Daniel Clancy

The more I see the public discourse on this the less it all makes sense. If Twitch can identify viewbots through historical data then why can't they strip only viewbots instead of just apply an arbitrary cap on views overall? It's because they can't. The viewbots people use today are primarily done through embedded traffic on third party sites. Distributed over many different areas and routed back to the channel. That means it's real people, real traffic, and real websites but the stream is in the corner as an ad or hidden as a single pixel. This still counts as a viewer and inflates the channels numbers. The view capping they are planning doesn't actually fix the issue and it will likely paint targets on streamers backs. If someone gets capped it will be seen as "proof" of view botting even if it was someone else trying to hit that streamer. We already see tons of people using third party browser plugins and starting witch hunts over flimsy data thinking viewers are bots. This just makes it "official". The real issue here is embeds over anything else. If you want to do actual damage to view botting then kill off embeds and shift everything back to user traffic in-site. From there you can actually fight this behavior instead of using blanket methods like this.

I disagreed with Dan Clancy when he said that “lurkers” is a negative term (I said it’s not, he said it is) and my follow up question was automodded for no reason. I honestly don’t understand how Twitch works anymore smh.

We wanted to follow up on the post we recently made about a security incident at TwitchCon San Diego. As many of you know, at the 2025 TwitchCon San Diego event, one of our valued creators, Emiru, was assaulted by an attendee during a meet-and-greet event. Although Twitch works very hard to try to keep TwitchCon attendees safe and to prevent incidents like this from happening, we failed to do both things in this case - to keep Emiru safe and to prevent the assault from happening. We deeply regret the distress we caused for Emiru, our other creators, and the entire community. In recognition of Emiru’s advocacy, Twitch will be making a donation to support non-profit organizations working to prevent sexual violence. More details on that to follow soon.

Get Max his Grammy 🗣️🏆

A quick update on viewcounts. We have teams and tech dedicated to ensuring that the views that show up on channels reflect actual viewership, and aren’t artificially inflated in any way. Ultimately, metrics on Twitch should represent the real and growing communities that show up and participate on channels, so we regularly update detection tools and methods. We recently made changes that meaningfully improved our ability to identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fake engagement. These changes will roll out over the next few weeks. So, if your channel was viewbotted, or if some of your viewers are artificial or inflated, you will see an impact to your channel’s viewcount. This also means that third party sites that publish unverified Twitch viewcounts are going to see changes to that data over time. We recognize that viewbotting can be out of the streamer’s control. In making these changes, our goal is to improve the experiences for both streamers and viewers.

Devin Nash drops a long tweet talking about his past agency’s findings on Twitch Estimates that 400 to 430 out of the top 500 streamers are being botted "We did some digging and were shocked at the number of top 500 broadcasters that are being viewbotted or view botting themselves. We estimate it is around 400 to 430 of the top 500, not including embeds”