You are missing my point. I WANT people to use it and don’t turn it off, because you can improve the chat and the user experience by a lot. Restricting the functionality because of the poor implementation will lead to a point where this is system is as abandoned as the Twitch messages.
Twitch is no social network like Facebook. There is no equal relationship between streamers and viewers. Viewers are following streamers, that’s it - the “do not receive messages from strangers” is as useless as the other folder and even worse as the messages will just go to /dev/null without any notice. This setting protects you from nothing and is just annoying when you miss important messages.
When you turn off the functionality because of a few idiots you will not be able to use it for good measures e. g. when a bot tells you your rank or server informations or what ever. And as you don’t get any confirmations if it works or not people will just go back to chat messages and forget everything about this. So instead of throwing a half-baked new feature on Twitch, please improve it before everybody turn it off.
More than half of the streamers I know use the dashboard and most of the moderators do it anyway because they have to see what the normal user sees.