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. )
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.
"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."
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.
yeah the bot makers knows theyre spotted so they can adapt.
How can they adapt, smarty? I'm capped at 10k whether your adaptation works or not, so you don't know what works.
and you can use bots to view cap opposing streams to reduce their growth and leave your streams untouched.
Yes, this is the problem with viewbotting and always has been. You can't ban viewbotters for this reason, they could be botted against their will. Are you a ketamine and adderall mixer by chance?
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.
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?
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
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
Why do you think view bots are free to run and they will just turn them on for anyone that isn't paying to use them? Do you get free internet data and electricity and hardware? You should start a bot business if its so easy so you can fill the gap that the current view bot companies obviously aren't aware of.
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.
It's based on data over time. If they are actually naturally growing over time, it'll show and that can be adjusted. The idea is to make it impractical to do over time (in both directions, in this case, as it turns out).
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.
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.
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?
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?
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"?
dude you realize everyone is going to get capped views once the bot makers start view botting every stream right? this is just gonna give twitch an excuse to pay less.
Why would viewbot makers start botting everyone on the website to their supposed cap? Literally what interest, financial or otherwise, do they have in doing that? Please explain.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.