this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Fair play to Twitch for biting the bullet and doing it - I remember Twitter, Reddit and many more committing to tackle bots, but I suspect that when top management see the data and impact to their sweet sweet equity of half their platform numbers vanishing overnight they suddenly have different priorities
Bots aren't really good for Twitch as a network. They don't provide meaningfully engagement or interaction, they throw off the algorithm designed to search for trending streams, and they consume system resources to broadcast data to clients that aren't using it.
But neither is the process of hunting and squashing bots necessarily productive. You'll get some number of false positives and load on your tech support staff. You piss off your talent base (because you're effectively demanding they take a pay cut arbitrarily). And the bot farms come back over time, through re-engineering or simple blind persistence.
It's always been a game of liar's poker with advertisers. We pretend to show their ads. They pretend to pay us.
Presumably, Twitch wouldn't have done this purge if they didn't see an ROI in it - either from advertisers demanding a more authentic count for renewals or because the spread on these extra bot users wasn't enough to justify the server load.
But investors don't look at "quality of network" they look at number of users.
What investors they are owned by amazon and with the discounted rate I'm sure twitch gets its literally sucking money from them. Ad nets don't want to pay for fake views so this is in twitches long term interest to do this.
Turns out Amazon is publicly traded.
Whose buying amazon stock to get a bit of twitch?????
*Who's
Literally anyone buying AMZN, effectively
Yeah, but you need decent "quality of network" to grow the number of actually-existing users. New users are gonna see the softcore streams and think they signed up to the wrong kind of streaming webpage.
They have to if they want to make profitable investment.
I know "turning a profit" hasn't been fashionable of late (which is why these phoney baloney bot populations have been tolerated for so long). But we're running out of free money to throw around for anyone outside the MAG7.
Could be that purging the fake accounts is something their investors are demanding. Idk
Remember when Elon bought Twitter in large part to get rid of the bots?
No, I remember when he tried to back out of buying it but the SEC forced him to follow through.
If only they hadn't...
Honestly, Twitter not being a cesspool when Musk bought it is a huge retcon. Remember, Twitter is where Trump rose to power. Jack Dorsey is just a tech bro billionaire among the rest of them.
Twitter was a barely working mess where fringe opinions thrived, whether they were destructive or constructive from what I've heard of it. The Musk buyout made it into a not-really-working mess with only destructive opinions.
now replaced by the humanoid replicant known as SPEZ.
Elon had no reason to buy twitter, he just enjoys price manipulation and gambling. However, once he did obtain the platform, his priority was very clearly to manipulate the public with it, that's why he fired all but the most loyal of staff.
In his defense, what else could he have done with it? Run it like a normal business? He's incapable of that, best he can do is state-subsidized overpromising stuff, and there was no angle for that with Twitter.
He actually could have just let it operate like normal, give himself bonuses, and slowly sell off his shares like he did with Tesla. Small changes like blue checkmark verification fees, ad free premiums, and labor cost minimization can be stretched out over time.
Instead he immediately cut the place in half and started promoting propaganda and hate. It's well proven his algorithm sent democrats and liberal ideology to the back while heavily promoting Republicans.
We both could have done that. But I'm not sure he could have.
reddit is tackling the lowest hanging fruit of bots and users, not the propaganda bots, that helps reddits engagement.
youtube stopped moderating, except anything that is not "child friendly"