PAX East always has excellent panels led by game developers and people in the community, so I was very excited when I saw a panel about the harder to discuss problems that women streamers face.

We heard from the ladies on the panel of the different ways they’ve been harassed online for being female streamers. The harassment ranged from unwanted DMs and invasions of privacy by viewers and mods, to swatting and physical assault by other streamers. The women were unashamed in telling their stories, which is so important. So many victims of harassment think that nobody will believe them, or that their story isn’t important enough to share, and the bravery and courage of the panelists to share their stories opened up listeners in the audience to share their own experiences in the Q&A.

Important takeaways from these ladies about how to better protect yourself:

Make sure your Twitch life is separated from your personal life. Create new email accounts, don’t share old screennames that may contain other information with your new Twitch identity. Be careful how open you are. Share general details with viewers, but don’t go into specifics. Surround yourself with mods and people you trust in your stream. If someone breaches that trust, they aren’t worth your energy. Have clear rules in your chat and stand by them. Even if it’s only one viewer in your channel, if they are making you uncomfortable it’s better to have no one in chat than one asshole.

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After the panel, I took some time to talk with the ladies one on one about their experiences streaming and their views on current topics surrounding Twitch.

ILuffHomer (Homer), TheHaleyBaby (Haley), Cahlaflour (Cahla), Tyrynn (Tyrynn), Friskk (Friskk), Meg Kaylee (Meg) [twitch links down below!]

Question 1:

Homer: Okie dokie. So first question to start — I’m just gonna pass it around — What was your first gaming memory? What was the first game you played? If you don’t specifically remember, what was the game that has captured you and has become very special to you personally?

Haley: Hello. My name is Haley, TheHaleyBaby. My first streaming game was definitely Call of Duty, I forgot which one, but it’s up there. I remember I threw a frag and it rolled off a building onto someone’s head and their hat came off and it was probably the funniest… you had to be there! It sounds stupid but the guy’s face was weird and it was just really funny and I trolled all my subs and it was great!

Cahla: So first gaming memory ever?

Haley: Aw I thought it was streaming!

Cahla: This is Cahlaflour. My first big gaming memory was my dad would come and wake me up when my mom thought I was sleeping when I was eight years old and we would go and play Halo in the basement and stay up until five am. He was always like “Don’t tell your mom! I don’t want to get in trouble!”. I don’t know, mostly just Halo Xbox stuff with my dad, turned me into a gamer.

Tyrynn: This is Tyrynn. Mine would be original OG Mario and it was my dad and I would play it a lot when I was really little. And then my younger brother was so much better at it than me and he would sit on the top of the couch and play it back upside down and still beat me. He would be upside down, playing this game, and still kicking my ass. But I loved.. I was really competitive and still wanted to beat him even though he creamed me but that’s when my gaming love started.

Friskk: This is Friskk. Hi. So when it comes to my first gaming memory, what comes to me is basically when I first started playing video games and it was actually my grandma — my grandma is a huge gamer. And she had introduced me to my Nintendo for the first time and we would always play this game called Bubble Bobble (transcriber note: yeah!). So it was these two dinosaurs, a green one and a blue one, and you had to go through a hundred levels and not die. So you can imagine the hours upon hours upon hours of continuous gameplay and that’s my first gaming memory.

Meg: This is Meg Kaylee. Wow it is tough to actually think back. My first actual game was on Gameboy Advance, and it was some crappy Disney princess platformer. But it was what actually got the ball rolling. After I got that, I eventually moved into more Nintendo games, I was a Nintendo kid growing up, so I loved Mario, I was a huge Mario fan. Super Mario Galaxy was my favorite. And then when I got to my freshman year of high school, I got an Xbox, and I started sort of moving into different areas of games, not just Nintendo stuff. It was kind of where I started.

Question 2:

Homer: Now, next moving into your streaming life. What got you into streaming and what has kept you in streaming?

Haley: This is Haley again. So basically what got me into streaming was my friend used to do justin.tv and oh my god I would love to do that but I never did it. But I dated this guy and he was like, “Your personality is so bubbly, you should do it!” I was like, “Okay. I’ll try it.” And it actually worked out! What kept me is, and I know it is very common-sense answer, but my community — I bonded with them so much and I just love them to death. Even through all the bad times, even the good times, they were always there for me and I never want to let them down.

Cahla: This is Cahlaflour again. I pretty much got into streaming because when I worked at GameStop, my coworker pulled it up when we would be working together, and we would be watching DansGaming. And he was like, “You’d be good at this! You’re a gamer, you’re super friendly, super bubbly, do it!” And I started doing it and I absolutely fell in love with it, loved the community aspect. What keeps me coming back is the stories when someone speaks up, that’s been lurking a long time, they’re like, “You have helped me through depression or social anxiety or whatever it is that they’ve been struggling with”, you’ve made an impact. When you have those people come in, you’ve even saved their life because you’ve give them somewhere they can be themselves — that’s so rewarding, that’s brought me back so many times.

Tyrynn: This is Tyrynn. I started because I was playing World of Warcraft a lot, and we were really, really good. And one of my friends was like, “Hey I watch streams all the time, you should stream our raids” And I was like, “No. That sounds really stupid. There’s no way I would ever stream.” And we were levelling alts the next day, and I don’t remember what I said but she was like cracking up, and she was like, “Seriously. People would eat this up. You should try it.” So I did, and didn’t really.. I streamed to just play this game, and show people how to do this raid and you know, how to be the best rogue on NA servers. And I ended up falling in love with creating a space for people to just be themselves, and it was this completely unexpected thing but hearing stories that I succeeded in that was what really keeps me doing that.

Friskk: Hi. Hello. Is this thing on? Hi. This is Friskk again. When it comes to what made me start streaming, initially someone just suggested it to me, they were just like, “You’re not a streamer?”. It was just some random person I just play games with on Xbox, and it was just like “Hey. You should stream.” And I’m like, “What’s that?” And they were like, “Oh. This is twitch.tv.” And I am like, “This is a cool concept. Yeah, I guess I could try it.” So I just ended up getting a capture card on Christmas Eve and just plugging it in, and I was like “You know what. Here, I’m going to do this whole streaming thing.” And it just blossomed from there. Initially it was just me playing video games on the internet, and then I realized slowly that I started accumulating a community, that I enjoyed making a difference that what I was doing would actually help people and I like making people feel like they mean something, and that’s basically what kept me going.

Meg: This is Meg again. I started streaming a couple of years ago and before that I was making YouTube videos. And I have a friend, her name is LadyDevann , I’ve been friends with her for many years, and she had followed my YouTube channel, we met through Instagram, and I met her in person for the first time at New York Comicon. And she was telling me all about twitch, she was telling me you really should try this, you would love it. And I kind of always had it at the back of my mind, like, “Maybe I’ll try streaming someday but I’m just going to make You-tube videos right now.” And her telling me that just gave me the push I needed to actually give it a go. And I was addicted from the very first day that I started streaming; it was like a light switch, as soon as I started, I could not stop thinking about it, and I would spend all my time working on streams stuff. What keeps me streaming now is definitely my community, I always wanna make them smile, and never let them down.

Homer: I just wanted a brief pause to say thank you, and I know you guys are busy. I have two more questions. First one,

Question 3:

Homer: We get a lot of posts on the sub that are like, “I’m a brand new streamer! What’s something I need to know?” or “I only have one viewer! And I’ve only had one viewer for the past eight years! What’s something I should do to improve?” So if you could give one piece of advice to a new streamer — I know that’s hard, because you want to give eight hundred pieces of advice — but if you give one, what would be the best advice you could give?

Haley: This is Haley again. Basically this is what I tell everybody is — because I see so many smaller streamers make this mistake, they wanna branch out very quickly, play every game — but it’s easier to build an audience if you play one game or a genre of games like FPS and MMO. So what I tell people is plant a seed, let it grow, so the tree is your backbone, let it get super tall and strong, and then branch out. Cos you don’t want a wimpy tree, you want something big, and large, and whatever. So don’t jump too quickly to everything, create a community and then branch out.

Cahla: This is Cahlaflour again. I typically tell people if you’re just starting out, you need to be consistent. You need a streaming schedule, and you need to hold yourself accountable to it, because people want to know when they can catch you, so you start to become almost a constant in their day/routine, like a TV show. I know I can watch this TV show at 7 o’clock this night; they do that with your stream. So if you’re not being consistent, people aren’t going to show up, so don’t call off the stream all the time, hold yourself accountable and post your schedule somewhere so people can check it.

Tyrynn: Yeah, I was going to say the same thing about consistency but I think the other thing that I think a lot of new streamers kind of do wrong is social media. Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool, and it’s like an very easy way to network, and people who only post like, “Going live!”, “Here’s my channel” and that’s all their twitter feed is, they’re gonna get lost, no one’s gonna want to read that. So engaging in topics you are interested in, or other communities, being able to share more of you will bring people in and then again they can see when you’re live, they can see when you’re at events, those kinds of things. I don’t know if that’s my number one tip, but that’s what a lot of new streamers do wrong.

Friskk: Hi this is Friskk. Network, network, network (laughs). And when I say network, I mean make friends. Make friends with people, don’t be shy, be assertive. Go to other people’s streams, even if you kinda hang out with them, get to know people and get to know their communities and eventually you can mesh with these people and create fantastic content that will grow your channel. Don’t just try to collaborate with the biggest streamers you can find because sometimes that’s not the best content you can make. Collaborate with your friends, collaborate with people you’ve known for a while, and naturally growth will occur.

Meg: This is Meg again. My piece of advice is a little cheesy, but it’s to believe in yourself because if you’re putting out content that you don’t believe in other people won’t believe in it either. It’s really important to take time to think about what you want your brand to stand for and what message you want to put out, and that you stand by that and stick to it.

Question 4:

Homer: Last question! So, I know that we’ve all seen it on Twitter…there’s been an increase of people feeling harassed, with the twitch TOS there’s been a lot of drama over what are you supposed to be wearing, how are you supposed to be looking, what are you supposed to be streaming. Just kind of, what do you think in terms of what you believe Twitch to be and how do you think people need to either change their perspective to look at Twitch? I feel that a lot of women have become targets, and how do you think all of this can be fixed and how can we work towards a more positive atmosphere and more supporting and less putting down of other people and their content?

Haley: Oh boy…so this is Haley again. Holy shit. Definitely like, you can’t fix it. There will always be those…can we cuss?

Homer: Yep. Fuck fuck fuck.

Haley: There will always be those assholes no matter what. You can be perfect and they’re gonna nitpick. So we can try to change the mentality of people, but we can’t change people. There will always be those people that will hate you, not like you make fun of you…that will never go away. I think something that can help is just be yourself and if someone else is being themselves, hype them up, don’t tear them down because they’re different. Like, fuck, I’m in a Lolita dress! These girls especially, they’re like “You look so good!” and it gives me the confidence to say “hey, you should do it too!” and “follow your dreams!” and you just hype people up and that mentality will spread, and I think that can help Twitch a lot.

Cahla: This is Cahlaflour again. I think the beauty of Twitch is the amount of different types of people on it. We all have different content, we all have different personalities, different communities…that’s what makes it so cool. I have people come into chat like, “Thank god you’re not a booby streamer” and I go, “Okay so…you can compliment my style of streaming without putting down someone else’s”. I think it starts with us correcting comments like that and saying you can do better. If you don’t like a female streamer showing a bit more skin, don’t watch it. It starts with us not putting down other people for being different and doing their own thing. Personally I think content creators calling out content like that will make Twitch a much more accepting place over time.

Tyrynn: Once again this is Tyrynn. She basically took my thing, but I was gonna say not being apart of the problem. Not being the type of person who talks about other streamers or their apparel or about comparing things. You hear that a lot even within partnered streamers that are like, “Did you see this person’s streamers?” and they compare. I agree that the beauty of Twitch is how we are all different people and we all have different communities, and that’s what’s important and makes Twitch great, and it sucks that that’s what people compete against or try to make it a bad thing instead of a good thing.

Homer: I like your sunglasses.

Friskk: Thanks! (laughs) Hi, Friskk again. Don’t be apart of the problem, be apart of the solution. I think a lot of it has to do with just spreading awareness, and that awareness can be a positive awareness. If you have a voice, use it. That’s one of the things I feel is very important. If you are someone who has a large following, someone who people do listen to, you can start by spreading a positive message and using your social media and your status for good. That’s what I do…I make my stuff be a comedy relief. So people will see it on my timeline and I see that it’s making a difference. Like hey, this is not okay maybe you shouldn’t do this…or hey, this is an awesome thing, do this. Word of mouth does make a difference.

Meg: This is Meg again. I’m having some trouble here, because everyone else pretty much said what I wanted to say. I love what all of you guys said.

Haley: Be yourself!

Meg: Be yourself! I think it’s important to bear in mind that no matter how big of a following you have, you have a voice and your voice matters. Even if you have one follower, that follower can be impacted by the words you say. The way you respond to situations like the Twitch TOS, you might think you’re just bullshitting on your Twitter but you have people that are reading and impacted by that, so it’s important to set a good example.

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Please give these amazing ladies a follow on Twitch and check out their communities. They are positive beacons on a site that has had some negative moments in recent times.

TheHaleyBaby: https://www.twitch.tv/thehaleybaby

Cahlaflour: https://www.twitch.tv/cahlaflour

Tyrynn: https://www.twitch.tv/tyrynn

Friskk: https://www.twitch.tv/friskk

MegKaylee: https://www.twitch.tv/sinfullyriddling

Author: iLuffhomer https://twitter.com/iluffhomer