Twitch Communities rolled out in February 2017, but will soon become a thing of the past, as the platform announced that it is on course to discontinue the feature.
Communities were created for users to share content with relevant gamers and were formed by users who followed a specific game, company, player, or playing style. Twitch says that Communities were meant to facilitate discovery of new streamers easier and faster than ever.
However, Communities grew… fast, and Twitch is now pulling the plug. The platform claims that there was a lot of overlapping and there was no way to tell different Communities apart at first glance. In a nutshell, Communities started as a feature to help users discover streamers, connect with groups of like-minded gamers, and follow games they like, and it has now reached a point where it does not represent that spirit anymore.
Twitch will be rolling out Tags, a feature which works… well… like tags, and they will be automatically attributed to game genres or in-game features, wherever applicable. Moreover, users will be able to select from a list of pre-populated tags to add to their streams. Yes, that is a complete departure from the freedom users had to identify and categorize Communities as they pleased, however, gamers will be able to recommend new tags, so that may be something to be moderately cheerful about.
A growing concern about Tags is surfacing, though: When users filter their results based on a popular tag, the list could be endless, so thoughtful curation would be a very considerate choice for Twitch developers. The target deprecation and launch dates for Communities and Tags, respectively, are now set for mid-September.
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