That said, let’s take a step back as well. Often times, it is hard to read the chat messages because of all the emoji and spam chat going on in the background. It may be even more difficult for the content creators to read the questions being asked and then responding to them.
I agree, however when you have many thousands of viewers all using the same chat at once it becomes impossible to read anyway with tens of messages flashing by every second. When SC has a live stream with the devs they always ask that legit questions are raised with a [QUESTION] so they have a hope in hell of reading them and I have seen on some non-SC streams that it has gone so far as to be monetized, having your comment stay on screen longer if you donate $ for it to be there. (I think this is standard for most streaming services however no no pitchforks for that.)
The red/green thing the youtuber in the original post was doing was an attempt to use chat in a way that let every one of those thousands of viewers watching still be engaged joining in with decisions that were being made on screen. A chat for a streamer with many multiple thousands of viewers is just not fit for purpose on ANY platform. There doesn't look to have been any innovation here, it's just forcing another string on to the violin that is their most popular brand but now it has nine strings none of them sound quite right anymore.
If they could innovate a bit and come up with a system that actually worked, like letting streamers have a dedicated questions sub-chat or a set of on screen buttons they could edit on the fly so they can let their viewers vote on things on the fly that'd be great!
And, in my opinion, I think Google should publicly apologize
I've been waiting for mine since 2011:
A number of Google+ accounts have been deleted in the last 24 hours as the new social network struggles with real name policy.
www.zdnet.com
Yes there was an utterance of "...for this we apologize" in 2014, but it followed the words "We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users." They apologized for the clearness of the policy, not the actions that they executed in
pursuit of the policy:
In a dramatic reversal from policy enforced since it was created three years ago, Google will now allow users to use any name they want across Google services.
www.zdnet.com
And even then they still required your real name in the account with an optional alternate display name. And then:
Google has announced another Google+ data breach, this time affecting more than 50 million users. So here's how to shut down your profile for good.
www.pcworld.com
A 52 million account data breach that revealed those names anyway.
I want to make it clear I'm not trying to witch-hunt this company, it has done many great things like Translate, Maps Streetview etc, their work in education is fantastic and they have literally changed the world for the better... but I can't say I haven't seen and been victim to something like this before.
Lessons from Google Plus real names policy have obviously not been learnt. The response to this particular instance had better be faster than three years, and had better not apologize for the clearness of a set of terms rather than their actions enforcing them.
Emotes can be very scary things
