How to deal with Toxic Trolls On Your Stream

Building a safe space on your live stream is half the battle when it comes to growing your online presence. Whether you’re streaming the latest games or livecasting another round of Valorant, we’re here to help you identify toxicity, manage the conversation during the live stream, and maintain your personal health so that you can deal with the troublemakers of your stream the right way.

 

How to Identify Toxicity Before It Gets Too Wild

 

Streaming connects us with different kinds of people- gamers, aspiring-streamers, fans, supporters, spectators, etc. However, not everyone you connect with wish you well. Sometimes, there are trolls. A troll is a person whose goal in life is to inflict pain, mock and humiliate others through hateful speech. Anybody can be a troll. Indeed, even the most pleasant, generally sensible, and easygoing individuals, all things considered, can show trolling conduct once they get on the web. Trolling can happen anywhere open online where people are free to post, comment, and share their thoughts and opinions. Commonly, you’ll see trolls starting to mass message your livestream with random and irrelevant context. To simply put it, trolls are online bullies.

 

While there’s still a chance, you can spot and be wary of as the longer they message the board, the quicker it escalates to true toxicity, these are things to look out for:

 

• Foul Language
• Hate Speech
• Repetitive Spamming of Stream
• Off-Topic Conversation
• Stream hitching (links to their own streams)
• Attacking an opponent’s character
• Racism
• Negative sexual comments
• Death Threats

 

If you are a streamer or just anyone who’s internet-savvy, chances are, you already know how some people can be like venomous snakes online. Since streamers put out their face and image online, the trolls can hit on a more personal level. This is not something to be taken lightly, in fact, according to Intel research, more than 81% of players who quit gaming cited toxicity as the reason. 

 

How to Manage the Conversation During A Live Stream

 

It is important for you to maintain a safe environment for you and your viewers during the live stream. You can do this with simple preparation before the live stream by assigning a Moderator. Moderators will handle the chat sessions during the live stream, this is recommended especially for high-traffic live streams or when you cannot multitask during the stream. 

 

They will be responsible for interacting with the audience, removing inappropriate messages, and hide/block abusive users or trolls. They can also share your live stream in other groups or on pages to reach more people.

 

There are also things that you, yourself, can do during the live stream to ensure you are effectively reacting to and addressing the comments of your audience. This has a significant part in encouraging such discussions and connections. 

 

A few methods to drive healthy engagement include: 

 

• Establish a policy for user comments. These policies should detail and elaborate on what sort of comments are permitted and be laid out on your site and social media accounts. These should be very clear for your audience to follow.
• Greet your fans and address them by name when responding to their comments.
• Ask for questions on a certain topic to encourage engagement.
• Whenever the situation allows, bring audience questions or remarks into the actual broadcast by addressing inquiries live. 
• Pin incredible remarks to the top of the chat.

 

You can also take advantage of certain features in the streaming site that you are using to ensure you and your audience are safe. Some live streaming sites give you the option to use keyword blocking. It is an option where you can compile blocked words and in the live chat session, those matching the words will be blocked. This is a feature that will annoy the trolls. Some sites even give you the option of blocking web links from being used in the chat- which means no stream hitching for the trolls!

 

Slow Mode can also be enabled on sites like Twitch. When this is enabled, the overall chat rate speed will be decreased. It is done by setting a time limit between chat messages to influence how frequently a user can post. This also ensures that the limit will not affect the channel owner and moderators.

 

There are also additional gaming and live streaming tools from third parties. Some of these third parties are Discord, GameWisp, IFTTT.com, Infiniscene, Nightbot, StreamElements, Streamlabs, XSplit Broadcaster, and Gamecaster. 

 

These are just some examples of what you can do to manage the conversation during your live stream. There are so much more tips and tools that can help you out there so don’t just give up. Take ownership, it is your channel after all!

 

Dealing With Troublemakers On Your Stream

 

While you can’t control whether you will end up being a troll’s target, you can choose if you will make yourself a troll’s casualty. Realizing that the troll’s goal is to humiliate, embarrass, belittle and disgrace you, you have a choice about how you will respond. If you have done everything but there are still very persevering trolls your way, just remember:

 

Trolls do not care about a resolution, it’s not on their agenda, not at all. All they want is to engage in battle, one that nobody can win.

 

That being said, the best thing to do is ignore the troll. Do not engage in an argument or discussion with this person. If you give them attention, they’ll love it- it’s actually what trolls feed off of.

 

In the event that the trolling is very harsh or hostile, most platforms like twitch or facebook gamging give you the option to report trolls who have made themselves known (since most trolls take advantage of the anonymity that usernames offer). 

 

The most effective method to report somebody for trolling will depend on the site or forum you’re on. if you’re on Twitch or Facebook, simply ban the person from your page and stream as the most effective way. Else, it can be as basic as clicking a “Report” button, yet as a last resort, you can utilize a site’s “Contact Us” link to send an email to the site’s managers to report about the inappropriate behavior.

 

Sometimes, it’s not even you these keyboard warriors are targeting, in fact – it’s the game you are streaming that they are against. You can always switch it up, and check out our picks in our latest post of Top Games to Stream on Facebook.