As it became clear in March 2020 that we wouldn’t be able to organise physical events until summer earliest, we had to face the question, like many cultural institutions: what would be the best way to translate our activities to the internet? None of the existing platforms seemed like a perfect fit, which isn’t surprising as most of the platforms we now use for our social life were created for business or gaming. What would be the best platform to host a cultural event like The Hmm? And how do these online platforms influence how we share and produce knowledge?

This kind of influence has been a focus of The Hmm for a longer time. When it became clear that Facebook’s algorithm pushes video to the top of newsfeeds, users and news media took advantage of this by posting more video content. According to The Atlantic, this cost the jobs of hundreds of journalists who produced non-video content. On Instagram, selfies work better than photos without a person in it. As a result Instagram has become the platform for self-promotion and narcissism. These examples show how a simple change in the algorithms of the platforms we use daily can have a huge impact on our society. Platforms influence the way we share information. It’s important to be aware of that and look at it critically. 

The experiment 

We set out to organise an event to find the most suitable platform for our cultural activities. Instead of opting for one platform and hoping it would be a good fit, we made our research part of the event and included our audience in it. And so, our first livestream event became an experiment. On 29 April 2020 we invited five speakers for a 5-minute talk about the role of the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. Each speaker was presenting on a different video conferencing or streaming platform. Visitors had to jump from platform to platform to view all the presentations. 

We set out to organise an event to find the most suitable platform for our cultural activities. Instead of opting for one platform and hoping it would be a good fit, we made our research part of the event and included our audience in it. And so, our first livestream event became an experiment. On 29 April 2020 we invited five speakers for a 5-minute talk about the role of the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. Each speaker was presenting on a different video conferencing or streaming platform. Visitors had to jump from platform to platform to view all the presentations. 

We chose five platforms that differ most from each other. From livestream platforms to video conferencing platforms. From the business-minded Zoom (which was also the most popular platform during this pandemic among our Instagram followers) to the mainstream YouTube. From one embraced by the gamers’ community (Discord) to one embraced by privacy advocates (Jitsi). Every platform had its own technical opportunities and limitations—listed at the bottom of this article—which made organising this event quite time consuming for our team. Because some platforms allow only a limited amount of visitors, and not all of our technical tests went smoothly, we decided to use Twitch as our backup platform. On Twitch, all our presentations (except for the one over on YouTube) were streamed. It became the place where our audience could go to if they were running into trouble with the other platforms or wanted to chat with us. Following the experiment, we asked our audience to complete a survey about their experience. You’ll see the results of this survey and some of our visitor’s comments quoted throughout this article. 

How did it go?

A consistent stream of 100 viewers watched the talks of The Hmm in Quarantine. Thirty viewers stayed on Twitch, while seventy viewers switched along with us through the five different platforms. Moving from one platform to another really created the feeling of ‘a real audience’, as we could see people in one platform that we had seen previously in another. Our audience, who could not just sit back and watch but had an active role, experienced the switching in a similar way: 

It resulted in a very engaged audience. The chats were filled with people introducing themselves, giving us feedback on the quality of the stream, and lots of questions for the speakers. Sometimes, interaction was even greater than during physical The Hmm events. If there wasn’t enough time to answer all the questions, speakers could stay on (either in the chat or on the video itself) with any audience members who still had questions and answer them there, while the rest of us moved to the next platform. This is really not possible in a physical event, as we have to move on to the next speaker together. In real life, a visitor can always meet the speaker for a talk or question at the bar during the break, but that takes more courage. We also experienced some unexpected forms of engagement, like when audience members were updating us that they had to leave the experiment early via the chat, showing us a new kind of online event etiquette.

The chat environment in Discord is very playful: there are different chatrooms for different purposes, and you can post customised emoji or GIFs. It was nice to see that as soon as the audience moved on to this platform, they totally embraced this playfulness. In our online survey, Discord was described as the most fun platform by almost 40% of the respondents. Our speaker on this platform, Sjef van Beers, also played with the platform by playing music during the transition time and using face filters while he was talking. It opened up possibilities for presentations that are only possible online.

YouTube was described as the platform that was most easy to use by 38% of the respondents. On this platform you could just watch the stream, and only had to log in in order to ask questions. Since YouTube is one of the most well known platforms we used, people were familiar with its environment. 

On the question through which platform the presentations most resembled a physical The Hmm event, we received many different answers. Some answered Jitsi, because it was easy to interact, and the non-hierarchical environment gave our audience the opportunity to unmute themselves for a virtual applause at the end of the event. YouTube was favoured for its comfort. You can watch the talk like an audience and ask questions in the chat. Zoom had a nice way of showing the speakers: next to each other instead of on top of one another.

“I really like to have seen people from across the internet-ecosystem. I tend to forget that it’s not just artists, trolls and venture capitalists that make up the population online.”

Quote from a participant

What did we learn?

The experiment introduced our audience to platforms they had never used before. One respondent won’t use YouTube for streams anymore because the quality was lacking (Twitch worked better) and the interaction was better on other platforms. A few people acknowledged that they will use Jitsi more often, especially as an alternative to Zoom. For some, this open source platform was totally new. Others were surprised by its improved quality, just like us. While Jitsi allows a maximum amount of 75 people in a video conference, on its community page it is written that the quality can suffer when more than 35 people are in. With around 60 viewers, the quality of the talk by Cas van de Ven on Jitsi was surprisingly stable. 

Esther Crabbendam from digital rights organisation Bits of Freedom, will be glad that our experiment stimulated the use of Jitsi among our audience. During our discussion after the event, she shed light on the privacy of the platforms we used. What data do we give away when we’re sitting behind our webcams? According to Esther, Jitsi is the safest to use because it’s an open-source platform. You don’t need to download an app when you use the browser version, and you don’t need an account to participate in the chat, making the platform very accessible. You can also choose to host Jitsi on your own server, if you want to keep control over your own data. 

Most of the platforms we used are owned by Big Tech companies who do not offer any transparency about what they do with our data. Google owns YouTube, Amazon owns Twitch. This last fact opened the eyes of some of our audience, who had no idea about this affiliation. Via our survey some people shared that they planned to delete their Twitch account or stop using it.

Zoom experienced an interesting development during this quarantine. After its 378% increase in active daily users at the start of the pandemic, the platform faced a backlash because of its privacy issues. This backlash must have been a wakeup call for the company. Esther found out they updated their privacy policies only a few weeks later. In contrast to the start of the pandemic, they now clearly describe on their website what information they use. Besides having cookies for advertisements, they don’t use any data from Zoom calls. At least, they say they don’t.

The live stream experiment showed us that the platform’s environment influences the interactions during an online event. When it’s possible to share funny GIFs via the chat, people will embrace that. It opens up their creativity. We noticed that a harsh control over your audience like Zoom offers – as a host in Zoom, you can control whether other participants stay muted and invisible – is not really necessary. Just as it is rare in a physical lecture that someone from the audience stands up and talks through the presentation, this also doesn’t happen when you give the audience the freedom to open up online. On Jitsi, everyone has the power to kickthe speaker out or unmute their own microphone, but no one did this – not even our visitor ‘5GcausesCorona’ that flooded our chat with messages claiming our speaker on Jitsi was lying.

Based on what we learned from this experiment, we have built our own ideal live stream platform for our future online events. It is self-hosted on our own website, so that we determine the atmosphere ourselves and provide a safe space for our audience and speakers. The source code for this project is freely available, and we encourage you to make your own platform to determine the environment and interaction.

Technical notes 

Below, you can find our setup for every platform. We also added their conditions and limitations. As we wrote this article in 2020, it’s possible that some of these conditions have changed since. We invite you to check them out yourself if you haven’t, to get the full picture.

YouTube
For the YouTube stream, we used Skype to connect the speaker, moderator and technician. The speaker did his presentation via Skype. Our technician made sure it was broadcast on YouTube along with his presentation using OBS (Open Broadcast Service). An unlimited amount of viewers could watch the stream. The audience could see the stream via the link we sent but needed to log in to YouTube to ask questions via the chat.

Twitch
Similarly to YouTube, we used Skype for Twitch to connect the speaker, moderator and technician. The speaker did his presentation via Skype. Our technician made sure it was broadcast on Twitch along with his presentation using OBS. An unlimited amount of viewers could watch the stream. The audience could see the stream via the link we sent but needed to log in to Twitch to ask questions via the chat.

Discord
In Discord, the moderator and speaker joined a voice channel on a server we created on our account. They couldn’t show their video, as there’s a limit of 25 people who can see this. The speaker used ‘Go Live’ and OBS to share his screen with his presentation. Discord has upgraded the limit of viewers for their livestream from 10 to 50. Viewers who did not make it onto Discord before the 50-person limit was reached could watch the stream via Twitch. The audience had to log in to Discord (either the browser version or the app) to hear the moderator and speaker and see the presentation.

Zoom
We created a Zoom meeting before the event and let it begin during the Discord presentation. The moderator was the host in Zoom, which gave her the power to unmute the speaker. The speaker shared his screen. Zoom automatically shows both the speaker and the presentation in a nice way. A Zoom meeting (based on a free Zoom account) can have 100 participants and lasts for a maximum of 40 minutes. Tip: in your settings, you can allow participants to join the Zoom meeting from their browser version. In that case, they don’t have to download the app and don’t need an account to join the meeting.

Jitsi
When we first organised this event you could just open your own Jitsi meeting by typing a name you made up behind the URL https://meet.jit.si/. Since August 2023, you need to login via Google, Facebook, or GitHub to create a Jitsi channel. We created a link before the event and opened the Jitsi right before the event started. In our settings we specified that everyone started muted, hidden and followed the screen of the moderator. There’s no hierarchy in Jitsi, so in fact all participants are free to unmute themselves and turn on their camera. By enabling ‘everyone follows me’ the moderator had control over which screens were shown. When ready, the speaker unmuted himself and started sharing his screen. Jitsi has a limit of 75 participants. The quality can suffer when more than 35 join the conversation. This went surprisingly well during our event, probably because there were just a few people who had their camera turned on. 

* This article was originally published on The Hmm website at https://thehmm.nl/jitsi-zoom-twitch-we-set-out-to-find-the-best-platform-for-online-cultural-events/