Hello, everyone, my name is Ryan yen. It's my pleasure to be here to present our
words on behalf of my co authors. Today I would like to introduce you story chat,
and narrative based viewer participation tool for live streaming chatrooms.
Live Streaming has become extremely popular these days. According to Twitch
There are 8 million unique streamers streaming each month on Twitch. And there are 2.5 plus
million Twitch users on the platform at any given time, which translates to over
31 million daily unique users visiting twitch. However, there is a common problem
in live streaming that all users including streamers and viewers have to face with an
experience with which is negative comments, which may include profanity,
personal attacks, sexual harassment, hate speech, trolling, and so on. From this
example, you can see that the live streamers are experiencing with massive
amount of tax images with some sexual comments. Of course, to combat these
negative comments there are tons of moderation approaches. A demand two types
of moderation approaches including the human moderators, and also the automatic
moderations including algorithm based chatbots machine learning based
approaches. But human moderators may introduce mental health issues for
moderators itself, and algorithm based might introduce bias and some blackbox issue
They're focusing on intervening negative comments,
and both of them are reactive moderation approaches, which means that they will
only react to the negative comments once they appear. Therefore, we decided to
explore the use of proactive moderations. More specifically, we would like to first
to view a sense of communities and belongings and eventually accomplish
viewer-led moderations. narratives can act as a cognitive tool for situated
understandings, viewers will produce internal behavior epsidoes that simulate
and events and enable them to imagine actuals or potential behaviors as their
were the main characters, or they were inside the narrative. So we're thinking
the possibilities of leveraging visual narrative in the online community.
Previous research has also suggested that reading narrative triggers empathy reduces
tolerance for negative behaviors and promote pro social behaviors. Derived from
the prior works and formative studies, we design story chat, which is the viewer
participation tool that leverages visual narrative to proactively moderate live
streaming chatrooms by the viewer community. For the viewers commands, this
is the overview of our interface. So you can see that viewers commands could change
the storylines of the visual narrative accordingly. For example, you can see that
a ghost is show up, it's because there's some troll or negative comments appeared
in livestream chat room. To craft the narrative desired carefully, we crafted
via a viewer centered iterative design process, which included a low fidelity
prototype workshop with 15 participants and high fidelity survey with 50
participants and finalize the dynamic graphical narratives. We asked
participants to freely explore freely craft out the narrative, which involves
the trolling events as a major plot. Based on the formative study results, we came up
with three design considerations or guidelines. First, it should be coherent
and simple. Second, the design should immerse viewers in a story so that they
can effortless imagine themselves in the characters or positions or the circumstances
Third, they should consider the underlying symbolic meaning and
reasoning behind the use of certain components in the story. So based on the
design considerations, here is the finalized storyline. First, this is the
staple state of the story involves a bare characters, which can represent the streamers
which can represent the viewers itself. And they're watching live streaming and
interacting with the computers. However, as the instance of negative comments
increases in the actual chat rooms, the storyline response by turning a warm, cozy
room to a thunders and lightning outside at a certain threshold negative comments
in the livestream chat rooms, the symbolic meanings of these Comments, these negative
comments which is a ghost appears, and a bear was frightened and scared. The
reaction of the bear arouse the viewers apathy and encouraged them to send
positive comments in the chat. After a certain number of prosocial comments in
our live streaming chapters, these components, these comments are represented
in the form of hearts and surrounding the ghost and expelled the ghost
At last, the story returned to the stable state. And that's a full cycle of
our story. And this is the actual interface of story chat, which of course
includes a live streaming chatroom content on the left, and on the right, there is
the design narratives on the top and the chat rooms at the bottom. Next to determine
the thresholds of how or when the ghosts appear. We conducted a pilot test with 18
participants. And we also evaluate the whole systems, the StoryChat with a
deployment study with 48 participants, followed by a semi structured interview.
And we also contracted conducted a post hoc reviews with two streamers and two
moderators, and to collect their perspectives and their reflections on
findings and also the systems. Our evaluation metrics have three major components.
First, of course, we want to see the moderation effectiveness. And the second,
we want to see if we have fostered successfully fostered a community sense,
and let the users feel a sense of belongings. And at last, we want to see
the general engagements or the narrative engagements of viewers by using StoryChat
We found that most participants, they enjoy using the interface and with
the story chat, they viewed and interact more with a chat in additions that were
engaged in the chat and worried about a bear when the negative comments appeared.
Participants showed high scores on narrative understanding and narrative
presents. The results suggested that the narrative was an attractive but not
disruptive tool for most of the participants. With the story, there's a
significant increase in the amount of prosocial commands, which encourage most
viewers to participate in the chat and proactively avoid negative comments. One
of the reason behind sending prosocial comments for these viewers because the
visual narratives and participants moved from becoming emotionally attached to a
story to becoming more connected to communities. And by connecting to the
community, there will send more prosocial comments. The reflections from both
streamers and moderators pointed out leveraging a visual narrative as an
implicit and proactive moderation tool is interesting and valuable in terms of
setting the norms in the chat, increased engagements and strengthened community
sense. In terms of the moderation effectiveness, both streamers and
moderators also noted that viewers participated more in the chat and build
stronger relationships with all the viewers, which is very important factors
in feeling more connected to a streaming sessions, and being more self regulated
because of the bystander inventions. So here's the short recap of the overall
First, we began with the introductions to the problems of negative
comments that all streamers all users viewers have to face with and talk about a
current moderation approaches that focus on reactively, combating negative comments
to find a proactive moderation approach that can both avoid negative comments and
encourage prosocial comments. We designed a visual narrative we implemented in in the
livestream chat rooms, and the storyline changes according to the comments. After
the studies, we found it, that visual narrative successfully promoted prosocial
comments and strengthened viewers sense of community. So we are proudly saying that
visual narratives as a moderation approach in online community is a promising future.
This is the end of my presentations. And please check out more details in our
papers. And also feel free to contact me if there's any questions. Thank you.