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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. 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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4. Hate Raids on Twitch: Understanding Real-Time Human-Bot Coordinated Attacks in Live Streaming Communities

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3610191  

   Cai, Jie; Chowdhury, Sagnik; Zhou, Hongyang; Wohn, Donghee Yvette (September 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Online harassment and content moderation have been well-documented in online communities. However, new contexts and systems always bring new ways of harassment and need new moderation mechanisms. This study focuses on hate raids, a form of group attack in real-time in live streaming communities. Through a qualitative analysis of hate raids discussion in the Twitch subreddit (r/Twitch), we found that (1) hate raids as a human-bot coordinated group attack leverages the live stream system to attack marginalized streamers and other potential groups with(out) breaking the rules, (2) marginalized streamers suffer compound harms with insufficient support from the platform, (3) moderation strategies are overwhelmingly technical, but streamers still struggle to balance moderation and participation considering their marginalization status and needs. We use affordances as a lens to explain how hate raids happens in live streaming systems and propose moderation-by-design as a lens when developing new features or systems to mitigate the potential abuse of such designs. 

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5. Reddit Rules and Rulers: Quantifying the Link Between Rules and Perceptions of Governance Across Thousands of Communities

   https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35863  

   Leibmann, Leon; Weld, Galen; Zhang, Amy X; Althoff, Tim (June 2025, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media)

   Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a community's rules and how its membership feels about its governance is not well understood. In this work, we conduct the largest-to-date analysis of rules on Reddit, collecting a set of 67,545 unique rules across 5,225 communities which collectively account for more than 67% of all content on Reddit. More than just a point-in-time study, our work measures how communities change their rules over a 5+ year period. We develop a method to classify these rules using a taxonomy of 17 key attributes extended from previous work. We assess what types of rules are most prevalent, how rules are phrased, and how they vary across communities of different types. Using a dataset of communities' discussions about their governance, we are the first to identify the rules most strongly associated with positive community perceptions of governance: rules addressing who participates, how content is formatted and tagged, and rules about commercial activities. We conduct a longitudinal study to quantify the impact of adding new rules to communities, finding that after a rule is added, community perceptions of governance immediately improve, yet this effect diminishes after six months. Our results have important implications for platforms, moderators, and researchers. We make our classification model and rules datasets public to support future research on this topic. 

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