It’s the world championship and chat is going hard with walls of text and emotes, often referred to as Twitch copypastas.
No, Twitch chat isn’t being spammed by bots. They are real people.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Twitch chat where memes run free and copypasta is law. It’s fun, free, and most importantly, tickles your feelers.
Memes are expressions of online culture, such as a belief, a story, or a moment that can be shared in many forms including images, text, and videos.
A type of meme, copypasta is a wall of text made with the intent of being spammed to evoke some kind of reaction.
The text can be an entire essay or a spammed phrase.
People who encounter copypasta for the first time will typically find it annoying because of the constant spam. What makes copypastas fun however, is how easy they can be repurposed and recycled to accommodate all kinds of memes.
For example, Dota 2’s Twitch copypastas are usually elaborately made stories and/or scenarios featuring pro players or talent. The really good ones will have you hooked the moment you start reading them.
Lucky for you, Twitch chat is not a science!
There’s no real right or wrong way to meme, but the easiest way to get started is to pick Twitch copypasta and memes that reflect what’s going on in the stream.
Is your favorite Dota 2 team winning? Cheer them on with encouraging copypasta like this:
Are they struggling to keep up with the competition? Create a funny story for one of your team’s players!
The whole point of memes is to have fun!
On top of Twitch’s default chat emotes, hardcore Twitch chatters use additional emotes from a Twitch extension called BetterTTV.
What makes BTTV so good is that users gain access to a huge list of user submitted emotes for free. Without the BetterTTV extension, chatters can only use Twitch’s universal emotes and emotes from Twitch channels users are subscribed to.
To get the full Twitch chat experience during The International for example, I highly recommend downloading the BTTV extension. It really is a whole new world.
(Note: Capitalization is important for inputting emotes in Twitch chat)
