Okay so there is an osu! player that the community has been obsessing over named osu420. They started streaming on Twitch, streaming a whole 16 hours on their first stream and 100 people or so there to watch, it’s mad.
Today they became a Twitch affiliate!!! That means they are showing ads to people, people are able to subscribe to them and are making money streaming on this site. It’s incredible.
What this is about is that the entire time, you are not able to send any text chats. The chat is in emote only mode. When osu420 became affiliate, one thing you gained the ability to do is send bits. I initially sent a single bit because I thought it was funny to make one of the emotes I sent something I spent money on. Eventually during the stream, someone noticed that you could overpass emote only chat by donating a bit along with the message. People would be surprised and then use this to try to connect with them. A Twitch chat screenshot showing a few members able to send text chats in emote-only mode by attaching at least 1 bit emote (a grey triangle).
They noticed eventually and would mitigate this by increasing the minimum bit donation to 10 bits, and then to 727 bits when people still sent text messages there.
It’s just fascinating
UPDATE 2024-06-09 10:19 PM: In today’s stream osu420 wanted to be nice and reduced the minimum bit donation to 69 bits, but someone dared and send a text message along with the bits, so they went out and increased the minimum bit donation to 3999 bits. It feels a lot like that meme about that guy in a square closed down, trying to open up, getting punched and then creating a thicker square, closing themselves off further.