Twitch Shows Off New Chat Feature

By Tanner Dedmon

Twitch showed off a new chat feature this week during its latest Patch Notes episode with content creators soon able to pin chat messages to the top of the chat box. Through this feature, streamers can pin either their own messages or those from others in the community to their chat windows so that the messages stick around for others to see after they would've normally been lost in the chat scroll. It's a feature that's been teased before, but now, we have a better idea of how it'll work.

And given that all it really does is pin a message to the chat box, it's not hard to visualize how it works either. The excerpt below from the Patch Notes episode shows the pinned chat feature in action where someone took a message from their chat and selected the new "Pin Message" button that'll exist next to the "Reply" option. Once the moderator pinned the message, it remained at the top of the chat window for a limited time with viewers able to expand or collapse it afterwards.

Why would someone want to pin a chat message to their window for people to see? Twitch says it's looking forward to seeing answers to that question given that this first implementation of the pinned chat feature will be an experiment. It's a test that'll start running in September for select channels, and Twitch product manager Emilio Cuartero says "the possibilities are endless."

"This new chat experiment will be launched to a portion of channels starting this September," Cuartero said. "We're gonna be using this time to really learn more about the use cases as you mentioned. You know, the possibilities are endless, and we want to figure out how to continue iterating those features so that we can best suit the needs that people have for this tool."

During this experiment, those doing the pinning will only be able to perform that action when they're on the browser version of Twitch, but the pinned messages will be viewable both there and on the mobile app.

Twitch's new chat feature will begin rolling out in September to select channels, so look for pinned messages to perhaps start appearing in streams depending on which ones you frequent.

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