On Tuesday, Twitch updated its community guidelines to permit the use of Omoggle, a third-party app that uses facial recognition to score two strangers’ faces against each other in a live “mog-off.” The previous policy explicitly prohibited randomised video chat services. The new one allows them, in the name of “participation in current trends.”
The trend in question has been building in the US for months and arrived in the UK this week. If you haven’t encountered it yet, here’s the short version: two people face their cameras at each other, Omoggle’s algorithm measures canthal tilt, nose-to-face width ratio, palpebral fissure ratio, and various other facial geometry metrics, assigns each person a score between one and ten, and declares a winner. The loser has been “mogged.” The winner has “mogged” them.
It’s being done for entertainment. Most participants say they don’t take it seriously. Some clearly do.
Where the Scoring System Comes From
This is the part Twitch’s announcement glossed over. Omoggle uses something called the PSL scale. The initials stand for Perceived Sexual Market Value, but they originally represented three specific websites: PUAhate.com, Sluthate.com, and Lookism.net — incel forums that emerged in the early 2010s built around the idea that physical appearance determines social and romantic worth, and that men who don’t measure up are entitled to resentment.
The ranking system those forums developed placed people on a scale from “subhuman” at the bottom through various tiers of “normie” to “chad” at the top. Omoggle has adapted this — “subhuman” becomes “sub3”, a new category called “molecule” sits beneath that — but the architecture is the same. The language is the same. The underlying logic, that faces can be objectively ranked and that your score determines your value, is the same.
Whether any individual teenager participating in a mog-off is aware of that lineage is a reasonable question. Most probably aren’t. That doesn’t change what the system is built on.
What Twitch Actually Said
Twitch’s position is internally contradictory in an interesting way. Earlier in the week, as Omoggle was going viral, they warned streamers that randomised video chat services were prohibited under existing guidelines — citing the difficulty of moderating content that appears via a less strictly controlled third-party app. By Tuesday they had reversed course, saying they would allow such services to “give creators more choice” and support “participation in current trends.”
Their practical advice to streamers who encounter explicit content through Omoggle was to “quickly remove” themselves by “switching scenes and not engaging further.” Which is advice that assumes the problem is manageable through individual action, rather than a structural issue with routing your audience through an unmoderated video chat service during a live stream.
The cynical read is straightforward: mogging is driving traffic and engagement, and Twitch — owned by Amazon — is not going to prohibit something that’s currently making the platform trend. The more charitable read is that they’ve made a genuine judgement call that the entertainment value outweighs the risks and that streamer discretion is a sufficient safeguard. Either way, the decision is made.
The Looksmaxxing Context
Mogging sits within a broader “looksmaxxing” culture — the pursuit of maximising physical attractiveness through diet, exercise, skincare, cosmetic procedures, and various more extreme interventions. Looksmaxxing as a concept predates the internet, but the online version, particularly as it developed on the incel-adjacent forums that produced the PSL scale, added a dimension of competitive ranking and nihilism that the gym-selfie version doesn’t have.
The psychologist quoted in the Guardian’s piece on this takes a measured view — Gen Z, he argues, meme-ify everything, and the ironic distance they bring to things that look alarming from outside can make the actual harm harder to assess. That’s probably right as far as it goes. It’s also true that spending significant time in a system that assigns you a numerical score for your face, even ironically, has some effect on how you think about faces — yours and other people’s.
Nicholas Graff, the 16-year-old from Iowa whose Omoggle video went viral, told the Guardian he thought looksmaxxing culture was “honestly a good thing.” He’s 16. Twitch has just made it easier for streamers with large audiences — many of whom are also teenagers — to bring that culture into their streams.
Why This Is a Gaming Story
Twitch started as a gaming platform. It still is one, primarily — the biggest categories by viewership are still games. But the decisions Twitch makes about what’s permitted on the platform shape gaming culture, particularly for the generation that grew up watching streams rather than just playing games. A platform that legitimises facial scoring systems built on incel-derived metrics, because they’re currently trending, is making a statement about what kind of space it wants to be.
That’s worth noting, even if — especially if — most of the people doing mog-offs are just doing it for a laugh.
For more on the gaming industry and platform decisions, see our Tech Giants & Gaming Industry: Legal Trouble Ahead?