It may seem odd that more than two years into the mobile live-streaming hype , we’ve heard so little from the biggest video site of them all: YouTube. In 2015, Meerkat was the talk of South By Southwest and Twitter quickly responded by launching its own live-streaming app, Periscope. Now it’s practically normal: We can watch news events unfold live on Periscope and groan every time one of our friends goes live on Facebook. Even Instagram is in on it: Photos of lattes and sunsets are now supplemented with endless live feeds from brunch, protests, and our friends’ apartments. So, again: Where the hell is YouTube?

Oh, here they are. Today, YouTube announced that it’s rolling out live video to people with 10,000 or more subscribers. That’s a tiny sliver of YouTube’s user base, but the company promises to extend live video—along with its new “Super Chat” pay-to-highlight messaging and monetization feature—to all of its users this year.

Limiting live video to YouTube stars may seem overly cautious, if not downright sluggish (especially considering how late the company is to this game). But this type of slow-paced iterative rollout of new features is pretty standard for platforms of YouTube’s size, and for good reason.

First, there’s the issue of quality. If you’ve ever scrolled through the current live streams on Periscope, you know how varied the results can be when you let anyone with a smartphone broadcast to the whole world. Some of it is intriguing or entertaining. Some of it is pretty weird. And then there’s the subset of it that makes you question whether mobile live-streaming should exist at all.

If you think things can get odd or questionable on Periscope, just imagine what would happen if millions of YouTube users suddenly had the option to “go live.” How would they wield that power? A post-traumatic flashback to Chat Roulette comes to mind, and that wouldn’t even be the worst-case scenario. Everything from live-streamed terrorist atrocities to the most banal moments of people’s lives could clutter up YouTube before the new feature could have a chance to prove its value to the masses. By contrast, handing the live video keys over to more experienced YouTube creators likely ensures a certain level of semi-professionalism in the quality of the streams that start popping up on the platform.

Of course, YouTube already lets people tune into live video feeds. They just typically come from broadcast partners rather than bedroom gossip hounds and amateur singer-songwriters. But even the professionally produced live streams offer us a glimpse at how easily things can go sour. If you’ve ever watched a presidential debate or really anything having to do with politics on YouTube, you’ve likely watched the real-time chat box on live videos can turn into a firehose of hate speech and conspiracy theories that fly by in all caps too rapidly to even allow for the possibility of a levelheaded discussion. We are, after all, talking about YouTube here. Have you ever read even the regular comments under a video? If YouTube doesn’t do something to tame the vitriol, expect a fair amount of hate speech and abuse to accompany the further democratization of live broadcasting.

This isn’t just a YouTube problem. In today’s political climate especially, hot-headed online discourse and outright harassment are common features across social networks and media sites of all stripes. For its part, Twitter is in the process of tweaking its abuse report tools and policies in a long-overdue bid to fix one of its nastiest problems now that neo-Nazis feel unusually empowered there. The fact is that the internet is pre-loaded with people ready to shout, stalk, doxx, and even threaten others, with the misbehavior seeming to be at its worst when content is flowing in rapid, real time and audiences are staring into their screens. It’s a modern reality that platforms like YouTube need to plan for.