[FAQ]

My gaming streams on YouTube have been growing lately, which is awesome, but the live chat is starting to get a little out of control.

While I’m trying to focus on the game, I’m seeing more spammy links, people getting rude, and a lot of self-promo. It’s becoming too much for me to handle alone. I’m wondering what the best practices are for keeping the chat a fun and positive place.

Should I be using YouTube’s built-in tools more? Is there a way to auto-filter certain words? At what point do you decide to appoint other people as moderators, and what do you look for in a good mod? I want to get ahead of this before it becomes a bigger problem.

[Jeff Bullas]

That’s a vital question for any growing channel.

Quick Answer: Effective moderation combines YouTube’s automated filtering tools with trusted human moderators. This layered approach allows you to manage the text content in your chat both proactively and in real time.

Choosing the right mix of these methods is key to fostering a positive community without stifling engagement.

A robust moderation strategy relies on two main content management formats. Firstly, you have the automated text filters within YouTube Studio, where you can establish a blocklist of specific words and phrases to prevent them from ever appearing, and you can also enable settings to automatically hold potentially inappropriate chat messages for review. Secondly, there is the indispensable format of human moderation, where you appoint trusted members of your community to act as guardians of the chat. These moderators manage the conversational content by removing harmful messages, placing disruptive users in a temporary timeout, and ensuring your channel’s specific rules are upheld. A successful live stream leverages both of these formats, using the automated system to catch the most obvious spam and empowering your human moderators to handle the nuance and context that a machine cannot.

Cheers,

Jeff

[Author]

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