I am a fairly small Twitch streamer, as well as a Discord user, who wishes to create custom emotes for use in both Twitch and Discord. I already have an account, and it is synced with my Twitch channel and a Discord server. However, when I went to add an emote, I got an error reading “Your channel is not currently big enough to warrant emotes. Come back when your channel is a little larger.” After doing some research, I discovered that this is a common error, and was created by the BTTV developers to fight against a flood of new Twitch users who use BTTV solely to create emotes for Discord.
While I had intended to use emotes mostly for Discord, I had also fully intended to use them for Twitch as well. Although I am a small livestreamer, I still stream at least somewhat frequently. Additionally, when consulting multiple Discord users who were also interested in custom emotes, I was informed that one of them was able to upload emotes on a Twitch channel with zero followers, and they never livestream. In other words, despite effectively never using their Twitch account, they were still able to create new emotes. (And pretty good emotes, at that!)
Even though my follower count is still in the single digits, and even though I don’t livestream as often as many Twitch users, I would still imagine that I should be able to create custom emotes to use for my channel, as well as for Discord. Especially considering the fact that less-active Twitch users are able to create custom emotes. I might still be missing some important information regarding this, for all I know, but that is easy to do when there are no clear answers to this issue to be found…
This is the problem, and is why you aren’t able to upload emotes. BetterTTV is for Twitch streamers, not Discord users. If your channel has little followers, you don’t really need emotes since, to be quite honest, nobody will be there to use them.
But you don’t seem to understand the use-case. Our target audience for emote uploading does not include Discord users or new streamers. While we originally let anyone upload emotes, abuse has caused us to refine our requirements against abuse. These restrictions are non-negotiable and will not be changing, sorry.
It would help if, at the very least, I had some clue as to how big my Twitch channel needs to be before I can use emotes. I know that this is information that you do not wish to disclose, so as to prevent other people from working around the abuse prevention measures. However, not giving any information to people who are legitimately interested in growing their Twitch channel and who are not trying to abuse the emotes system might not be the best course of action, either. If there’s any information, anything at all, that you are willing to disclose regarding this, I would greatly appreciate it.
Even though I’ve shown more interest in using emotes for Discord than for Twitch, which caused it to sound like I was another person who tried to use BTTV for only Discord emotes, I really do wish to improve my Twitch channel. Thus, I figure that custom emotes could help to do so. The only reason I haven’t already tried other custom emote services (such as FrankerFaceZ) is because BTTV emotes can be used on 2 different platforms. It really is a useful feature, as one would only need one single account to deal with custom emotes on multiple services.
In fact, I think that it would be better if you were able to separate the BTTV emotes service into two separate entities: One service for Twitch, and one for Discord. Then, you wouldn’t have Discord users misusing the system just to get custom emotes for a non-target platform. It isn’t much, especially since I have no clue as to how much work that would require, but it’s just a possible idea.