There’s a storm brewing on Reddit right now regarding the actions of a lead administrator of the popular streaming platform Twitch, who goes by the tag “Horror”.
As someone who has been reported by community members many times in the past for being disrespectful and misusing his administrative powers, “Horror” seems unable to correct his ways and once again has landed in the spotlight.
What started it off was ‘Horror’ making his boyfriend’s ‘fursona’ into a global Twitch emote. The step was inappropriate and ironic at the same time, which led to many popular streamers calling him out.
It was inappropriate because the emotes were of a sleazy nature and hence clearly violated Twitch’s code of conduct.
It was ironic because another user who goes by the name of Cyghfer recently had all of his emotes banned because the mods didn’t deem them “appropriate.” However, when put against that of Horror’s it’s pretty evident to the average man as to what is appropriate and what’s not.
After knowing about the underage emote being made official, speed runner Duke-Bilgewater made a comment which he thought Horror would find funny.
Hey Horror, what’s the easiest way into your pants so I can get a global emote too?
Unfortunately for him, Horror didn’t find any humor in that and straight away banned his account. This in turn started a chain reaction.
Many streamers instantly renamed their streams to or posted banners on their live cast that said “Remove Horror”; while others contacted Twitch to remove the said administrator for misusing his power.
Twitch’s official response to the whole ordeal was the following post made on their TwitchTVSupport Twitter account, which now has been deleted:
Apparently, it will be a block party afternoon. Weee Will… Weee will block you [clap clap] Block you.
Instead of taking action against their lead administrator, Twitch’s higher ups surprisingly chose to go after Horror’s smear campaign and went on a rampage, banning streamers left and right.
Many popular streamers came into the crossfire and the amount of accounts banned is just too vast to be mentioned here. In fact even those users who were only commenting their support in a stream were banned.
Here’s an example quoted on Reddit for a popular streamer called Peaches who renamed his stream to “Using my keyboard to remove Horror”. It was shortly changed by Twitch staff member Jason to “Using my keyboard to remove”, who also threatened to ban Peaches if he changed it back.
As it is with Internet warriors, Peaches did change it back to “Using my keyboard to remove Horrific zombies” and later was banned.
If Twitch thought banning a dozen accounts would defuse the matter then they were wrong. The matter has exploded on /r/gaming with many expressing their anger over Twitch’s blatant disrespect and misuse of their code of conduct.
Horror’s boss Jason not finding his actions inappropriate in any way has also not helped with the matter.
As Horror’s boss, he won’t be removed, petition or not. Cheers all, announced Jason in a Twitch chat.
After six hours of brutal posting on Reddit, an official Twitch employee has posted his views in an attempt to clarify the matter.
The main crux of it all is that “Twitch admins are not paid employees, but community volunteers who police site behavior.” So any actions they took do not come back to the Twitch company.
Currently, a team has been assembled to sort out the matter. Some of the accounts banned earlier have been un-banned.
Twitch is currently the only major streaming platform available and is also being integrated with the new PlayStation 4. One would expect such a high-profile company to perhaps keep a tighter leash on their voluntary administrators/moderators.
An official response from Twitch is still pending. We’ll update this post as we get more information.
