Streaming sounds like a dream job for most gamers. You get to sit at home, turn on a game, and get paid to play it, but that isn’t the reality for most streamers. Streamers work hard for their success, and a huge part of that is streaming long hours and interacting and engaging heavily with your community, but coupled with that is intense isolation, constant harassment, and anxiety that often turns to depression.

When most people think of a Twitch chat, they imagine a group of fans eager to talk to and engage with their favorite streamer. However, a chat can often be dominated by those that want to be heard the most, and those people are often angry and trying to make a point. There’s little logic to the harassment that pours into chats, but it’s always much worse for those that facecam. A streamer’s race, gender, weight, appearance, and even fashion are all open season if they have the courage to show their face – which statistically garners more views – and it can turn streaming into a spotlight on all of a person’s biggest insecurities.

Even some of the biggest streamers in the world can face constant harassment; they just happen to be better at handling it. Nightblue3 is one of the most popular streamers on Twitch and across League of Legends, but streaming 5 days a week and maintaining a Youtube channel puts a lot of targets on his back.

In a recent stream, for over two hours, his chat was dominated by trolls and flamers. Every mistake he made in game was compounded on by a slew of negativity, and if voices from his chat told him to do something and he didn’t, he was often insulted and harassed. Here are just a few samples of the constant stream of harassment that went on for hours.

For someone like Nightblue3, this is nothing new. Several years back, when his girlfriend broke up with him, this information leaked into public knowledge, and he wasn’t just mocked and harassed in his own chat, but in games he played as well. This was similar to harassment that Youtuber Boogie has recently faced over his own marital problems. Both creators had tough emotional times in their personal relationships which predators in their community took as an opportunity to attack them while they were down.

This is compounded on by the fact that streaming is an isolating profession. Sitting in the same spot day after day and hour after hour isn’t just unhealthy; it’s dangerous to mental health. Taking into account anxieties about success and worth – especially for smaller streamers – can turn this dream profession into a nightmare. It’s one of the reasons why Twitchcon features several panels on depression and on how to build supportive communities.

There are steps streamers can take to protect themselves. Having ban phrases – which auto-ban a person when typed- as well as helpful moderators make the experience easier, but mods aren’t easy to find and ban-phrases are often circumvented by creativity. It takes a lot of hard work to overcome the difficulty of streaming, and most of that difficulty is in the mental battle.