Session Chair: Daniel Joseph
Presentation 1
BROKERS OF THE METAVERSE: HOW A WEB3 PLAY-TO-EARN GAMING GUILD ACTS AS CULTURAL MEDIATOR ON TWITTER
Violeta Camarasa San Juan, Dmitry Kuznetsov
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China)
Play-to-earn (P2E) games targeting users unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies are playing a key role within Web3 and blockchain industries associated with the next iteration of the Internet. More crucially, P2E gaming guilds (Elliott, 2021) are emerging as essential intermediaries bridging Web2 and Web3 ecosystems. Drawing from social network theory’s study of brokerage motivations, this paper examines the structure and communication practices of a P2E guild, Yield Guild Games (YGG) on Twitter. Through a computational analysis of YGG’s presence on Twitter, the paper compares two mention networks corresponding to a period of optimism, and a period of crisis. We used network analysis to examine the structure of YGG communication on Twitter (Rathnayake, 2023), analysed tweets using BERTopic topic modeling (Grootendorst, 2022), and extracted links to determine what information is shared within the network (Hoyng, 2023). The results demonstrate YGG’s role as a “cultural broker” (Foster & Ocejo, 2015) promoting the adoption of blockchain technologies, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and ideologies (Swartz, 2017), ascribing legitimacy and value to particular actors and products in the Web3 ecosystem. The topic lists highlight prominent communication practices related to community building, such as AMA (ask me anything) sessions and airdrops.
Presentation 2
LOCALIZED VOLUNTEER MODERATION AND ITS DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION
Nicholas Proferes(1), Kelley Cotter(2), Kjerstin Thorson(3), Ava Francesca Battocchio(3), Ankolika De(2), Chia-Fang Chang(3)
1: Arizona State University, United States of America; 2: Pennsylvania State University; 3: Michigan State University
The social media industry has begun more prominently positioning itself as a vehicle for tapping into local community. Facebook offers hundreds of region-specific community groups, proudly touting these in nation-wide commercials. Reddit has hundreds of subreddits focused on specific states, cities, and towns. And Nextdoor encourages users to sign up and “Get the most out of your neighborhood.” In these locally oriented digital spaces, users interact, discuss community issues, and share information about what is happening around them. Volunteer moderators with localized knowledge are important agents in the creation, maintenance, and upkeep of these digital spaces. And, as we show, Facebook, Reddit, and Nextdoor create strategic communication to guide this localized volunteer moderator labor to realize specific goals within these spaces. In this work, we ask: “What are the promises the social media industry make about local community groups, and how do they position volunteer moderators to help realize those promises?” Through a qualitative content analysis of 849 documents produced by Facebook, Reddit, and NextDoor, we trace how platforms position their version of local community as slightly different utopian spaces, and channel volunteer moderator labor both through direct instruction and appeals to civic virtue.
Presentation 3
"Enforce Your Own Rules:" Hashtag Activism as Play in the Case of #TwitchDoBetter
Ailea Grace Merriam-Pigg
UW-Madison, United States of America
Raiding on Twitch, the act of sending one’s audience into another channel to spam the chat in overwhelming numbers, has long been a staple of the platform. In many cases, raids are positive. However, in some cases, streamers would perform raids in order to harass other streamers. The hate raids of 2021 come out of this tradition. Instead of sending their audience to harass a streamer, hate raids rely on code which quickly creates bot accounts to send to a channel and spam a message. These bots served one purpose-overwhelm the streamer by spamming the chat with messages of hate. #TwitchDoBetter arose in this moment to beg Twitch to do something about the hate their streamers with marginalized identities were receiving.
During #TwitchDoBetter, one user posted “@twitch @twitchsupport you guys really need to do something to help end the hate on your platform. Enforce your own rules. #TwitchDoBetter” (August 7, 2021). When we look at this case study as play, we see how this is a discourse meant to navigate who belongs on Twitch. By directing their attention at Twitch, rather than the hate raiders, the hashtag users make it clear that Twitch has the power to decide– is it a platform for hate raids that privileges the hegemonic center or is it a safe space for all creators to work and find community free from racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and more?
Presentation 4
Adaptive Governance by Digital Platforms: How Twitch changed its platform over time
Kevin Patrick Garvey(1), Daniëlle Flonk(2)
1: Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan; 2: Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan
Since its launch in 2011, the live streaming platform Twitch has continually expanded its mechanisms for monetizing interactions between content creators and their viewers. While numerous studies document the motivation of viewers (Sjöblom, et. al. 2017; Wulf, et. al. 2020), experiences of live streamers (Taylor, 2018; Sjöblom, et. al., 2019; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019), and platform policy (Partin, 2020; Poell, et. al., 2022), an explanatory framework and a clear timeline of functional changes on Twitch is still missing. Tracking Twitch changes can shed light on what motivates them, and what is likely to influence the platform going forward.
The literature on Twitch platform policy focuses mainly on how the platform mimics features that were first introduced by users, a process Partin (2020) called “envelopment”. However, we argue that there are two important parallel mechanisms that motivate change. First, via competition, Twitch copies features from other platforms. Second, via realignment, Twitch meets user demands for changes on the platform. This process of strategic cooptation of features via envelopment, competition, and realignment, is what we call adaptive governance. It is this holistic approach of adaptive governance that remains a blind spot in the literature and which this article aims to give a first description of.
