Valkyrae reveals where YouTube falls short against Twitch

100 Thieves star Rachel ‘Valkyrae’ Hofstetter has explained what she misses most about Twitch now that she’s streaming on YouTube while also revealing that changes are coming to YouTube’s streams. 

Twitch has always been the premier location for streamers, even though other platforms have tried – and failed – to usurp them as the top dogs.

In the last few years, YouTube has been gaining ground on Twitch – signing some top streamers – but they are still quite the ways behind the Amazon-owned platform.

Even though they’ve added some of Twitch’s most popular features like emotes, clips, subscriber-only chats, and drops, YouTube still has some changes to implement that will make streamers feel like they’re on familiar ground.

During her March 11 appearance on the Scuffed Podcast, Valkyrae revealed that she misses a few things that make Twitch as good as it is, even though YouTube is making changes in the future.

• Read More: 100 Thieves sign Love or Host’s AustinShow

“The culture. We have no emote culutre, we have no hosting, we hardly have a directory on YouTube. I don’t even know who streams on YouTube because I can’t find people!” Rae said when asked about the biggest differences between the two platforms.

“They’re working on everything. It’s just so far behind like culture-wise like you can use my emotes only in my chat and there’s no BTTV. That’s like something I really miss about Twitch is the emote culture, the chat culture,” she added. “Chat carries the streamer, I really believe that.”

As Rae notes, even if YouTube makes changes and adds Twitch-like features, it’s hard to replicate that chat culture that Twitch has built up over the years.

It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a big esports event or a small streamer with 50 viewers, there’s always chat spam going down on Twitch. It might take the arrival of more former Twitch streamers to make it happen, but who knows if moves will be made.