Twitch moderators are an essential part of any channel, especially for a streamer as big as Felix “xQc” Lengyel.
According to an official guide, their role is to “ensure that the chat meets the behavior and content standards set by the broadcaster by removing offensive posts and spam that detracts from conversations.”
The more popular a streamer is, the more volatile their chat is, and thus, the more mods they need to ensure things run smoothly. And since it can be hard work, streamers often pay them.
xQc isn’t one of them, though—and he thinks he has a pretty good reason why.
“I don’t want it to become weird,” he said during his stream on Nov. 10. “Listen, there are creative reasons. It wouldn’t be that much of a setback to pay them, right? But it could become weird and shit. It could become dramatic.”
xQc explained that mods should do what they do because they want to and have a passion for it, not because of money—because the latter would lead to a massive problem.
“What if they don’t like the channel anymore?” he continued. “They’ll be modding, but they won’t like me anymore. They’d be doing it for the money. Then it becomes kind of weird because I’m trying to try something creative and then they hate it, so it goes against the whole [point] of it.”
The juicer warlord also made the point that, since there are a lot of active mods on his channel, it means the workload is shared between them rather than imposed on one or two.
Kai Cenat, who also doesn’t pay his mods and started the discussion by asking xQc if he does or doesn’t, agreed with him. “I feel you,” he said. “Y’all are volunteering to do this shit for free!”
It seems like xQc isn’t the only popular streamer who feels that way.
