Celebrate Yourself and Your Community with 350+ New Tags

Note: Tags are now available, please go here for the most up to date blog.  

Celebrate Yourself and Your Community with 350+ New Tags

Next week, streamers will be able to select from over 350 new tags related to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health, and more. The list of tags include transgender, Black, disabled, veteran, and Vtuber, among many others. We will also remove references to “ally” from the LGBTQIA+ tag, and are instead creating a standalone ally tag. These additions won’t change how tagging works and are completely optional. They simply give creators more choices.

We’d like to thank our trans community for originally requesting the “transgender” tag, and for their passion and persistence in pursuit of that request. This has been one of the most popular requests we’ve heard, and the simple truth is that we should have done this sooner. 

Why now? And what took so long?

When we launched tags in 2018, we did so to boost discovery, to help creators describe their content and to help viewers find streams they’re interested in. We intentionally designed that system for creators to be able to describe what they were streaming, not who they were or what they stood for. We have maintained this distinction since that time, and we were wrong.

When viewers talk about why they love Twitch, they don’t just talk about the content. They talk about creators, what they care about, and the communities they have built. By expanding tags, we are giving creators more ways to be discovered and viewers more ways to find communities that they want to call home.

The exception to the initial design was the LGBTQIA+ tag, which began as an experiment a few years ago and stayed based on overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community. We loved hearing creators share how it has helped grow their community and discover others like them. It took us too long to embrace that there should have been hundreds of ways for creators to share who they are and issues they care about. The Twitch community is incredibly diverse and the tags available to creators should reflect and celebrate that.  

Creating a list of new tags

When we made the decision to add these new tags, we wanted to make sure that we were being  as inclusive as possible. We’ve partnered with several independent, third-party organizations such as GLAAD, The Trevor Project, AbleGamers, SpecialEffect, and other experts focused on the progress of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and marginalized communities. And finally, we reached out to members of the Twitch community for their feedback. 

Still, we understand that, as comprehensive as we have tried to be, we will inevitably miss tags that our community is looking for, and we encourage you to share your suggestions via UserVoice to let us know what else you want to see. To begin with, we’ll regularly review highly upvoted suggestions on a weekly basis, and after an internal evaluation to ensure that these follow our Community Guidelines, we will add them to the list.

Keeping your stream safe

Our hope is that these new tags help every community, but especially those that are underrepresented, grow and thrive. As with any means of discovery, there are bad actors who may use the ability to find streams for malicious purposes. Users that utilize these tags as a means to harass those displaying the tags will be subject to enforcement of our Hateful Conduct and Harassment Policy. In order to help protect against malicious behavior, we recommend creators familiarize themselves with the available Moderation Tools, utilize moderators on their channels, and please report anyone who violates our Community Guidelines.

Learn more

We’ll be going live May 26 at 9:30 AM PST on /twitch to speak more about tags and address as many questions from chat as we can. Join us!

Thank you

We know implementing the request for tags is taking far longer than it should, and we sincerely thank you for your persistence, feedback, and patience. Now and always, it helps us make a better Twitch for everyone.