Twitch has a major discoverability problem. Many big streamers have pointed this out and owe their growth to other platforms like YouTube or TikTok. However, Twitch has made the unpopular decision to remove its Host feature, one that seemed to aid discoverability. From October 3, Hosting a channel will be replaced by a list of suggested channels in the dashboard.
As reported by Dextero, Twitch revealed its reasons for the change in its FAQ section.
"The experience [hosting] delivers to viewers doesn’t match their expectations when they come to Twitch. Viewers want to interact with a streamer when they’re live and host mode blocks this from happening. Preventing viewers from interacting with the streamer they’re watching also limits a streamer’s growth potential because they’re not able to build meaningful connections with those new viewers."
Rather than, I don't know, changing the feature so that viewers can interact with another channel's chat while watching via a host, Twitch is scrapping the feature altogether - a move that's proved unpopular with many.
Twitch has some recommendations for how streamers can help each other grow following the removal of this feature. "Give [channels] a shoutout to help them gain more followers," raids, and using the incoming suggested channels feature.
The problem with raids is that there's a cap on the number of viewers you can have. This is done to protect small streamers from hate raids, but also has the knock-on effect of preventing big streamers from giving smaller ones a boost.
In other Twitch news, Samuel "AceGamerSam" Girard has crowned himself the king of N64 after beating all the system's 296 games live on stream.