Twitch Offers New Chat Feature

With the ability to pin conversation messages to the top of the chat box coming shortly, Twitch debuted a new chat feature this week during its most recent Patch Notes episode.

Using this tool, streamers can keep messages that would otherwise be lost in the conversation scroll by pinning them to their chat windows, whether they are their own or messages from the community. Although the functionality has already been hinted at, we now know more about how it will function. 

Additionally, it’s not difficult to understand how it operates given that all it actually does is pin a message to the chat box. The pinned chat functionality is demonstrated in the segment from the Patch Notes episode below, where someone chose a message from their chat and clicked the new “Pin Message” button that will be available next to the “Reply” option. When a message was pinned, it was visible at the top of the chat window for a brief period of time before viewers may expand or collapse it. Why would someone wish to make a chat message visible to others by pinning it to their window? Given that this initial use of the pinned chat functionality is an experiment, Twitch says it is interested in learning the answers to that query.

With this test, which will launch in September for a few channels, “the possibilities are endless,” according to Twitch product manager Emilio Cuartero 

Cuartero said; “This new chat experiment will be launched to a portion of channels starting this September. 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.” 

Pinned messages will be available on both the mobile app and the browser version of Twitch during this experiment, but only people doing the pinning will be able to do so when they’re there. Look for pinned messages to maybe start appearing in streams depending on which Twitch channels you frequently watch. Twitch’s new chat feature will start rolling out to some channels in September.