Twitch has revealed a new shoutout feature, now live on the platform. It gives streamers and selected users the ability to “share the love” and highlight notable members in chat, prompting others to follow their channel.
Twitch has been pushing new interactive features on the platform over the last few years, aiming to make the streaming and chatting experience better.
The Amazon-owned website has yet again taken inspiration from popular third-party tools and bots on the platform in launching a new feature, called shoutouts, on September 27.
Shoutouts have been a popular community widget before now, with some bots enabling streamers and viewers to promote another’s Twitch channel in chat. Now it’s baked into the website via the /shoutout command.
When you type it in chat along with another username, it will prompt others in chat to follow the shouted-out account. It appears in a drop-down box similar to predictions, polls, and hype trains at the top of chat. Users who get the shoutout will also be notified in their activity feed.
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Only streamers and their mods can access the shoutout feature in chat, however, to stop regular users abusing it.
📢 Support other streamers with the new /shoutout command!✨ Broadcasters & mods can share a follow button directly in chat using /shoutout [channel]✨ Show up in their activity feed with the # of viewers you shouted them out to💜 Share the love and /shoutout 💜 pic.twitter.com/9brqjVvjuM
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) September 27, 2022
The feature has been positively received by the Twitch community, appreciating it being built into the service itself with better interactivity than the previous bot widgets.
Twitch also revealed the previously announced raiding features, put in place to combat hate raids and harassment, would go live on September 27. Streamers can now set limits on who raids them, filtering by account age date, size of raid, and other parameters.
The two new features in tandem should give streamers more safety while live on the platform, as well as opportunities to highlight friends and notable community members in a more meaningful way.