We’re Taking Community to New Levels

Twitchites! We’re excited to announce updates to our Twitch Community program. We want to bring more open and useful community programs to all of you who make Twitch possible. Because, well, you make Twitch… Twitch!

First, let’s kick things off with the news that we have not one but two new members on our Community team: Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham (pretty much the Godfather of Video Game Broadcasting) and Jordan “Soma” Tayer (pretty much a younger dead ringer for Joel from “The Last of Us”). Together, they bring years of experience in video game broadcasting, and most importantly, they’re fanatic Twitch users just like you. You can read about both of these fine folks below.

With these awesome CMs in place, next we’re organizing ALL TEH WAYZ we can reach and interact with as many of you as possible. We’ll be creating a series of educational videos around maximizing your Twitch experience, notably in the areas of broadcasting and utilizing existing site features. We’ll also collect your feedback from Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. We’re planning live shows direct from HQ. We may even run a weekly contest or two to give some of our awesome swag away!

We’ve got a busy rest of 2014 ahead, and so many amazing things in the pipeline. We’ll be working hard to keep you well informed, educated, and as excited about the future of Twitch as we are. Please always feel free to let us know what you think about how we can do better for the Twitch community by sending an email to feedback@twitch.tv.

Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham — Director of Community and Education

Greetings Twitch! My name is Marcus ‘djWHEAT’ Graham and for 3 years I have worked on the Twitch Partnerships Team to grow esports, mobile gaming, and trading card games. I’m thrilled to be taking this new position as the Director of Community and Education to help create new bridges between Twitch and the growing Twitch community. I have been an online broadcaster for over 10 years, and I hope to leverage that experience to better meet the needs of our massive community. Community has always been one of the most important aspects to me as a broadcaster; in fact, to me, Community is an extension of my family. I will embrace this philosophy as I jump into this new role at Twitch.

You’ve already begun to see some results of these role changes. Twitch Weekly, our weekly live show which airs Fridays at 4PM EDT, is our first major effort to promote more community content, showcase new features/tools, and provide more regular communication to our audiences. In the coming months, we aim to add more content that will help inform, educate, and promote the Twitch Community.

Another thing that’s very important to us moving forward is education. How do you grow your channel? What are best practices for reporting video issues? What do these tabs on my Dashboard do? Our goal is to provide more robust education, knowledge, and answers to the viewers and broadcasters on Twitch. Soon you’ll begin seeing more videos, articles, and show content focused on Twitch Education.

We can’t wait to dive in and bring the relationship between Twitch and the community to the next level!

Jordan “Soma” Tayer — Community Manager

Hey folks, I’m Jordan Tayer, also known as “Soma” on Twitch and in any game I’ve played over the past 12 years. I’ve been a gamer since 1993 and have been a Twitch viewer since the winter of 2011. After becoming absolutely addicted to Twitch, I figured it was probably a good idea to start broadcasting myself. I started streaming in June of 2012 when the Arma 2 mod “DayZ” was just gaining popularity. I became completely engrossed in my stream, a myriad of other streams (and other games) and basically the entire entity that is Twitch.

When it comes to “community” and what it really means when you examine Twitch, there are many different layers to pull back. There are communities around entire genres or that are game specific, there are people that watch caster’s such as LethalFrag or MANvsGAME and join “the Dapper” and “Mankind”, respectively, and show up for every stream. You’ve got your speedrunning group, your TwitchPlaysPokemon contributors, and many other groups that are essentially the gears that keep the Twitch “machine” running efficiently.

Sometimes it seems like these communities never cross paths or that they are completely different from one another. While, in terms of the game or genre or mechanically speaking they can be, in the end it’s just millions of passionate people that love showing up to the same website after they get home from work or school to watch people play games. Being able to ask your favorite TSM player, fighting-game guru or entertainer how his or her day was and actually get a response is such a glorious thing that no matter what channel or corner of Twitch you hang out in you can appreciate it.

I can’t wait to start getting involved with the Twitch community now that I can take a look at it from the other side of the fence and help foster it’s growth in a way I couldn’t before. I feel incredibly honored to be amongst some truly passionate people that are at the helm of what makes Twitch tick: the people that watch and the people that play games for us everyday.