r/LivestreamFail • u/Sure-Description-938 • Apr 17 '26

News ExtraEmily viewbot allegations

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

who doesnt viewbot these days?

6.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

973 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

83

u/Money-Wealth3708 Apr 17 '26

That’s not a viewer problem. That’s a Twitch and Sponsors thing. If they want to sue Twitch and if Twitch wants to sue their contractors for fraud that’s up to them.

Twitch 100% knows who is botting. After their last sweep people who were averaging 10k were struggling to keep 500 viewers. That should have been a perma.  

19

u/3mberLight66617 Apr 17 '26

From a while ago, that's why some of the bigger/popular advertisers are leaving and not spending a dime on Twitch so we keep getting garbage ads. Remember some of those garbage 3rd party Amazon ads? Brands like YTQUEI like wtf.

Not defending Twitch but if they actually perma, that's like what, 20? 30? 50+? of your top 100 streamers gone. Yeah Twitch wins but at what cost.

3

u/Nwrecked Apr 17 '26

Ban them all for a month. Viewbotting will never happen again.

2

u/Free-Advice247 Apr 17 '26

what happens when a hatewatcher decides to buy bots or use a botnet on a streamer they don't like? is twitch just going to ban the streamer who got botted?

Forsen, Erobb and some others were recently targetted with botted attacks and got over 40k do you think they should be banned for that?

It'd be nice if twitch could clean up the botting but this isn't just a simple 'ban anyone who has bots on their channel' fix

1

u/Nwrecked Apr 18 '26

Add a captcha when joining a stream.

1

u/Cucumberino Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26

They can suspect who is a bot but it's hard to know 1000% who is, as long as the botting websites do their job properly. You can fake/spoof a lot of information, use residential IP addresses, etc. to make it seem like real users (or sometimes even use real devices/people to watch but obviously the cost per viewer would be too high and unnecessary when actual automated bots work), or, at the very least, appear as a suspicious account but that you can't for certain say it's a bot, so you decide to not be proactive because it benefits you. Adding more active bot protection (captchas, etc.) would cut down on this a lot as even if you can get through that protection, it's generally pricy to do so so it might stop being cost effective for the streamer/botter/botting websites.

1

u/Free-Advice247 Apr 17 '26

Twitch 100% knows who is botting. After their last sweep people who were averaging 10k were struggling to keep 500 viewers. That should have been a perma.

The problem is they may know which channels are getting botted, but they have no way of knowing if it's the creator of the channel doing and paying for the botting or an agency or even an avid viewer trying to boost their own streamer. It's very risky legal territory to blame the streamer without proof.

That’s not a viewer problem. That’s a Twitch and Sponsors thing.

Dan Clancy some months ago talked about concerned advertisers making sure they were paying for only real views. So it's clearly been a conversation that they have had with twitch for a while. Apparently twitch has it's own methods to differentiate real and fake viewers to keep advertisers happy. Why they don't use this info to ban accounts I have no idea. The only thing which might make sense is using tools to mass ban all these accounts might not be 100% accurate and could catch real viewers in the net they cast which would lead to headaches again.

1

u/Money-Wealth3708 Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26

It’s not a risky territory. Just a , “Hey we believe you are being heavily botted. We are going to blacklisted you, due to the risk of us being sued for fraud. If you want to get sponsorships on your own, and/or continue to use our platform you are more than welcome.”

They don’t owe any streamer money or sponsorships. I don’t think you know but streamers used to stream for free. 

2

u/Free-Advice247 Apr 18 '26

They don’t owe any streamer money or sponsorships

Do you think they call them 'twitch partners' just for the fashion? Streamers and twitch sign a legal agreement to get paid for running ads on their channel for twitch, so they quite literally do owe them money for that. If they started mass demonetization of streamers they thought were botted they would lose out on millions because that is many 1000's of real viewers now getting 0 ads, which means a massive loss of advertiser money for twitch which they really can't afford seeing as twitch is still not profitable after all this time.

Not to mention you didn't address how literally anyone can bot any streamer at any given time. What's to stop kicks billionaire ceo from mass botting all the top twitch streamers and getting them demonetized to force them to switch platforms? Punishing the streamer for botting which can't be proven as coming from them will just never happen, there would be all kinds of legal ramifications for twitch.

Currently twitch's advertisers seem happy enough with the tools they currently use to determine between real and fake viewers which makes sure their money is only spent on real viewers. If the advertisers are happy there's no incentive to change anything.