Part I: Assemble the Dream, Would You Kindly?
Three years. Three years blink by in a moment if you are not prepared for them to come. When they do, they do so in a whirlwind of life twisting what had been into what it has become, and I can safely say I’m quite glad that I got to see what this became.
Time, however, marches on and so must I. Let’s talk about the wild course that made it happen, how it went, and how we enter this stage of my engagement with some of the most entertaining Twitch TV broadcasters I’ve had the pleasure of working with during my time as a member of their staff. First, let’s take a look at how this all began.
During the summer of 2017, Would You Kindly was in the midst of a strong year and this made Crash, their manager at the time, begin dreaming big. A recurring thought popped into his head that kept resounding like an immutable beat: Recruit a team of people, put them in position around the broadcasters, simplify the promotion process, and let the members focus on their projects. By the fall, he began to put this idea into action.
He’d long since had Spacecat running the team’s webserver space and, in time, the server space for WYKBot. Despite living in The UK, he always made time to make sure the lights were on and that things worked, despite wordpress being the absolute devil in the details that could make things … not.
They also had ArcaneLumi, a passionate community manager on-side for social media work. Her prodigious efforts during Metal Meal Meltdown in the years since need little to no introduction, but if you’re reading this you should feel the inexorable need to yell: ALL HAIL LUMI!
Next came Syconawt, a talented video editor and music producer who has done wizardry in the years since. (Sidenote: Crown The King. Irish band. Go check them out. DEAL WITH IT, SIR!)
To expand their reach and begin shaping the future of the team’s management, they brought on board omgVandi as an assistant manager. In the time since, she spent a period as Would You Kindly’s manager, taking part in hosting WYK Wind Down at Twitchcon.
Finally, there was a need for a writer whose wordsmithing could get the job done with a modicum of talent behind it, and when they didn’t find THAT, they came around to … me. Drawn my way by postings to another website we both visited, the manager reached out to me and asked me a simple question:
Wouldn’t you like to do something more than you are right now?
It didn’t take much for me to decide to sign on, and the transformation was under way from word one: We recruited the various channel moderators to help populate the community discord and set aside some space for them to do what they do: from lofty discussions about ongoing Twitch culture, to sharing info about events and moderation related moments in streaming to … well, shitposting. Look, we all need to blow off steam, alright?
Unfortunately, our takeover had the side effect of asking the channel representatives, whom had previously handled promotion on a channel-by-channel basis, to surrender a role in the process and trust us to appropriately represent all of the member channels through the unified but singular staff. I’m happy to say most accepted and entrusted the endeavor to us without too much trouble, however, we did not handle this part of the transformation gracefully. It was far too much of a telling, and not enough of a discussion, and I regret that to this day — even if my role didn’t make it my responsibility to make that right.
Originally, Crash described the designs for my role having two veins: writer at the team’s availability for important releases and, in time, editor-in-chief for the WouldYouKindly website. Sadly, plans for the website quickly changed and that part was set aside, so I focused on a bad idea. The worst kind of idea you can have when talking about handling 13 streams of information on your own …
What if we did live notifications for all the shows, instead of using a bot? … Oops.
To be continued…
