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  • 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.
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[-] thr0w4w4y2@sh.itjust.works 194 points 4 days ago

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

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 77 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] yucandu@lemmy.world 18 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] blackfire@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

Turns out Amazon is publicly traded.

[-] blackfire@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Whose buying amazon stock to get a bit of twitch?????

[-] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

*Who's

Literally anyone buying AMZN, effectively

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

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

[-] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 4 days ago

Remember when Elon bought Twitter in large part to get rid of the bots?

[-] scutiger@lemmy.world 33 points 4 days ago

No, I remember when he tried to back out of buying it but the SEC forced him to follow through.

[-] dellish@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago
[-] TipsyMcGee@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] HK65@sopuli.xyz 7 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago

now replaced by the humanoid replicant known as SPEZ.

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

reddit is tackling the lowest hanging fruit of bots and users, not the propaganda bots, that helps reddits engagement.

youtube stopped moderating, except anything that is not "child friendly"

this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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