- Twitch’s new anti-bot system caused viewer counts to nosedive across hundreds of channels, with some losing over half their displayed audience.
- Channels running 24/7 reruns saw the biggest drops, with Mira falling from 2,000+ to under 200 viewers overnight.
- The cleanup affects sponsorship deals and ad rates since brands have been paying premium prices for audiences that were partially fake.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He actually could have just let it operate like normal
We both could have done that. But I’m not sure he could have.
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.
Looks like dead internet theory was closer to the truth that one might have thought.
And the rest are ads.
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.
I mean…if I wanted to watch porn I’m going to watch porn, not streams of simps paying for a glimpse of nipple.
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?
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
I find streams of women wearing yoga pant with camel toes are an insult to gamers.
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.
The less-organized content creators will lose.
Sounds like they need a union.
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
Making accusations in this way is kinda dirty
Dude was caught paying to break the hype train record, view botting would be very plausible.
And stating that would have negated my point, and I would have never replied to the comment.
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 itYeah but being in kahoots with one of his mods to boost the stream isn’t really making all that much difference imo.
You guys are so pathetic with this PirateSoftware shit
Yeah he’s an arrogant nerd. Who actually gives a single goddamn shit? Oh my god I feel like I’m going insane
People on the internet are doing crypto rugpulls, AI is useless but it’s going to make us all unemployed and blacken the sky
“But he played WoW really bad this one time and my favorite stweemer got big mad”
Fuck off and fuck you
I suppose you may have missed the allegations of emotional abuse and sexual manipulation.
…yes, yes I did miss that wtf
Plus it’s just fun to see douchebags lose. 🤷♂️
Got any link for that? That’s news to me
I’m not sure if I’m more surprised that there’s a website dedicated to this, or that the
.sucksTLD is a real thing that exists lol…JFC. That poor dude, manipulated by a sociopath.
People no longer (only) hate him for being dog shit at wow, they hate him for much more serious things now.
I think he’s also the guy who tried to cause the petition for saving video games to fail
He just said he didn’t agree with it. Like, poor take but really? Sabotage? Press X to Doubt
He made at least two YouTube videos negatively covering it, saying how it’s bad for the industry and shit and said he’d actively tell people not to sign it. Why do you keep defending him if you don’t know?
Expressing your opinion on something is not sabotaging it. He’s done plenty of bad shit (including relating to SKG) but negatively covering things and actively trying to make sure the thing you don’t want to pass isn’t passing is just political participation in the same way that promoting SKG is.
Well, op never used the word sabotage. Just said tried to make it fail. And that’s what he did. He told people it was bad and to not sign. And people listened. If you check the signature timeline, there’s a clear dropoff after his videos.
And since the things he said were untrue, we don’t know if he actively lied or is just too stupid and misunderstood, but the effect was the same. It was never just about opinions. Me telling you the earth is flat or that gravity doesn’t exist is not just me expressing an opinion, is it?
Yeah my bad I just took that from the reply I think. He did try to cause it to fail, and I agree we can’t know whether he lied about things intentionally (but even if someone is generally a dick, I would presume innocence unless he’s actually a compulsive liar or something).
completely agree - if he sucks so much why dedicate so much mental space to an insignificant stranger who streams games or development or whatever online?
i guess people just love to follow minor e-celeb drama, but the biggest dunk you can make against someone like this is to just stop thinking and talking about them. reading people type about this stuff is like being in high school again lol
Exactly! Like I don’t even disagree with some of the points but like people are making cartoons about it and never cease to comment or shitpost like they took down fascism or something
I mean look how many downvotes I got, how many of those you think justify it by being like “bet you like him” in their head
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.
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.
Had a feeling
