Twitch has confirmed it's adding over 350 new community tags next week in a bid to improve visibility and discoverability across the platform, allowing creators to choose tags for "what they stood for" as well as the games they play.
From next week, according to a new blog on the official website, streamers will be able to "select from over 350 new tags related to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health, and more".
We had planned to share this next week, but we’ve heard a lot of you talking and want to make sure the record is clear. Next week we’ll be adding 350+ new tags to celebrate yourself and your community.May 22, 2021
"The list of tags include transgender, Black, disabled, veteran, and Vtuber, among many others," the post explains. "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 had planned to share this next week," a tweet on the official Twitch Twitter account said today, "but we’ve heard a lot of you talking and want to make sure the record is clear. Next week we’ll be adding 350+ new tags to celebrate yourself and your community."
The post also seeks to clairfy "what took so long" to make the change, with the company confirming that when it launched tags in 2018, it "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".
We’ll have tags related to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, mental health, and more.For the full details, check out the blog: https://t.co/dXLPrlayPXMay 22, 2021
It said it drew up the new tags alongside "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".
At the end of last year, Twitch responded to feedback from gamers with disabilities by agreeing to remove the term "blind playthrough" from its tag list.
Back in June 2020, accessibility advocate and COO of Able Gamers Steven Spohn spoke publicly about the problematic term in a wider discussion about ableist language, which is when people insert the name or symptom of a disability in place of a negative word like "sucks". The issue was picked up by Twitch, and now the streaming platform has confirmed it will drop the term in order to promote more inclusive language.
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