. In addition, they enable the use of moderators, or commonly known as mods, who serve as the peacekeepers of the chat community that remove offensive posts as well as spammed messages.

Despite the occasional “toxic” chat, there is still much to offer from Twitch.

“There is a little bit of everything for everyone,” said Nikaido.

Games are not the only content live streamed on the platform. There is a wide array of things from music, art, IRL (In Real Life), Pokemon and even sports (sometimes).

    The variety of the streams is one reason for the large and ever growing Twitch population. The site gets 15 million unique visitors that watch an average of 95 minutes daily. There are also 2.2 million content creators that stream daily as well.

   The platform’s achievements did not go unnoticed as Twitch got purchased by Amazon, a well known tech giant, for $970 million back in 2014.