>>2029695The other day I heard a certain streamer make an obvious but important observation: the in-group behavior alienates the out-group behavior. If you have a streamer that is a game designer and there are a lot of people in the chat who like to discuss game design, people who just want to spam emotes will go somewhere else. On the other hand, if you have a streamer who encourages meme-spam, people who want to have a more in-depth conversation will leave.
I would add as a corollary that out-group behaviors that take the least amount of effort and appeal to the greatest number of people are the ones most likely to to displace the current in-group behavior. It explains why so many communities devolve into endless memes, feels, gossip, politics, and so on. On 4chan the in-group is the entire population of the board most of the time, so most of the site is like that. But within threads like these that are dominated by a small subset of the board, those who frequent every thread comprise an implicit in-group that has the power to shape the discourse to some extent. The challenge is to put in enough effort collectively to stem the everlasting tide of shit that washes over this place.
With regards to stream chat, Beatani has a lot of power to decide how she wants it to go by responding to some messages and not others. If she got someone like Chihiro to be a mod for her chat, that could also play a big role in setting the tone. People who comment or superchat frequently also have some degree of influence, thanks to their messages being more prominent. If a lot of people are writing their blogs in superchats for example, you can get a run-on effect where new people will see that and decide to write their blog in a superchat too. If you want a great community, the remedy is to write great comments and superchats that give Beatani and other community members interesting material to riff on or delve into.
