Volunteer Moderators in Twitch Micro Communities: How They Get Involved, the Roles They Play, and the Emotional Labor They Experience
Abstract
The ability to engage in real-time text conversations is an important feature on live streaming platforms. The moderation of this text content relies heavily on the work of unpaid volunteers. This study reports on interviews with 20 people who moderate for Twitch micro communities, defined as channels that are built around a single or group of streamers, rather than the broadcast of an event. The study identifies how people become moderators, their different styles of moderating, and the difficulties that come with the job. In addition to the hardships of dealing with negative content, moderators also have complex interpersonal relationships with the streamers and viewers, where the boundaries between emotional labor, physical labor, and fun are intertwined.
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To date, few academic studies have explored what impacts the demands of the content moderation job might engender, and many conducted have focused on the experience of volunteer content moderators.
“To date, there have been few academic studies that explore what impacts the demands of the job might engender and many that have been conducted have focused on the experience of volunteer CMs (e.g., Dosono & Semaan, 2019; Lo, 2018; Wohn, 2019).”
From The psychological impacts of content moderation on content moderators: A qualitative study (2023) · cites this paper as Wohn, 2019
Content moderators have to maintain high accuracy levels and throughput quotas to meet acceptable job performance standards, which contribute to stress above that from viewing the content alone.
“In addition, CMs have to maintain high accuracy levels and throughput quotas to meet acceptable job performance standards, which contribute to stress above that which might be experienced through viewing the content alone (Dwoskin et al., 2019; Wohn, 2019).”
From The psychological impacts of content moderation on content moderators: A qualitative study (2023) · cites this paper as Wohn, 2019
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References 35 · Cited by 191
- Authors
- Wohn, D. Y.
- Affiliations
- New Jersey Institute of Technology (US)
- Corresponding author
- Wohn, Donghee Yvette
- ORCID
- Wohn, Donghee Yvette
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-05-02
- Pages
- 1-13
- OpenAlex
- W2940648399
- Cited by
- 191
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 30 · 2022: 24 · 2021: 41 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 9
- FWCI
- 66.99
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Mozilla Foundation
- National Science Foundation (1841354)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Games and Media
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Emotional Labor in Professions
- Keywords
- volunteer moderators, Twitch, live streaming, micro-communities, online community moderation, emotional labor, negative content, unpaid work
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