A recent leak of popular streaming site Twitch.tv has put the entire source code of how the site works out on the internet for everyone to see, comments and all. One of the first things that peaked people’s attention was to finally see behind the curtain of how Twitch assigns the elusive “Golden Kappa.” Per the source code, it seems that Golden Kappa is not as random as people believed.
What is the Golden Kappa
For those not in-the-know, “Golden Kappa” refers to a Golden version of a well known emote on Twitch. The normal emote, Kappa, is one of the most well-known emotes on the site. It is often used to convey a sense of sarcasm, much like “/s” is used on other social sites. The basic Kappa emote is a greyscale picture of Josh DeSeno, a programmer for Justin.tv, the early version of Twitch. As the name implies, “Golden Kappa” is the same picture with a golden look rather than the greyscale. The golden version is also only two colors, making it flatter and appear a bit more as an award of sorts.
While every user can use the global emote Kappa anywhere on Twitch, only a select few could use the golden version, and only for a short time. Prior to the leak, it was generally believed that every day, a select few users were randomly chosen as the Golden Kappas for the day. When these select users typed the Kappa emote into a chat, it would produce the golden version instead of the standard greyscale.
There was no notification or any indication that a user had been awarded access to the Golden Kappa. The only way to know that you were chosen was to type Kappa into chat. This led many to often do “Golden Kappa Checks,” where viewers of a stream would all spam the Kappa emote to see if any of them had been lucky enough to win the roll for that day.
How Does the Golden Kappa Actually Work
The code snippet shown here implies that a list of specific users are able to assign the Golden Kappa to anyone they want. It may be that there is another part of the code that assigns it randomly, but even if that is true, these users can assign additional Golden Kappas at their own discretion. As was speculated, the duration for how long a user is awarded the Golden Kappa is 24 hours.
The leak has demystified a niche but exciting aspect of Twitch. What was once believed to be a free lottery that every user was entered into daily has instead been shown to simply be an award a select few users can hand out to whoever they like. While it still could be true that the Golden Kappa is relatively random, knowing that it is decided by bias prone humans instead of dispassionate code makes it a lot less exciting.