The New Twitch Tags Expand Its Vocabulary Far Beyond Gaming

While Twitch is primarily a game-centered streaming service, its new tags announced recently cover a much wider specter of topics. As Twitch announced in its official release, these tags are community-centered, which just highlights how Twitch cares about its users’ lives outside the gaming.
 
Topics these tags address include nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, ability and disability, and so on. The tags become much more detailed: for example, for LGBTQ allies (which earlier had to use the LGBTQIA+ tag) now a special tag exists, while the original one got rid of this “A”. There are tags for veterans, Vtubers, and (as Twitch highlights) Transgender tags. The keyword for the current update is inclusivity: every category that can have its own tag (except for something-phobic) should have one. 
 
While some may wonder what these tags have to do with gaming, there are clear answers. In many games, there are various identities that have a lot to do with all these issues. Beyond gaming, each gamer has his, or her, or their, or (choose the right pronoun) specific identity that’s also reflected in gaming. Especially if this person is an influent streamer. So introducing all these tags just helps keep the offline reality with the gaming stuff.
 
Unlike user-generated tags used in other social media (like Twitter or Instagram), tags on Twitch are implemented by the service itself. It helps avoid misspelling and duplicating tags, so no tagged material is left beyond because of tag mismatch. Another reason is to prevent irrelevant or inadequate tags that could have appeared. Moderated tags, though, take longer to implement. Since tags were first introduced in 2018, the community requested for more tags on certain topics, and only now Twitch responds – and does it well.