If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, you’ll probably immediately be able to think of multiple ways that a Twitch stream’s live chat of potentially hundreds or thousands of people that is open to anybody could go bad.
Besides the obvious of any random chatter saying inappropriate or lewd things, there’s more abstract ways someone could ruin a Twitch chat, such as bullying other chatters or just genuinely creating and encouraging a toxic environment in the chat.
Thankfully, that’s where Twitch mods come in to save the day. Twitch mods, or moderators, are users appointed by the streamer that help keep the chat under control to make the stream more enjoyable both for viewers watching the stream live or saved after the fact. Tools available to mods to achieve this can include disallowing certain words in the chat, as well as suspending and even banning particularly bad actors.
This raises the question that we’ll be going over in today’s article: with such an encompassing task of keeping a Twitch stream’s live chat under control, do Twitch mods get paid?
What do Twitch Mods Do?
Twitch moderators are essentially the supervisors of a streamer’s Twitch chat. Since the streamer will be busy actually performing the content of their stream, they don’t have time to make sure everyone in their chat is acting in an appropriate and healthy way. That’s where the chat moderators come in.
Different chat moderators will have different levels of power and/or authority from stream to stream and even sometimes from moderator to moderator. Some moderators may have the power to kick users, some may have the power to mute certain words from the chat (which means that attempting to post a comment containing the muted word won’t be possible for people in the chat), and some may even have the power to ban particularly bad viewers in the chat.
Who Does Moderating for Twitch Streams?
The moderators for a creators’ stream chats are usually made up of fans of the creator that are determined to help encourage a healthy environment in the streams and the chat.
There will be the occasional times that you’ll see another creator that is friends with the streamer acting as a moderator for someone’s stream (maybe even after sending a raid over to them), but those kinds of scenarios are typically not the usual scenario for the streams, and are more of a “one off” situation.
That’s why it’s usually fans of the creator that wind up acting as the chat moderators. Sometimes the fans find their roles from applications put out by the creator, and sometimes it’s just a long time viewer that the creator becomes used to seeing during streams and then trusts enough to make them a moderator.
Due to this overwhelming trend of the chat moderator role being filled by fans, the vast vast majority of chat moderators on Twitch are not paid for their moderating duties, due to it’s nature of it not being an “official job”, so to speak.
Final Word
The overwhelming majority of the time, chat moderators on Twitch streams do not get paid for their efforts. While there may be the rare exceptions to this, unpaid moderation is the reality for the vast majority of moderators on Twitch streams.
Despite the unpaid nature of the role, many people do still enjoy being moderators for Twitch streams and it can still be a very fun experience, especially if you’re a big fan of the creator you’re moderating the chat for. Being a mod for a Twitch stream’s chat can create more direct interaction with the streamer as well as give you a direct role in the content that you enjoy.
