Its a little hard to find community on Twitch

One of the weirdest things to me about Twitch is how it’s a social site that doesn’t incentivize much community-building. Part of this is obviously because it’s a place for broadcasting, which is a one-to-many application. The other half of it is that the social functions that do exist on the site feel mostly geared toward growing communities around broadcasters instead of between them, which is a little strange!

During this pandemic I’ve found myself wanting more sociality from Twitch. The platform currently offers an atrophied friend request feature, which feels like a relic from the days of Myspace, and the (very good!) “recommended smaller communities” tab on the homepage, but they’re not enough. This is probably because I’ve...

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