Yeah, unfortunately, his community is... well, it's not toxic, it's not the blistered wasteland that is YouTube comments, but it does tend to be really annoying. I think a lot of them are probably really young. (Also, he encourages them.)

Mind you, he's made an effort to reduce the amount by which he makes the subs-and-donations thing worse. He used to have the most horrendous sound effects set to go off before the text-to-speech part, so that even the users who didn't post their doctoral dissertations along with their donations caused the casual viewer (i.e., me) to want to start ripping people's ears off. (Check out the vods of his Farming Simulator streams from a year or two ago. O God.)

I find the Twitch user experience bemusing because of these features—it's deeply weird for me to live in a world where you're supposed to interrupt people while they're performing and you have to touch the screen—but I admit I do like the interactivity when it's managed well. On the Lewis & Ben Save the World streams, for instance, they have (reasonably discreet) donation and sub notification graphics, but no loud sounds or TTS, and they pause to read through and acknowledge their messages at strategic points in the gameplay rather than be constantly interrupted in real time. I think that's a nice balance. It probably wouldn't work with every game, though. Old-school X-COM has convenient places to pause for that kind of thing, particularly with two players; one of them can read out the donations while the other one plays the Spreadsheet Simulator 1994 portin of the game. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.