Twitch Auto Raiding

Twitch will soon be testing a new Auto Raid feature. As the name suggests, at the end of your stream, if you don't manually raid anyone, it will automatically raid your community to one live, pre-approved potential raid target.

It appears to be optional and opt-in, and lets you select specific channels you would like to raid. It also leans into Guest Star by pulling from your Favorites list for the Knocking feature. If no channels on your Auto Raid list are live, then it will raid no one.

Context:

Earlier this year, CEO Dan Clancy said they were bringing back several features related to the now-defunct Hosting function. Hosting had 'auto-host', which this clearly takes inspiration from.

My Thoughts:

Raids are one of the best organic community features on Twitch. Being able to take your audience and hand them over to someone else really defines the community experience on Twitch. (I'm sort of amazed Dan Clancy's Twitch hasn't tried to ruin it with something stupid like monetizing it or gamifying it...) This looks like a good update that lets you support people you like, even if you don't have time to raid at the end of your stream.

For Twitch, there's obvious upside in keeping people engaged on the platform (and driving lurk viewers into other live content so they can keep generating ad revenue and increasing view count/hours watched stats).

Check out the conversation about this on Twitter, Bluesky, or Threads.