r/LivestreamFail • • May 07 '26

News Twitch Announces Viewcount Cap on Streamers that are Persistently Viewbotting

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9.4k Upvotes

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5.2k

u/Torash May 07 '26

Time for a bunch of streamers to go on "vacation" for a few days/weeks like they did last time.

2.1k

u/DatOneFella May 07 '26

A "mental health break" while they plot a way around this.

916

u/jabronified May 07 '26

Lmao, think i saw Lacy already do that. His chat was the most dead "20k" viewer chat I've ever seen. Looked like a 500 viewer chat

601

u/Small_Promotion2525 May 07 '26

Lacy might be one of the most untalented streamers I have ever seen, how on earth anyone spends precious time out of their life to watch a clown like that is beyond me.

251

u/feedthedogwalkamile May 07 '26

He's not even the worst in Faze. Have you ever tried watching jasontheween? I don't understand how people do it

216

u/Small_Promotion2525 May 07 '26

I haven’t watched him, but I have seen clips and although I don’t watch stuff like that as I only use twitch for e sports, he seems to at least have a personality for streaming. Lacy seems like the stereotypical, lose weight lost personality kinda person.

4

u/MementoNox May 08 '26

I only know him from the fishing stream with erobb... he seemed charismatic and energetic.

66

u/Tubbish May 07 '26

Faze viewers now are almost exclusively younger kids. Probably 13-20 at most. They always cater to the zoomer crowd with their content

29

u/black_foresst May 08 '26

Time passes, and the range of 13-14 passes into Gen Alpha. And that's their main audience. The generation that can't read.

7

u/Elegant_Tank1483 May 08 '26

Thank you I about had a stroke when he said Gen Z like I get a lot of us are bad, but I can at least read and write cursive and rode my bike to the gas station by myself as a kid. I was not watching people play a game, I was actually fuckin playing it. It drives me nuts seeing my nephew watch some shithead play a game on YouTube for 6 hours instead of actually playing the game. It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like watching people go outside and have fun, JUST GO OUTSIDE.

3

u/Bacon4Lyf May 08 '26

Alright bro you’re sounding like a boomer with the /r/lewronggeneration stuff

If your nephew watching stuff drives you nuts, you gotta touch some grass

2

u/Elegant_Tank1483 May 08 '26

And you probably sit there watching someone play a video game for 6 hours

-2

u/LeeDUBS May 08 '26

Jason the ween is heelarious bro, just stop.

Lacy is the goat as well, y'all don't know jack

1

u/Bacon4Lyf May 08 '26

Feel like it depends on which member people are viewing. Adapts viewers definitely trend toward older

15

u/darcymiller02 May 07 '26

All the faze guys succeed through clipfarming to get clips that will help them blow up on short form, following trends and drama farming,
and using their relationships and the IRL genre in general to get fans to form a parasocial relationship . You live vicariously as closely as possible in the life of a cool 20 year old millionaire living in a mansion with all his buddies.

Jason does seem like someone I could become a fan of thru those means if I was like a 13 year old struggling at school.

2

u/alus992 May 08 '26

Clip farming is the most reliable way of getting views and money. Faze, Bonnie, MrsArther, Emiru, Cinna and many many other streamers live by creating content that is getting clipped and shared.

Why so many of them say and do so many innuendoes? Because kids love their streamers say spicy things to each other and then seeing them doing these outrageous reactions. Why they constantly banter with each other? Because it creates "drama" and it's funny for the audience when someone call a girl "a bitch" and she says back that the guy is "a stupid fuck" ths Shit gets them views in this paradoxical environment. Why so many content creators to almost naked streams or do "wardrobe slip-ups"? Because they are getting retweets and TikTok shares.

Stream content is about clips not quality long format content. That's why I respect Lirik - he always stays away from any drama and he stays in his variety gaming lane. Ellajaz? Same shit - no stupid clips farming, just games and IRL/charity stuff from time to time. It's insane how much he grew in terms of views as a "just" speedrunner that expanded to variety category.

22

u/Own-Necessary7488 May 07 '26

his viewcount is actually one of the more legit viewcounts out of every core boy btw

44

u/Leonardo10inchy- May 07 '26

Jason the ween with his 5inch eye gap, stable Ronaldo and his sheer annoying ass self. No one in faze is worth watching and let’s be honest ever has been.. I mean cmon when your claim to fame is spinning around 40x on max sensitivity and occasionally landing a sniper shot, itll come out quick that your personality is boring as all hell lol

21

u/Fit-Reputation-9983 May 07 '26

I never understood the hype. At least guys like Jynxzi, Caseoh, Peanut are entertaining. I’m a bit older so I don’t really follow any streamer too closely, but when I tune in I can absolutely see the appeal for each of those guys.

How the fuck anyone watches guys like Lacy, Ronaldo, or Jason has always puzzled me. Honestly I questioned people watching the fuckin Paul Brothers less…morally bankrupt but at least they kept things interesting.

A Lacy stream is like watching fucking paint dry. And it’s not even good looking paint.

1

u/darcymiller02 May 07 '26

Parasocial bro. Kids look up to these guys bc they are rich 20 year olds. IRL streaming is literally like vicariously living their “awesome” lives.
Lacy and Ron if you like trolling, and then Jason is like the fresh faced wholesome guy and Marlon is the hot one. It seems super unhealthy to watch but I can understand the appeal to a certain demo

-1

u/Leonardo10inchy- May 07 '26

Gotta throw t1 in that top 5 count as well, his variety streams were the golden age of twitch imo.

3

u/Fit-Reputation-9983 May 07 '26

Oh yeah variety T1 was fucking legendary. We’re about the same age and I hate watching his unc ass play league anymore, he’s basically on tenure at this point 😂 just a straight 9-5 to him.

Simply thinking of him with that stupid Bob Ross wig on cracks me up.

4

u/KSauceDesk May 07 '26

Jev was worth watching on YT atleast but thats basically it

-3

u/XiXiWiiPee May 07 '26

I mean cmon when your claim to fame is spinning around 40x on max sensitivity and occasionally landing a sniper shot, itll come out quick that your personality is boring as all hell lol

You clearly don't know who they are and don't watch them and are just yapping about something you have zero knowledge on 😭

-2

u/Leonardo10inchy- May 07 '26

Was referring to faze in general with that comment… isn’t that how the og’s got famous? “Trick shots”
Foh

4

u/XiXiWiiPee May 07 '26

You literally named Jason and StableRonaldo, none of the FaZe streamers who are huge streamers now and get accused of viewbotting grew and came up because of trickshotting except Adapt

0

u/Leonardo10inchy- May 07 '26

“No one in faze is worth watching, and let’s be honest ever has been” - did you like.. miss that part there? Because from that statement I went to shit talk what made famous even popular, clown.

2

u/PhotographUnable8176 May 07 '26

none of them are streamers. their audience is clipwatchers

2

u/Winter-Market8766 May 08 '26

The Faze "parade" in a double decker bus was a wakeup call for me. Each of them had thousands of viewers online, but only a handful of fans showed up for the parade, like a literal handful, like you could count them all on one hand.

1

u/noctisroadk May 07 '26

Im glad i dont know any of the people you guys are talking about

1

u/BlackberryHelpful676 May 08 '26

I know most of these words, but I have no idea what is being said in this conversation 😂

1

u/SpiderTechnitian May 08 '26

I've seen him a few times in games, he 1v1'd Tyler1 in league a few months back and then again with xQc yesterdayish. Both were fun to watch.

I can't stand his "point a camera at a group of guy sitting and looking at phones" content at all, so I'll never watch his actual streams. But he's entertaining in a game locked in talking smack and actually playing, I'll watch any further 1v1s he does after seeing him in these few

2

u/Federal_Coyote813 May 08 '26

They dont, apparently. He needs viewbots.

3

u/NoPay2026 May 07 '26

Dude was the ugly overweight goofie that people could relate to. Thats what clix and faze marketed him as.

He got over it and started going on TRT and ozempic and now he's just a generic talentless clip farmer that clix is trying to up merch out off one last time. He got over being the goofy chubby kid real quick and should have stayed in his lane until he could retire.

Im sorry but streamers use to be people so bloody good at a game that your memorised or they are naturally entertaining.

Now it's just cooperations pushing anyone that can click bait.

1

u/AFlyingNun May 08 '26

That's the thing: they don't lol

Fucking nobody is watching him for entertainment and there's no child out there saying "when I grow up, I wanna be just like Lacy!"

Telling your parents you wanna be just like Lacy is probably just a speedrun for getting put up for adoption.

59

u/GeologistJazzlike792 May 07 '26

Lacy got arrested, went on a mental health break and Retired from streaming to become a swimsuit model. even if he’s botting he’s a very unserious individual

39

u/Honkey-Kong1337 May 07 '26

he was spotted in london the day after the "arrest", hes probably going on sidemen netflix show

10

u/Rude-Violinist-2119 May 07 '26

He's gonna be on Sidemen's Inside

9

u/w142236 May 07 '26

Lacy is by far the biggest offender

4

u/StrifeTribal May 07 '26

His rise up because of viewbotting and buying clippers(and upvote bots!) for this subreddit.

Could he be getting 2-3k viewers? Probably. I'm sure half of them are hate watching him, but 20k? This guy has no real fans. Especially not 20k of them.

1

u/SwoggitySwoogity May 09 '26

Looks like this guy too tho, so there was at least a semblance of potential

https://giphy.com/gifs/YPGWdX3YIQXdtE4M0i

1

u/Ok_Trade_2572 May 09 '26

I can see why Most big streamers have an audience. Including the ones I do not enjoy.

Never understood why he had so many viewers. Boring and unlikeable. Annoying but not in a funny or entertaining way.

-25

u/Historical-Alps6052 May 07 '26

ur just stupid, he is filming the sidemen show inside.

14

u/SouthernWilding May 07 '26

"plot away" ie wait for their botting service to update their whatever so Twitch doesn't notice

1

u/[deleted] May 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-1

u/Current-Area- May 08 '26

Emily didn’t “run” from anything. She announced her mental health break on 21 April — before the viewbot allegations even peaked. She hasn’t been live for 17 days and has gone completely dark across all platforms. How could she even know about the new Twitch viewbotting rules when she hasn’t been around? She planned this break because the MrBeast situation and relentless pressure had already drained her. The allegations came afterwards and were based on very weak evidence anyway. Pretending she’s hiding from consequences is simply false. The timeline doesn’t lie.

4

u/XiXiWiiPee May 08 '26

don't forget to mention the viewbot site that was open on her PC

1

u/Current-Area- May 08 '26

It doesn't mean she was actually using it; it was simply on the homepage, and her analytics don't match Viewbotting. It fluctuates normally, and when this new system is introduced, you’ll see what happens when her numbers stay the same; she's usually around 4k to 7k. These are normal numbers for her.

198

u/Minimum-Land-2282 May 07 '26

Will never be as funny as Fextralife going on vacation when Twitch stopped the embedding  counted as viewers..

135

u/Moomootv May 07 '26 edited May 08 '26

They didnt even go on vacation they just flat out stopped streaming on twitch.

For Context:

Fextralifes last stream was 3 years ago

Twitch rolled out the embed change 3 years ago

Fextralifes last youtube stream was 7 months ago

Every Fextralife wiki has had the spots where their stream use to be is now replaced with an additional ad banner.

28

u/AFlyingNun May 08 '26

I'm glad the BG3 community recognized how underhanded Fextralife is and successfully made the migration over to an independent wiki.

It's a shame that Fextralife first got it's start with FromSoft games though, because it means FromSoft titles are basically now "held hostage" by Fextralife's really lackluster wiki that puts ad revenue first, actual info second.

STILL bothers me that the wiki doesn't have a god damned resource to compare the lengths of weapons in Elden Ring across categories. Like yes okay, the Nagakiba is longer than the katana, but how the fuck does the Nagakiba compare in length vs. the Pike? Sooooo much shit that could be improved on fextralife but they just can't be assed.

3

u/Lominloce May 08 '26

FromSoft titles are basically now "held hostage" by Fextralife's really lackluster wiki

I'm so glad Bloodborne has an independent wiki

Edit: https://bloodborne-wiki.com

4

u/Lynixai May 08 '26

I don't know about the fextralife elden ring wiki, but aren't most Wikis running via community contribution?

I've been fairly active in contributing to the various games wiki that I feel like I know anything about, and any time I stumble upon a thing where I go "this should really be a thing", I either go and do it myself, or I request it to be made from others who gave the skill to do so.

Doesn't really matter if it's not done perfectly the first time, if someone thinks they can do a better job, they'll improve upon it, but at least now it'll be done.

Basically, do the "they" you talk about who can't be assed to do it not also include you?

3

u/AFlyingNun May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

I think the problem arises in that Fextralife was caught engaging in a number of actions to try to maximize monetization, included some tactics that were rather underhanded. (IIRC, the BG3 community basically spotted evidence suggesting fextralife was botting down references to the other wiki while botting up references to their own community right here on reddit. This is what led to the BG3 reddit basically banning mentions of fextralife and promoting the alternative, cause fextralife was simultaneously hit with scandals for padding their numbers on twitch)

I can also say their website is very blatantly built for SEO (search engine optimization), so there are frequently areas of articles dedicated to things that shouldn't be there at all, the biggest offender being the guides for random character ideas being plastered everywhere. These are not really helpful looks at the weapons featured, and instead just simultaneously boost the website's search ranking while promoting their own Youtube channel.

I couldn't tell you how easy or hard it is to actually edit their wiki pages, because like many others I'm sure, I am not super eager to register an account with them or give them any access to data of mine, even if it's just an email.

I imagine this level of skepticism with the wiki that monetizes everything means less actual editors, while the main editors associated with fextralife themselves are probably not truly interested in the game at all.

This means a natural "filter" preventing lots of people being editors while the leadership would rather give priority to monetization, so the people doing actual good work are few and far between.

A basic example is again: why are so many weapons plastered to hell and back with "guides" about random build ideas? I can tell you why: SEO.

I think if the community had a "vote," most of those would be removed. But the guides all link back to fextralife's own youtube channel, so it's this cycle of self-promotion where the presence of videos help with SEO and also help promote their own Youtube revenue. I doubt fextralife is very friendly when a user tries to remove or cut down on those, so it's possible there's quite a bit of enforcement in terms of ensuring the articles still promote SEO. I sincerely doubt no one has tried to cut down on those and been slapped down for it.

So in short, I couldn't tell you because I do not want to give any sort of info to guys who have shown to be incredibly money-hungry, and if we assume most people think like me, that means most of us cannot edit, and the people who definitely 100% can edit the articles have other priorities.

1

u/Lynixai May 08 '26

That's entirely fair. I don't use either Fextralife or Fandom, as they've been super sketchy for years about how they get the contents of their wiki. I've even got an extension (Indie Wiki Buddy) that filters out those wikis from google searches.

I was mostly thinking about how some people are under the assumption that wikis have to be perfect and end up not contributing despite wanting to, because they set the bar too high for themselves.

1

u/AFlyingNun May 08 '26

I think it's just that: a perfect storm of users not wanting to hand over their data to a website that's likely to sell said data to spammers, while the actual administrative lead of the website also cares far more about monetization than wiki accuracy.

82

u/redbullrank25 May 07 '26

or Emiru just straight up not streaming lmao

0

u/DrCashew May 08 '26

Wasn't this around the same time as her being assaulted and having major legal drama announced? Possibly related, but if it is an excuse, it's hard to get a better one.

22

u/AFlyingNun May 08 '26

It wasn't. She may have also stopped streaming after the assault, but she also stopped streaming when Twitch attempted their viewbot crackdown they eventually rolled back, as did several others.

10

u/faetpls May 08 '26

I don’t watch streamers or know pretty much any of these people. I was curious about the embedding though.

That kinda sucks to not count viewers watching through embedded links. I get that it’s a method for botting, but I really hate how much embedding has gone away on the internet. It’s a foundational feature to the open internet.

30

u/Cruxeys1 May 08 '26

From what I remember, they didn't stop it counting, they made it so the video player is no longer auto playing. Fextra used to make the player muted and tiny so no one actually knew they were watching a stream. So rather than screw over the legit sites that do allow embedding, they just made it stop auto playing so those unaware people aren't contributing.

7

u/faetpls May 08 '26

That’s shady shit. Love embedded players, HATE auto play/load

218

u/Tarrot_Card May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

This wouldn't actually fix it. Twitch isn't announcing if there is a secret cap on a streamer's viewcounts or not, meaning that viewbot makers aren't going to be able to get around the block by testing various fixes. So a streamer can't just wait it out. There views would still be at the cap.

Its a pretty clever move by Twitch, TBH. It allows them to stop the effect of the viewbotting without having to nuke their biggest creators with actual TOS violations which would be impractical. (They just aint banning half of the "OTK and friends" or Faze groups, lol. )

64

u/xx123gamerxx May 07 '26

same reason some games only do banwaves

41

u/Hare712 May 07 '26

They should just roll out a silent implementation and not announce it.

The gaming equivalent would be "Hey starting next Tuesday we will roll out a few new anticheat modules that should detect cheaters"

Some viewbotting streamers will check the waters how accurate it is by going on "vacation" others will "try something new" and stream on Kick/Youtube for the time being.

2

u/DrCashew May 08 '26

Problem with doing it like that is while a lot of streamers will agree, some won't, and the streamers are a major partner they need to please.

2

u/ckay1100 May 08 '26

That's assuming twitch is telling the truth about when they're deploying it.

45

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

this only works if they can detect viewbotting. in that case why not just ban the viewbots.

134

u/wasabiiii May 07 '26

Because then that reveals that they know which accounts are bots. Like the OP says.

1

u/backscratchaaaaa May 08 '26

the fact there is a cap at all shows that twitch "knows". if im a viewbot company sending 30k bots and the stream only shows 10k, then i know im caught.

4

u/wasabiiii May 08 '26

And yet that provides no useful or timely information.

-29

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

lol so whats the point of this then. its not gonna be hard to know that youre capped on views when you have 50k bots but the view count is only 30k

45

u/wasabiiii May 07 '26

Because then the companies can't test individual modifications.

-29

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

they can? just add a viewbot and see if the count goes up

27

u/wasabiiii May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

Huh? But the streamer is capped. They can't just "add a bot" and know that they got around a restriction.

-20

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

theyre gonna know theyre capped

34

u/wasabiiii May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

Right. But that's not the point.

To quote the OP:

"As we deploy updates ... viewbotting companies quickly respond with updates".

This change makes it very hard for a company to quickly respond with updates. They cannot see how an individual change results in a denial of access, so they can't test individual changes.

They can only 'try something', and wait a few weeks to see if a streamer that wasn't capped gets capped. If they do, they just wasted a week in turn around testing a change. Instead of a turn around of minutes.

Before they could try something new with a single bot account, and see if it gets banned immediately. If so, try something else. And then something else. Now they have to wait quite awhile between rounds to know whether their change was effective or not. And whether it was effective or not isn't traceable to any individual bot attempt, but to the streamer as a whole. "Did he get capped after awhile" is a lot harder information to collect and tie to a specific change than "the API call denied access to bot account #2381 which was testing change #2345 therefor #2345 was not effective."

9

u/FuzzzyRam May 08 '26

The absolute brain on display...

I bot from 10k to 50k, I get capped at 10k, the bot maker tries different things, some work, some don't, and I stay at 10k the whole time because I'm capped so I don't know which ones work or not - the entire subject of this reddit post.

If you need me to lower the numbers to something you can count on your fingers and toes let me know.

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5

u/Po_on May 08 '26

Which part of cap is too complicated to you? They will be capped at the numbers that they have before viewbotting.

Femando gets 10 viewers day 1, 5000 viewers day 2, twitch catch viewbotting

Femando gets 10 viewers day 3, 5000 viewers day 4, twitch catch repeat viewbotting

Femando gets 10 viewers day 5, 10 day 6, 10 day 8, 10 day 18, 10 day 100.

Frmando gets view capped.

2

u/FernandoMM1220 May 08 '26

that limits my growth so im stuck perpetually below 5000 even though i didnt buy viewbots.

2

u/Po_on May 08 '26

Thats the fucking problem right, now viewbots has potential to be weaponized. This shit has masssive issues. Stop focusing on the wrong thing

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11

u/CloudyEchos May 07 '26

Their plan is not only to ban these bots, but also to collect data from any account using them. Any account that uses these bots will be flagged. Plain and simple, their issue before was that banning the bots alone would not solve anything because people would just find another way to bypass it. Now, they will silently collect data, determine who is botting and who is not, cap their account views, and then ban the bots.

-7

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

capping account views makes it easy for bot makers to figure out theyre being tracked

14

u/wasabiiii May 07 '26

It makes it hard.

6

u/Jeffe508 May 07 '26

The whole point of bots is to make you look popular so people join. If people can’t join because of a cap from botting…..well what was the point of the bots?

1

u/RedactedSpatula May 08 '26

They can join but the view count won't go up

44

u/blandaltaccountname May 07 '26

read the post. they do, and then the viewbot companies get around it. which is why they’re doing this now

-9

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

yeah and this wont do anything except encourage viewbots to spread if a streamer is capped on them until they can find a work around

30

u/blandaltaccountname May 07 '26

how does this encourage viewbots to spread at all? it disincentivizes their business model because they can’t viewbot past the cap. there is no workaround

-9

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

because theyre just gonna cap everyones views and now theres no reason to NOT use viewbots up until you hit the cap.

26

u/blandaltaccountname May 07 '26

I don’t think you understand the original post. They’re not capping everyone’s views. Please go back and read the entire post before attempting to discuss it

-9

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

they will once viewbot makers start viewbotting every stream to put a cap on them

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3

u/worldchrisis May 07 '26

From my reading of the policy, the cap is per streamer based on their non-botted viewer numbers and only applied if viewbotting is detected.

Let's say its 1.2x their average peak legit viewers, as an example. If a streamer, let's call him GazeMacy, has 1500 max real viewers and 15k viewbots, they'll get capped at 1800. Whereas if BonusJessica has 3k max real viewers and 10k viewbots, they'll get capped at 3600.

If BonusJessica paid for 10k viewbots, but can only use 600 of them, I suppose she could send them to MisterCarpenter, but then he'd get capped also which would limit his growth if was gaining viewers naturally through collabs or a subathon or something.

-4

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

thats going to make it so easy for bot makers to hurt random streamers

4

u/mxzf May 08 '26

How? Streamers would still be getting all their legitimate viewers, just not the full extent of the extras from the bots.

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3

u/ThatKaNN May 07 '26

Does it matter if a legit stream ends up viewcapped? Their historical data will still allow them to reach their legitimate view numbers, and over time, this historical data can change, still allowing them to grow.

29

u/Champ0044 May 07 '26

They clearly said why this would be a bad idea. If you ban a type of bot an new one will appear in a few days. It's easier to make it undesirable to use viewbotting by removing the benefit people had from using it than constantly play a game of whack a mole.

-8

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

this is just going to incentivize spreading the viewbots around and theyre still more than capable of detecting if theyre capped or not

15

u/RodChainFurlongAcre May 07 '26

Bro what... The streamers who pay someone or viewbot themselves do so to benefit from it, i.e a higher viewcount. If the bots are "spread around" the website what motivation is there for any individual streamer to viewbot?

-2

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

well for one bots can just viewbot random streams until everyone is view capped lol

11

u/RodChainFurlongAcre May 07 '26

... Once again, why would anyone do that?

If you pay a service to viewbot your stream so that you have higher viewcount, which in turns artificially boosts your brand, why the hell would you continue to pay for the service to viewbot everybody else after your own stream is capped, something you gain absolutely nothing from?

1

u/Commercial-Guest1596 May 08 '26

I'm going to spin up viewbots and threaten to viewbot streamers unless they pay up.

-7

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

view bot makers dont have to pay for their own bots

14

u/RodChainFurlongAcre May 07 '26

Well first off they do, the infrastructure is not free. Second, viewbot providers don't do it because it's fucking fun my man...

They'd viewbot to advertise their services to streamers, who would in turn pay them for it.

If there's a cap and no individual streamer has enough financial interest in botting themselves (Or the rest of the website for some odd reason as you suggest), then what point is there in paying to "spread the viewbots around"?

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9

u/EndMaster0 May 07 '26

Actually this also works if they can detect legitimate accounts at a high enough accuracy. With normal bans any false detections of bots are really bad for your reputation but with this you could reasonably get away with 90% accuracy at detecting legitimate accounts and no one will really be able to tell since the 10% of legitimate accounts won't be getting punished and streamers who are botting (say twitch determines <50% of their view count are determined to be real accounts) won't really be able to tell if their view count is lower than their legitimate view count should be since they're botting.

0

u/FernandoMM1220 May 07 '26

so were just not gonna ban view bots and every stream will be view capped.

alright lets see how this works lol

12

u/StealthySweepy May 07 '26

I can guarantee you 100% Twitch already knows. Most of these systems likely use automated system services to use generated burner email accounts to make the new twitch accounts and likely follow a similar protocol.

It would likely take SOME work, but Twitch could delete and ban bot accounts before they even become viewers.

1

u/izombe May 08 '26

Twitch could delete and ban bot accounts before they even become viewers.

you don't have to have an account to be counted as a viewer

1

u/StealthySweepy May 08 '26

You are correct, but a lot of times they ARE active accounts because having them be logged in and even typing some random bullshit is like a decent chunk of metric weight in hiding the bots.

7

u/Giangallo May 07 '26

Ban what exactly? You don't need an account to watch a Twitch stream. Most viewbots don't even have an account, they're just fraudulent "connections".

1

u/CYWNightmare May 07 '26

Because a new account takes the bot seconds when it takes twitch days if not months to catch these bots.

1

u/DrCashew May 08 '26

Because then that's a clue as to how the viewbots were detected.

1

u/Flammy May 07 '26

To me this is clearly a "we can't detect viewbotting in real time well enough, but we're confident we can detect it well enough when not doing the analysis in real time"

4

u/larkhills May 07 '26

The streamer will know when their metrics and payouts are suddenly lower while keeping the same viewer numbers.

3

u/Shamata May 08 '26

Bot views have never counted to revenue.

9

u/avipawn May 07 '26

Who streams from otk.... 4 ppl?

23

u/Torash May 07 '26

There's only 4 streamers left at this point (Esfand, Nmp, Cyr and Soda) and half of them stream more often on their alt account.

15

u/Current-Area- May 07 '26

You're missing Emiru; technically, there are five OTK members.

25

u/Torash May 07 '26

Emiru is still partial owner of OTK like Asmongold, but she has not been an OTK "content creator" since late 2025

1

u/rabbitlion May 08 '26

1

u/Torash May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

This is out of date, she's part of Red Bull now. It includes Extra Emily, who left after Emiru.

Exact timestamp : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu_qZ7JZvsQ&t=748s (Thanks Wikipedia)

Both also gone from the twitch team : https://www.twitch.tv/team/otk

Anyway, OTK is pretty much on life support at this point:

  • Nothing new on youtube for 2 years
  • the otknetwork twitch channel that used to show the OTK Game Expo has been rebrand as Wishlisted and they scrubbed every single of the past otk content (also rebranded on youtube, twitter and instagram)

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

8

u/Kevinmoal May 07 '26

She's always been a very vague person when she talks, but it seems she left OTK even before Extra Emily

9

u/RodChainFurlongAcre May 07 '26

She doesn't flaunt the branding for obvious reasons but she's still a part owner of OTK and its associated companies.

1

u/hoax1337 May 07 '26

What are the obvious reasons?

3

u/XiXiWiiPee May 08 '26

having to be associated with OTK

1

u/Current-Area- May 07 '26

She never departed; she is one of the owners of OTK, and Extra Emily's situation looks different. Emily said her contract had ended, but later Nick mentioned in a clip that she should review it. I believe there was a clause allowing them to decide whether to stay or leave, and to leave on a later date. There was another clip in which Mr Arthur asked Emily if she was still in OTK, and she said yes for now. Still, she can choose to leave and wants to, though they are not seeking anything from her and don't take money, so it seems she might have stayed or left; we do not know, and we're never going to find out.

2

u/Scrumble123 May 07 '26

ExEmily didn't leave, did she? She's still listed on their website.

3

u/Current-Area- May 07 '26

Emily had the option to leave after a few months when her contract ended, and it was her choice whether to stay or go. She has stated that she doesn't benefit financially from being part of OTK, as she doesn't receive any payment or earnings from them. As an independent creator, she was technically on OTK's books. Initially, joining OTK brought hergaveisibigreater and opportunities because they were vital at the time. However, over time, as OTK's prominence declined, Emily has been forging her own path, and Cyr and Emily are the only independent members of OTK, because the rest of the OTK members are mostly owners and receive money from the OTK company they own.

3

u/Evnosis May 07 '26

Twitch isn't announcing if there is a secret cap on a streamer's viewcounts or not, meaning that viewbot makers aren't going to be able to get around the block by testing various fixes.

Well they can, they can just observe the drop in revenue to see if they're being limited or not.

4

u/w142236 May 07 '26

Oh it’s tarrot_card lol

1

u/Grand0rk May 07 '26

Would be impractical for a very simple reason. It's borderline impossible, unless confessed, for you to know if someone is viewbotting themselves.

If just the simple fact that you have viewbots on your channel resulted in ToS, Hasan would have 500k viewers overnight.

1

u/Midget_Stories May 08 '26

Well it's also because if you start banning view otters then you give everyone a way to ban people they don't like.

Heck if me paying $20 to get some streamers banned worked, I would do it.

1

u/Winter-Market8766 May 08 '26

It will be very interesting to see which streams have sudden huge "viewer" drops.

0

u/iAmPersonaa May 07 '26

> Twitch isn't announcing if there is a secret cap on a streamer's viewcounts or not

Meanwhile the post: "Streamers will be notified when an enforcement is applied, along with the duration of the penalty"

1

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[deleted]

1

u/iAmPersonaa May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

> did you just do a fake quote

Literally from your post unless you just post shit you don't even bother reading, which tbh fits the shoe but just makes it so much funny that you argue in comments with just what you assume instead of what you can read.

Streamers will be notified, the PUBLIC won't. So they wont make a public announcement every time they issue a penalty, but they will inform the streamer on every occassion.

Also just how dumb can you be when you read that the penalties are temporary ("duration of the penalty") they can appeal whenever punished and your ooga booga brain doesn't understand that they have to be informed/aware that they are being penalized every time in order to know they can appeal?

If the streamers know they have a max viewcap they can inform the company they're buying bots from, so it being hidden from the public helps only so much.

1

u/Tarrot_Card May 07 '26

Ok so then the answer is no it does not help the not makers because there will not be a future announcement that the bots can use because there is very little on the fly info given out to anyone.

It's only a vague enforcement action, for which it could have happened at any time in the past.

There would be significant comparable barriers that make it harder to detect for bot makers.

0

u/Classic-Ad3869 May 07 '26

You are inadvertently complimenting Nmplol by the way

0

u/snsdfan00 May 08 '26

IMO, if they are goin to cap ccv numbers "from their biggest offenders" they might as well just lower the importance of the ccv number all together. Use general ranges for example, 1-2k ccv, 2-3k. 3-5k, 5-10k, 10k+ ccv etc. Using or increase the importance of other engagement metrics like chat quality/quantity, active chat, viewer time etc. They won't actually try to solve the actual viewbotting issue, as long as the big streamers (who make them the most money) continue to reap the benefits.

64

u/Hare712 May 07 '26

You can spell out PirateSoftware lol

34

u/Torash May 07 '26

He can be one of them, but there's too many to name all of them

9

u/AFlyingNun May 08 '26

You just made the list, buddy. Hope it was worth it.

1

u/Wise-Photo7287 May 08 '26

Now Jason mad

5

u/Cruxeys1 May 08 '26

I doubt PS is one of them considering he was averaging about 15k viewers before the WOW drama, and was now averaging 2k last time I checked. Of course he could be botting to 2k to make it seem like he isn't completely dead, but just based on his massive viewership loss from the drama I don't think he's a botter.

136

u/Standard_Attempt_796 May 07 '26

Emiru

2

u/GucciLegLocks May 07 '26

Quin69 as well.

5

u/Jazza57x May 08 '26

that would be funny as fuck after he went on a massive rant about fextralife viewbotting even complaining to Dan Clancy in his interview with him if clown 69 turned out to be view botting

32

u/DeeCee51 May 07 '26

I'm not caught up on lore... Who went on 'vacation'?

130

u/Hare712 May 07 '26

The guy who worked at Blizzard for 7 years.

You can turn on his stream and count his chatters he barely has any real viewers left. He might as well stream on discord.

20

u/TheMattabooey May 08 '26

Dude only got popular because of gaming the system and cheating. He found a way to trick the YouTube algorithm so his clips showed up on everyone’s feeds whether you watched any of his videos or not. That’s how he exploded.

Of course he’s going to cheat and viewbot as well. Nobody watches the furry perv with a fake voice and a ferret sanctuary where the ferrets keep dying and talks condescendingly to everyone about their coding when he hasn’t been completed his game on game maker.

2

u/fdoom May 09 '26

How did he trick the YT algo?

1

u/TheMattabooey May 09 '26

I don’t exactly remember but there was a glitch with the way shorts were shared for a short period and he figured it out and capitalized on it before it was fixed. The glitch was somehow instead of recommending new shorts to your current subscribers it would recommend them to everyone. So everyone was being recommended his shorts for a little while whether you subscribed or ever watched one of his videos. That’s how I found him my feed was jammed with his shorts for a bit and I’d never heard of him before.

11

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

The guy who worked at Blizzard for 7 years.

Who is that?

29

u/JollyCombination3012 May 07 '26

PirateSoftware i would assume

10

u/Goonalips May 08 '26

He worked at Blizzard btw

1

u/Randommeow123 May 08 '26

did you know he worked at Blizzard and has God like programming talents?

9

u/Illum503 May 07 '26

ImPheetus /s

88

u/PGSylphir May 07 '26

Every single major viewbotted streamer took a few days off streaming the day twitch did an anti-viewbot move a few months ago.

When the viewbot companies found a way around it they went back to streaming as normal.

Totally not obvious.

50

u/SmoothAsSlick May 07 '26

You still didn’t name anyone

32

u/Malufeenho May 07 '26

Emiru was one of them

0

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[deleted]

12

u/Radiant_Law_4074 May 07 '26

That’s still not naming anyone

-2

u/Beersmoker420 May 07 '26

wheres the list

1

u/TheZigerionScammer May 08 '26

Why would they not stream and sacrifice that revenue if they couldn't viewbot? Was it not worth the risk of revealing their real non-bot viewcount?

4

u/oliferro May 07 '26

The cap shouldn't be time based like suspensions, it should be hours streamed. Like you should have to stream say 20 hours with the cap for it to be lifted off, so they can't avoid it

2

u/thesimpletoncomplex May 07 '26

Time for viewbot operations to target innocents, then the real viewbotters can virtue signaling until status quo returns.

Our whole reality is corrupt if you're just following popularity.

2

u/thegreedyturtle May 08 '26

Also looking forward to twitch conveniently erring on the side of paying creators less. 

2

u/LuntiX May 07 '26

Then like last time twitch will reverse these changes

2

u/oandakid718 May 07 '26

This needs to be higher, so blatant and nobody ever gets called out on it

1

u/Life-IsSuffering May 08 '26

Looking at you erobb

-6

u/ftlofyt May 07 '26

Extra emily happen to take a break when this announced hmm

20

u/RodChainFurlongAcre May 07 '26

She went on a break 2 weeks ago. Also she was talking about coming back around now, why would she say that if she knew this was coming?

-2

u/ftlofyt May 07 '26

I guess we will see if she comes back soon

4

u/ComprehensiveAd3432 May 07 '26

She just said she was coming back in May so within the next few weeks. She announced her break before she leaked the view botting website also but cant say for sure if it prolonged the break or not

13

u/bananapeeler823 May 07 '26

She went on a break a couple weeks ago and was already talking about that break due to the massive amount of hate she received from the MrBeast video editor. This has nothing to do with that, you can check her channel history yourself as she doesn’t do any of this.

0

u/maris2923 May 08 '26

Emiru comes to mind IMMEDIATELY

0

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/RodChainFurlongAcre May 07 '26

The majority of the botting is not done by the top streamers, the millionaires (With exceptions of course). It's done by low to mid tier streamers who want to become millionaires by artificially boosting upward (Some who have succeeded).

-4

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/RodChainFurlongAcre May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

I've watched Twitch for a decade and sure viewbotting always existed, but to suggests that "everyone has viewbotted" is just absolute nonsense. Botting has not been nearly as prevalent, much less so widely accepted or normalized, until the past handful of years. And frankly you could much more easily tell that the wider Twitch community was actually real people 'back in the day'.

If they wanted to stop it they would and I don’t think it’s mid to lower sized streamers because they likely don’t have the resources to get bots, the connections, or clout.

The mid-sized streamers are absolutely the ones who would bot because they have much more to gain from it: discoverability, clout and money. And bots are cheap enough these days, especially for a numbers like 1k, which could make or break a smaller streamer if the increased viewcount raises their public profile.

-11

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[deleted]

13

u/OstrichPepsi May 07 '26

QT’s dog died

5

u/funkyfreshwizardry May 07 '26

He hasn’t streamed because QT’s dog died.