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1. 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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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. (In)visible moderation: A digital ethnography of marginalized users and content moderation on Twitch and Reddit

   https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221109804  

   Thach, Hibby ; Mayworm, Samuel ; Delmonaco, Daniel ; Haimson, Oliver ( July 2022 , New Media & Society)

   Research suggests that marginalized social media users face disproportionate content moderation and removal. However, when content is removed or accounts suspended, the processes governing content moderation are largely invisible, making assessing content moderation bias difficult. To study this bias, we conducted a digital ethnography of marginalized users on Reddit’s /r/FTM subreddit and Twitch’s “Just Chatting” and “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches” categories, observing content moderation visibility in real time. We found that on Reddit, a text-based platform, platform tools make content moderation practices invisible to users, but moderators make their practices visible through communication with users. Yet on Twitch, a live chat and streaming platform, content moderation practices are visible in channel live chats, “unban appeal” streams, and “back from my ban” streams. Our ethnography shows how content moderation visibility differs in important ways between social media platforms, harming those who must see offensive content, and at other times, allowing for increased platform accountability. 

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4. Categorizing Live Streaming Moderation Tools: An Analysis of Twitch

   https://doi.org/10.4018/IJICST.2019070103  

   Cai, Jie ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ( July 2019 , International Journal of Interactive Communication Systems and Technologies)

   Twitch is one of the largest live streaming platforms and is unique from other social media in that it supports synchronous interaction and enables users to engage in moderation of the content through varied technical tools, which include auto-moderation tools provided by Twitch, third-party applications, and home-brew apps. The authors interviewed 21 moderators on Twitch and categorized the current features of real-time moderation tools they are using into four functions (chat control, content control, viewer control, settings control) and explored some new features of tools that they wish to own (e.g., grouping chat by languages, pop out window to hold messages, chat slow down, a set of buttons with pre-written/pre-message content, viewer activity tracking, all in one). Design implications provide suggestions for chatbots and algorithm design and development. 

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5. Compute- and Data-Intensive Networks: The Key to the Metaverse

   https://doi.org/10.1109/6GNet54646.2022.9830429  

   Cai, Yang ; Llorca, Jaime ; Tulino, Antonia M. ; Molisch, Andreas F. ( July 2022 , 1st International Conference on 6G Networking (6GNet))

   The worlds of computing, communication, and storage have for a long time been treated separately, and even the recent trends of cloud computing, distributed computing, and mobile edge computing have not funda-mentally changed the role of networks, still designed to move data between end users and pre-determined compu-tation nodes, without true optimization of the end-to-end compute-communication process. However, the emergence of Metaverse applications, where users consume multime-dia experiences that result from the real-time combination of distributed live sources and stored digital assets, has changed the requirements for, and possibilities of, systems that provide distributed caching, computation, and com-munication. We argue that the real-time interactive nature and high demands on data storage, streaming rates, and processing power of Metaverse applications will accelerate the merging of the cloud into the network, leading to highly-distributed tightly-integrated compute- and data-intensive networks becoming universal compute platforms for next-generation digital experiences. In this paper, we first describe the requirements of Metaverse applications and associated supporting infrastructure, including rele-vant use cases. We then outline a comprehensive cloud network flow mathematical framework, designed for the end-to-end optimization and control of such systems, and show numerical results illustrating its promising role for the efficient operation of Metaverse-ready networks. 

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