Virtual Ethnography: Twitch's "Offline Chat"
10 November 2021
Pokimane is a 25-year-old Twitch streamer who has gained 8.4 million followers on the platform since her start in 2013. She is the most successful female streamer on Twitch and is generally considered one of the faces of the platform (D'Anastasio). An “offline chat” refers to the live chat room of any Twitch channel when the streamer is not live streaming. Unlike other live streaming platforms like Facebook or YouTube, the chat room on Twitch is open 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the streamer is live. Most casual users of the site are unaware of this, as Twitch does not advertise this feature in any way. When a user enters Pokimane’s profile while she is not streaming, they see an illustration of Pokimane’s face, with the word “OFFLINE” in all caps, and are directed to her other social media profiles. A notice from Twitch in the top-left corner of the screen tells users to turn on notifications to know when Pokimane is live next. Most users would take this to mean that there is nothing to see here, to come back later. Those that stick around, though, will notice messages beginning to appear in the chat room. They will discover an entire community exists here, hidden in plain sight.
The membership process for participating in an offline chat is the same as any other Twitch chat. Users must create a Twitch account with a verified email address or phone number. Pokimane’s chat room specifically requires a verified phone number (this cuts down on spam from bots and harassment from sock puppet accounts). Before a user can participate in the chat, they receive an alert listing the rules of Pokimane’s chat room:
CHAT RULES:
1. Be meme, not mean ✔️
2. Don’t insult the streamer, the gameplay, or other people. We’re here for a good time 👍
3. No racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. 🙅♀️
Users must click “Okay, got it,” before continuing. For the average internet user, there are no significant obstacles to participating in a Twitch chat. The barriers to participating in an offline chat, however, are 1. Knowing that the community exists at all and 2. A willingness to overcome the offline chat’s deliberate inconvenience.
The offline chat is not promoted anywhere, and is not necessarily sanctioned by Pokimane herself (I could only find 2 instances of her explicitly mentioning it -- a Reddit comment and a Tweet, both from early 2018). The only reason I know offline chat communities exist is because of a few passing comments I’ve witnessed over hundreds of hours on Twitch. In Pokimane’s offline chat, channel moderators may or may not be present; while some are offline chatters themselves, the chat remains basically unmoderated while Pokimane is offline. In contrast, an official Discord server is advertised under the “About” section of Pokimane’s profile. Through this Discord server, Pokimane’s audience has the ability to connect with nearly 150,000 fellow supporters using an application specifically designed for group messaging. Why, then, have users built a community in an unmoderated and inconvenient chat room, especially when an obvious alternative exists? Who are these people? Through observation and interaction with the community, I came to two main conclusions.
One of my initial thoughts when observing Pokimane’s offline chat was that, due to its inconvenience, using Twitch’s chat function in this way only makes sense for users who spend all day on Twitch. Through deeper observation, I realized that this was exactly the case. Little of the discussion was about Pokimane at all, but about Twitch culture at large. Users discussed current Twitch trends (the “meta”), other Twitch streamers, Twitch drama on Twitter, and a popular subreddit dedicated to notable stream clips. During the week of my observation, another streamer, Valkyrae, was in the midst of a scandal for promoting her now-defunct skincare company. Much discussion revolved around her young, newer audience, and their behavior on Twitter. Recurring characters made obscure references to deep Twitch lore, spammed copypastas, and teased casual viewers (“normies”). The interactions I observed were those of Twitch veterans, an elite group of long-time users. This offline chat provided a place for them to distance themselves from new and casual Twitch users, both culturally and materially. The inconvenience of the offline chat is central to the meaning of the community -- only those committed enough to participating in the offline chat will be willing to forgo all the affordances of a group messaging application like Discord. Twitch’s user base has grown significantly in the last few years. Using the digital infrastructure of the platform in creative ways has allowed veteran users to filter out the “normies'' and create a space all their own.
In an interview with Peter Guest for Rest of World, tech writer Azeem Azhar describes the tradeoff users have made with platforms in recent years: “The moment where things start to shift is when we ended up thinking about commerce and convenience, rather than where the web started, which was criticality and collaboration. The internet wasn’t really convenient in 1994 or 1995, but it was a very collaborative space… And so there’s a really distinctly different feel in the 2013, or 2014, internet to the one that you might have had in 1997, or 1998... We’ve brought the brilliance of this technology to billions of people. And I suppose the question is, could one get that brilliance and ubiquity without this power shift?” (Guest). The power shift Azhar describes is the sacrifice of data and privacy users have made in exchange for convenience and ease of use. The conventional wisdom driving innovation in tech is that users’ number one priority is convenience, and they are willing to sacrifice their data in order to get it. Pokimane’s offline chatters challenge this narrative. The offline chat is decidedly inconvenient. Users can’t “mention” other users, share photos or videos, search for or view old messages. But participation also isn’t monetized -- users don’t have to subscribe and aren’t served advertisements. Offline chatters sacrifice convenience in exchange for a meaningful community, free from refinement and optimization. There’s no obvious reason for Twitch to allow this space to exist, and yet, they do. It is one of the few places on the mainstream internet that still has character, and participating in it made me nostalgic for the internet of my early childhood.
Pokimane’s offline chat is an excellent example of the social shaping perspective of technology. Twitch’s live chat function was designed for dialogue between one broadcaster and many viewers; it was never designed to be used as a community’s group chat. But internet users are savvy -- they realized the digital infrastructure of the platform itself provided a material boundary through which only the most committed Twitch users could pass. Through copypastas and shitposts, a small community of Twitch veterans are challenging dominant narratives about social media.
Works Cited
D'Anastasio, Cecilia. “Pokimane Has Done Enough-and Has so Much Left to Do.” Wired, Conde Nast, 26 Aug. 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/pokimane-has-done-enough-and-has-so-much-left-to-do/.
Guest, Peter. “‘The Internet Wasn't Designed to Breach National Boundaries.’” Rest of World, 13 Oct. 2021, https://restofworld.org/2021/conversation-with-azeem-azhar-exponential-age/.
“Twitch Statistics & Charts.” TwitchTracker, https://twitchtracker.com/statistics.