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
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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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.
impact to their sweet sweet equity of half their platform numbers vanishing overnigh
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.
Bots aren't really good for Twitch as a network.
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.
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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.
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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.
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When a metric becomes a target, it loses it's value. If viewers or views are what drive monetization, then that will be all that matters.
Looks like dead internet theory was closer to the truth that one might have thought.
And the rest are ads.
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If the antibot sweeps keep going and numbers keep plummetting, it's gonna be lots of fun for the sponsors in the next contract revision with the streamers.
Seems like this would be a boon to those who have actual audience, like they should be able to command higher returns?
In an honest world, yes. But this looks like a situation where the sponsors have the power and can use it to fuck over the streamers.
Sponsors probably knew the bots were there and were factoring that into their cost already, but now they can take advantage and pay less. Sponsors will probably argue something like:
“we were lied to and overpaid. We will graciously pay you the same per viewer rate and not reduce the amount to recoup our excess payments for bots in the past.”
And in theory, the rational free market would keep this from happening because sponsors should be competing for content creators (and vice versa), but the sponsors are the ones with the money and structure to win. They will collude (directly or indirectly) in order to pay less. The less-organized content creators will lose.
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I mean...if I wanted to watch porn I'm going to watch porn, not streams of simps paying for a glimpse of nipple.
Looks like a lot of right wingers were botting their numbers. Asmongold lost a ton of "viewers".
It was an open secret.
More views equals better visibility on twitch which equals more real subscribers.
Seeing other "people" donate makes real people donate more.
I'm not gonna bother figuring it out, but real curious how many views FromPirateSoftware is losing, if he was hitting to try and stay afloat after all his drama
Making accusations in this way is kinda dirty
He was previously caught live on stream artificially boosting his "hype train" or whatever it was Twitch called it. So it's not like this guy doesn't have a history.
Was he the one doing it? I thought it was someone else doing it for him,
He paid a close associate ~~a few thousand dollars~~ (I don't remember how much it actually was), and the associate then donated that same amount of money for the hype train. It's basically just a method to conceal it
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Making accusations in this way is kinda dirty
Dude was caught paying to break the hype train record, view botting would be very plausible.
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Wish they did it 10 years ago and maintained themselves as being a space for playing video games. So many esports communities destroyed by losing relevance versus the IRL streams that have nothing to do with gaming.
How do other streams destroy existing communities?
I wouldn't say destroyed, but it definitely watered down the brand. Twitch was funded as a game streaming website as opposed to the site it branched off of, which was Justin.tv - a site that was for live-streaming yourself, so theoretically perfect for just chatting, hot tubs and beaches etc. Sure, that site doesn't exist anymore, but I think it would have been better to create a new site for this kind of content, possibly even share the accounts etc with twitch if the user wants (or even use different profiles per site that ultimately link to the same user). Sure, Twitch doesn't really care because there's no real competition, the business is super hard and probably still deficit even for a giant like Amazon.
Like, it feels at times you went on twitch and the first thing you saw were barely clothed women and gambling. I don't have a moral problem with either, but it raises questions about a site's identity and their target audience.
I guess they hurt discoverability and siphon away viewers?
Dang, mad respect for them for taking on bots. Most companies love anything that inflate their membership numbers. Imagine how few users X would have without bots.
Like we didn't know! Finally, all these fake streams. Especially with the NSFW +18 streams. Let alone the fake subs and donates, did they fix that too? Made by anonymous(a friend) to show that people donate and subscribe.
I think that won't get a crackdown since it's still money going to twitch
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Nice, stop rewarding the slop and hopefully the good streamers get to be in the top of the listings now.
I knew there were a lot of bots, but I'm pretty surprised to find out it was so many. I wonder if this will result in more real viewership for smaller channels.
Looking forward to see how social blade represents the data.
Damn, throw it on the dead internet billboard. We got another one!
Had a feeling
just like youtube, and reddit. thats why both of these corporations refused to clean up thier problematic bots.
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