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.
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"
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.
now replaced by the humanoid replicant known as SPEZ.
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.
as confirmed on reddit too, 50% are propaganda bots. and FB is more blantant at doing it. some users dont realize they could be arguing with bots and getting themselves banned too.
I remember there were these two glorious days just after one of the sanction packages hit russia, that blocked a bunch of Internet services from being accessible, that r/Conservative became a ghost town. Not a single new post for, like, two days, and then someone posted "are we all just bots here?", got banned, post deleted, and by then they figured out how to circumvent the blocks and came back to the regular activity.
REMEMBER that kept happening for sometime, when russia was facing some kind of crisis: remember the nov purges they went quiet around december, and the luigi situation, russian bots also went quiet. the first instance ,sign of them coming back, using a right wing shill, jack prosebic to "rail on luigi". the site was much cleaner without RUSSIA, and Israeli/mossad bots were trying to gatekeep worldnews, until i blocked the sub, and reported the propaganda on other subreddits.
and reddit think its genius to use AI, and other moderation to identify accounts for banning, i say it doesn't stop a person who can create hundreds if not thousands of accounts at once.( also because i think they are purposely not blocking the RU bots)
also because i think they are purposely not blocking the RU bots
It's not that. Or rather: it's not because of what you think it is.
They're not blocking them by default for two reasons:
It's both difficult and technically against Reddit's best interest to auto-ban such accounts, nothing more.
thats why they go for the "easiest target" to block. propaganda bots are just too many, and it does work, but reddit would have to keep doing it, im sure they can. but like you said any press is good press. i also visit another forum, where people are using paid methods to evade bans(for thier businesses, OF or links). they whip up legions of accounts at once.
from what ive determined, they use the warming up methods(i dont think state actor bots are doing that) to evade reddit filters.(like waiting a while before commenting or engaging with your account)
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.
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?
just like youtube, and reddit. thats why both of these corporations refused to clean up thier problematic bots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Got any link for that? That's news to me
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
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.
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