Is using your own emotes self-promo?

Today I wanted to talk about a topic that I just recently stumbled across on Twitch, Self-Promo… but using emotes. Well, some people apparently think that using your own emotes in other people’s chats is considered self-promo aka yourself promoting your channel in their channel, which is why it is frowned upon in some communities. The reason behind that is basically that people can click on emotes and essentially have a “follow” button right there, available to them. This basically means that when other people use your emotes in other channels, people from those other channels could in theory find your channel even though you’ve never been in those places. The idea that using your own stuff is considered self-promo never came to my mind, though, because it just sounds so bizarre to me.

But let’s first talk about Self Promotion in general. Why is it so frowned upon? Why do people dislike it? Why is it useless? If you want to see another post by me on that topic, you can check out this one here (featuring some lovely cat pictures) btw!

The act of self-promotion is frowned upon because you’re essentially trying to profit off of someone else’s hard work. Sometimes you see small streamers hop into other people’s streams with bigger communities, asking for a follow, raid or host. There are times where they say “anyways, I’ll go see *this other streamer here*” or “I’ll start up my own stream now if you wanna stop by” or any other iteration of that, which a lot of people dislike. Most people tend to ban those people. I personally find it super inefficient since any other form of promotion would be a lot better and more efficient than that. When I see someone promoting their channel in a stream I’m watching, then I tend to not visit that channel because it’s a shitty thing to do. “But Magi, if it’s inefficient and doesn’t help, why is it bad?”, you may ask, and I shall answer: It’s just bad manners. There are unwritten rules on Twitch that aren’t within ToS also known as Twitch Etiquette. If you want to grow your channel, then try improving your content or try to connect with other streamers. Ask them for advice or if you wanna collab – but do that off-stream and not while they are live.

And I can see how newer people may fall into that trap and do that by accident, not thinking much of it. It’s not like it’s in the ToS… and even if it was, most people probably never have read the Twitch Terms of Service. It’s just something that you’ll understand over time and you’ll just accept it.

Onto the actual topic here: Emotes on Twitch. I make them myself and am really proud of it, so I use my “magiwaWave” or “magiwaHug” emote at times in other channels because I’m very proud of those. There are streamers that really like their own emotes and use those as well, so I feel like it’s not really that big of a deal when someone uses their own emotes. At least, that’s my own opinion. But the other day, who thinks so said that it’s clearly self-promo when you spam it, and I guess I can agree with that. I mean, if it’s just about showing love or hugs or support, you can spam all your love and hugs and pride and whatever emotes if you want to. It’s something that people do at times in some communities. It’s a different story, though, when you have one emote that you add to Every. Single. Message. You. Sent. In. Chat. – Got my point? That’s clearly intentional then, especially since, when 300 people were watching this streamer and chat moved quite fast, this one particular person added multiple of their own emotes to every message they sent. It may not be with an ill intention in mind but they clearly are trying to have people ask them what that emote is… or they want people to click on that specific emote to check out their channel.

So, if someone were to do exactly that in my channel: Spam their emotes nonsensically throughout the chat… Then I would probably also think that it’s self-promo. In that instance, I personally would ask them to stop doing that (off-stream probably) because it doesn’t look good for them. I mean, I don’t care if people self-promo. Really. I don’t. It’s your channel that is getting a bad reputation after all, not me. I’m not doing the shitty thing, after all. I feel like most people that get very agitated about self-promo are maybe even a bit insecure thinking that their community would leave them for this other person’s stream, when factually the people that self-promo usually don’t have great streams… I mean, they wouldn’t need to advertise their streams in other people’s communities if they’d be doing well or if they had great content. 

Overall, though, I don’t mind it when people use their own emotes in my channel. It’s not self-promo really, in my opinion, unless it’s excessive and I guess “intentional” as in “with the intent of giving that emote exposure so that people stop by”. I wouldn’t worry about it personally, though. After all, it’d be silly to worry about people “stealing” my viewers. If I have the time to worry about stuff like that, I also have the time to work on my channel and improve it – and I feel like more people should go at it with that mindset. If you worry about it, make it better so that you don’t have to worry.

Either way, this is just a silly little comment-style post I wanted to make since I’ve seen this opinion show up multiple times. I mean when I see rules like “do not use other people’s emotes”, I just don’t go to those streams, I guess. People have weird takes sometimes and this whole “stealing viewers” thing that keeps popping up on Twitch is ridiculous in its own way. Oh well. What do you think about this?

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!