Honestly this response doesn’t feel super uplifting to me.
In general, we don’t encourage using whispers for direct communication
by bots due to users not understanding why a bot is whispering them or
viewing them as spam.
When you say things like this, it feels pretty patronizing. It feels like you’re saying that you don’t trust developers and casters to come together to create good user experiences, where interaction with the bot is well defined and easily understood. But even if that were the case, where casters having bots whisper their viewers leads to unequivocally bad user experiences it feels like you don’t trust your users to be actual people with functioning brains who can block or report spam or even just vote with their feet to find a channel with a bot that’s more respectful.
I guess I can’t speak for everyone, but I feel like the community that I built the bot for and that I frequent most often does a really good job of ensuring that the viewers understand why the bot’s there and why it whispers them when it does. If they add a quote and it whispers them confirming that the quote was added, I feel like that’s a pretty straightforward interaction that’s easy to understand and hard to think of as spam. If a viewer joins the queue to play with the caster and the bot whispers them saying “I see that you joined the queue. I’ll whisper you again when it’s your turn to play.” I feel like it’s pretty clear why they’re receiving that whisper, and honestly if there are users who find that confusing, I’d go so far as to say that the confusion says more about the viewer than it does about the bot having whispered them.
And if a caster is worried about their bot’s whispers being viewed as spam, there’s a lot they can do about that. They can set up automatically repeated messages where the bot occasionally posts in chat about how it works and how to interact with it. They can just talk on stream to remind people of the bot and how it functions. They can ensure that the bot gets a fancy BTTV bot icon so that when people see the bot posting in chat they’ll know more immediately that it’s a bot, and when they see the bot whisper them later, they’re less likely to be confused.
Ultimately, in my experience, setting up this sort of environment where viewers know what’s up and see the bot as a valuable tool has been relatively straightforward. Saying that you don’t trust the use of whispers because it’ll confuse viewers seems like it’s selling casters, developers, and viewers all short.
I’m sure it’s difficult to differentiate between spam and legitimate whispers, and I’m sure that whisper spam is really irritating to your userbase. If there are technical reasons why it’s not really possible to differentiate between the two, or even if it’s just sufficiently difficult or expensive to do that twitch doesn’t see much value in doing it, that’s fine. I mean, that wouldn’t be my favorite answer the the world to this sort of question, but that’s an answer that at least makes sense to me. Your current answer leaves me scratching my head and questioning how willing I feel to put more time into developing my bot further. Which I realize in the grand scheme of things probably isn’t that important. There are better bots and cooler services out there. Still though, all I can do is honestly present my thoughts on your answer and hope that twitch is taking all (reasonable) perspectives into account when considering what it wants to do next.