YouTube has rolled out a trio of new Twitch-like features that should help creators engage with their audiences in more ways during livestreams.
Clips, Polls, and Subscribers-Only Chats are the suite of new YouTube features. If you’ve interacted with a content creator on Twitch before, these terms may sound familiar to you as they’ve been platform staples for a while.
Clips function just as advertised. Creators with at least 1,000 subscribers can enable the feature, which lets viewers cut a snippet of a livestream to share online. Any views or engagement these clips–between five and 60 seconds–get go back to the original YouTuber. Though only available for gaming creators with 1,000 subscribers or more, Clips will expand to all content creators in the future.
Polls can be created and managed during livestreams and premieres. All creators regardless of subscriber count can use them for audience feedback on anything from what to do next in a video game to what to stream next.
Finally, Subscriber-Only Chats is a feature all creators have access to. It limits a YouTuber’s chat to only those who subscribe to the channel, while giving creators the ability to choose how long people must be subscribed for.
All three tools should help content creators better moderate and manage their communities, while giving creators and viewers alike more ways to participate in and make more content around that particular community. Online harassment is particularly egregious in online chatrooms, where messages fire off far too quickly for moderators to catch and disciple. Features like Subscriber-Only Chats should alleviate that problem.
