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1. An Exploration of Mental Health Discussions in Live Streaming Gaming Communities

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.575653  

   Gandhi, Reesha ; Cook, Christine L. ; LaMastra, Nina ; Uttarapong, Jirassaya ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ( March 2021 , Frontiers in Psychology)

   null (Ed.)

   Live streaming is a unique form of media that creates a direct line of interaction between streamers and viewers. While previous research has explored the social motivations of those who stream and watch streams in the gaming community, there is a lack of research that investigates intimate self-disclosure in this context, such as discussing sensitive topics like mental health on platforms such as Twitch.tv. This study aims to explore discussions about mental health in gaming live streams to better understand how people perceive discussions of mental health in this new media context. The context of live streaming is particularly interesting as it facilitates social interactions that are masspersonal in nature: the streamer broadcasts to a larger, mostly unknown audience, but can also interact in a personal way with viewers. In this study, we interviewed Twitch viewers about the streamers they view, how and to what extent they discuss mental health on their channels in relation to gaming, how other viewers reacted to these discussions, and what they think about live streams, gaming-focused or otherwise, as a medium for mental health discussions. Through these interviews, our team was able to establish a baseline of user perception of mental health in gaming communities on Twitch that extends our understanding of how social media and live streaming can be used for mental health conversations. Our first research question unraveled that mental health discussions happen in a variety of ways on Twitch, including during gaming streams, Just Chatting talks, and through the stream chat. Our second research question showed that streamers handle mental health conversations on their channels in a variety of ways. These depend on how they have built their channel, which subsequently impacts how viewers perceive mental health. Lastly, we learned that viewers’ reactions to mental health discussions depend on their motivations for watching the stream such as learning about the game, being entertained, and more. We found that more discussions about mental health on Twitch led to some viewers being more cautious when talking about mental health to show understanding. 

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2. Volunteer Moderators in Twitch Micro Communities: How They Get Involved, the Roles They Play, and the Emotional Labor They Experience

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300390  

   Wohn, Donghee Yvette ( May 2019 , Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   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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3. Coordination and Collaboration: How do Volunteer Moderators Work as a Team in Live Streaming Communities?

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517628  

   Cai, Jie ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ( April 2022 , CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   Volunteer moderators (mods) play significant roles in developing moderation standards and dealing with harmful content in their micro-communities. However, little work explores how volunteer mods work as a team. In line with prior work about understanding volunteer moderation, we interview 40 volunteer mods on Twitch — a leading live streaming platform. We identify how mods collaborate on tasks (off-streaming coordination and preparation, in-stream real-time collaboration, and relationship building both off-stream and in-stream to reinforce collaboration) and how mods contribute to moderation standards (collaboratively working on the community rulebook and individually shaping community norms). We uncover how volunteer mods work as an effective team. We also discuss how the affordances of multi-modal communication and informality of volunteer moderation contribute to task collaboration, standards development, and mod’s roles and responsibilities. 

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4. Quantifying the Selective, Stochastic, and Complementary Drivers of Institutional Evolution in Online Communities

   https://doi.org/10.3390/e24091185  

   Zhong, Qiankun ; Frey, Seth ; Hilbert, Martin ( September 2022 , Entropy)

   Institutions and cultures usually evolve in response to environmental incentives. However, sometimes institutional change occurs due to stochastic drivers beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind imitation, and complementary cooperation in fluctuating environments. Disentangling the selective and stochastic components of social system change enables us to identify the key features of long-term organizational development. Evolutionary approaches provide organizational science with abundant theories to demonstrate organizational evolution by tracking beneficial or harmful features. In this study, focusing on 20,000 Minecraft communities, we measure these drivers empirically using two of the most widely applied evolutionary models: the Price equation and the bet-hedging model. As a result, we find strong selection pressure on administrative and information rules, suggesting that their positive correlation with community fitness is the main reason for their frequency change. We also find that stochastic drivers decrease the average frequency of administrative rules. The result makes sense when viewed in the context of evolutionary bet-hedging. We show through the bet-hedging result that institutional diversity contributes to the growth and stability of rules related to information, communication, and economic behaviors. 

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5. What are Effective Strategies of Handling Harassment on Twitch?: Users' Perspectives

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3311957.3359478  

   Cai, Jie ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ( November 2019 , CSCW '19: Conference Companion Publication of the 2019 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing)

   Harassment is an issue in online communities with the live streaming platform Twitch being no exception. In this study, we surveyed 375 Twitch users in person at TwitchCon, asking them about who should be responsible for deciding what should be allowed and what strategies they perceived to be effective in handling harassment. We found that users thought that streamers should be most responsible for enforcing rules and that either blocking bad actors, ignoring them, or trying to educate them were the most effective strategies. 

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