Chat Speed OP : Practices of Coherence in Massive Twitch Chat

Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different copyright statements: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced in a sans-serif 7 point font. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. Abstract Twitch.tv, a streaming platform known for video game content, has grown tremendously since its inception in 2011. We examine communication practices in Twitch chats for the popular game Hearthstone, comparing massive chats with at least 10,000 concurrent viewers and small chats with fewer than 2,000 concurrent viewers. Due to the large scale and fast pace of massive chats, communication patterns no longer follow models developed in previous studies of computer-mediated communication. Rather than what other studies have described as communication breakdowns and information overload, participants in massive chats communicate in what we call “crowdspeak.”