Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassell is one of the largest Twitch streamers on the platform. With a little over one million followers, CohhCarnage, who often goes by "Cohh," specializes in strategy games —mainly RPGs— and has turned his one-time hobby into a full-blown career. Cohh, who is in his mid-30s, is known for his community he dubbed the "Cohhilition," his relatable personality and entertaining gameplay. Over the weekend, Cohh sat down with InvenGlobal to discuss his journey on Twitch.

Part one of the conversation can be found here.

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When Cohh speaks about the growth of his Twitch channel —now with over one million followers and thousands of monthly subscribers— he rarely describes it as his own or uses the word “I.” That’s because, while it is technically his channel, he is quick to defer the attention off of himself and onto his team and community he has built over the years. There is no “CohhCarnage” without the group of individuals, some of them full-time employees, that help him with day-to-day tasks such as moderating his chat, fixing back-end technological problems while he streams, work on upping his production value with various graphics, etc. The same goes for his dedicated viewers who tune in each day and support him in a wide variety of ways.

His team and community are called the “Cohhilition” and they mean the world to Cohh. So much so that, as his channel has grown larger and larger over the years, he spends a great deal of time brainstorming ways to maintain the level of intimacy with each of his supporters, despite, on any given day, that number being in the thousands.

"Back in the day, I would get 30 subs a day so every single sub could get their ‘Good show!’ [greeting] and it wouldn't really shake the show up. But then as I went on I noticed my regulars would be like, ‘Oh, you’re shouting out subs more than you are playing the game,’ and I would see new people coming out of the channel saying ‘Can you just play the game?’ So I kind of had to take that down a notch. I would then call them out in blocks at the end of the stream and then those started taking 10-plus minutes per day and people would be going ‘Can you just play the games more?’ So the way that I interact with the viewers and the way that I thank them for the support has basically boiled down to a hierarchy of: How I can get the most interaction with my community while at the same time getting as much content on the channel?"

So far, the balance has worked out pretty well in not only his opinion but his supporters.

"I have received amazing feedback from the community saying that content is key. ‘We would gladly not get shout outs for every sub if you can focus on the games and deliver the content for us.’ And honestly, getting to that point with my community, was a really big deal."

As much as he wants to spend more time thanking people due to their generosity, Cohh understands that there isn’t enough time in the day. Often times when the camera isn’t rolling, Cohh theorizes further ways he can give back to those who have allowed him and his family to live the lives they do.

"I am constantly trying to balance giving the very, in my opinion, best acknowledgment and ‘thank yous’ to the support that they give me because I'm reminded every single day that I do this at the best of my viewers. If it wasn't for my sub-community, if it wasn't for the people who come here every day, I wouldn't be in the position to do this. This is a dream job for me so. I am constantly in a state of thankfulness to these people.”

Taming Twitch chat

Often times, when a Twitch streamer the size of Cohh’s channel has thousands upon thousands of viewers watching them at any given time, maintaining order in the chat can be impossible. Spamming of emotes, copypastas and incoherent messages can flood the chat screen, preventing the streamer from being able to effectively communicate with their supporters. There are certain measures that can be taken to prevent this such as switching the chat to “follower-only mode” or “subscriber-only mode”. However, that is only so effective when the number of followers or supporters is in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

I am not the most entertaining streamer, I'm certainly not the best at these games, I'm not the smartest, and I have lots of issues.

The Twitch chat experience for some of the largest streamers in the world such as Ninja, Summit1G or timthetatman differs greatly from someone like Cohh’s. While the former has a wall of emotes and spam clogging up the feed, Cohh’s is well organized with, for the most part, rational messages.

Why though? Did he discover some hidden formula no one else has? Nope.

"My team. That is the singular word of it all..team. I could not do this without my team. Over the five years I've been doing this, I have accrued a phenomenal group of trustworthy, excellent people.  A fleet of great mods too."

In addition to his employees keeping the feed clean, at some point, the community began policing themselves.

"Chat starts to moderate itself. They will kind of get on someone saying something that isn't community-like. Even if it is as simple as, ‘Hey, we don’t do that here.’"

The concept of paying people to moderate a chatroom doesn’t sound too daunting for a top-end streamer making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. So why doesn’t everyone take a page out of Cohh’s book?

"I think that it is not necessarily time that is the factor but it is effort.  It would be very hard to hire a team to moderate a channel because there are hundreds of small decisions that that team needs to know what that streamer wants to do. There are hundreds of events that happen every day that are gray areas and chat is very rarely black and white unless they are saying a banned word or something like that then it generally falls into gray territory."

“If a streamer the size of Ninja or Summit really wanted to lock down their chat it would require money because, to be blunt, the people that I found took years to find. Finding quality talented people in a sea of folks that are perfectly willing is quite difficult. If you're lucky, like I have been, you could find these people within your own community."

When it came to selecting the select individuals who applied to be moderators for his chat, the process was so exhaustive that Cohh had his team handle it for the most part.

"Whenever we got mods we had this full application process with multi-page applications. We would have people fill out these applications and they were almost like resumes. We would then distribute them to the team. I wouldn't even see them. The team would then go through them and they would decide the people that would work well with them. I don't care how much I like someone, I care how much my team works with them because they are going to do the people working with them most of the time. Then the top-10 would go to me and I would pick my favorites and go back to the team. So we take these things very seriously. It’s just one of the reasons we got to the point we are at right now."

The Cohh-effect

With the number of individuals streaming on Twitch increasing by the day, it's not easy to stand out and find success. Cohh is one of the fortunate ones who has not only made a name for himself on the platform but earns enough money to stream as a full-time job. Even with all of his hard work, dedication and, admittedly, luck, he still doesn't completely understand why people choose to support him each day.

"I ask myself that every day. I wish I knew, I really do. The only thing I can think is that I kind of got to a stage in my life that I decided that I wanted to be the person I wanted to be. And a big part of that is just having fun enjoying what little time I have on this planet and trying to do it in a way that not only benefits those around me but also benefits myself.

I am not the most entertaining streamer, I'm certainly not the best at these games, I'm not the smartest, and I have lots of issues. But at the same time, I like to think that I provide a place for people to come every single day where they can leave their problems at the door just like 'Cheers' and come in and have a good time hanging out. I'm going to strive to keep doing that for as long as I can and all I can do is appreciate those who want to come along for the ride."