That post seems to be missing.

thr0w4w4y2 203 points a year 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

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UnderpantsWeevil 82 points a year 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.

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yucandu 18 points a year 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.

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blackfire 18 points a year 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.

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SpaceNoodle 6 points a year ago

Turns out Amazon is publicly traded.

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Ephera 4 points a year 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.

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UnderpantsWeevil 2 points a year 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

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sp3ctr4l 20 points a year ago

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

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scutiger 37 points a year ago

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

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dellish 8 points a year ago

If only they hadn't...

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TipsyMcGee 20 points a year ago

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finitebanjo 13 points a year ago

Elon had no reason to buy twitter, he just enjoys price manipulation and gambling. However, once he did obtain the platform, his priority was very clearly to manipulate the public with it, that's why he fired all but the most loyal of staff.

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Laser 4 points a year ago

In his defense, what else could he have done with it? Run it like a normal business? He's incapable of that, best he can do is state-subsidized overpromising stuff, and there was no angle for that with Twitter.

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finitebanjo 3 points a year ago

He actually could have just let it operate like normal, give himself bonuses, and slowly sell off his shares like he did with Tesla. Small changes like blue checkmark verification fees, ad free premiums, and labor cost minimization can be stretched out over time.

Instead he immediately cut the place in half and started promoting propaganda and hate. It's well proven his algorithm sent democrats and liberal ideology to the back while heavily promoting Republicans.

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Tollana1234567 3 points a year 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"

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Inucune 90 points a year ago

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.

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AtariDump 65 points a year ago

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Call_Me_Maple 56 points a year ago

Looks like dead internet theory was closer to the truth that one might have thought.

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Alaknar 31 points a year ago

It's already been proven that right now over 50% of all traffic online is bots.

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HK65 12 points a year ago

And the rest are ads.

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Tollana1234567 3 points a year ago

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.

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Alaknar 1 point a year ago

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.

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Tollana1234567 0 points a year ago

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)

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AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor 55 points a year ago

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.

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Onomatopoeia 45 points a year ago

Seems like this would be a boon to those who have actual audience, like they should be able to command higher returns?

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Nimrod 33 points a year ago

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.

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HK65 4 points a year ago

The less-organized content creators will lose.

Sounds like they need a union.

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GreenKnight23 34 points a year ago

I mean...if I wanted to watch porn I'm going to watch porn, not streams of simps paying for a glimpse of nipple.

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IndustryStandard 31 points a year ago

Looks like a lot of right wingers were botting their numbers. Asmongold lost a ton of "viewers".

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Croquette 21 points a year ago

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.

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mushroommunk 28 points a year ago

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

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paraphrand 6 points a year ago

Making accusations in this way is kinda dirty

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ChairmanMeow 23 points a year ago

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.

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blackfire 6 points a year ago

Was he the one doing it? I thought it was someone else doing it for him,

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sus 20 points a year ago

He paid a close associate a few thousand dollars (I don't remember how much it actually was), and the associate then donated that same amount of money for the hype train. It's basically just a method to conceal it

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ChairmanMeow 2 points a year ago

Yeah but being in kahoots with one of his mods to boost the stream isn't really making all that much difference imo.

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kadup 21 points a year ago

Making accusations in this way is kinda dirty

Dude was caught paying to break the hype train record, view botting would be very plausible.

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paraphrand -8 points a year ago

And stating that would have negated my point, and I would have never replied to the comment.

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4am -39 points a year ago

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

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ChairmanMeow 33 points a year ago

I suppose you may have missed the allegations of emotional abuse and sexual manipulation.

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Kolanaki 20 points a year ago

Plus it's just fun to see douchebags lose. 🤷‍♂️

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4am 17 points a year ago

…yes, yes I did miss that wtf

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p_consti 7 points a year ago

Got any link for that? That's news to me

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ChairmanMeow 13 points a year ago

https://piratesoftware.sucks/summary

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Redacted 19 points a year ago

People no longer (only) hate him for being dog shit at wow, they hate him for much more serious things now.

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Aussiemandeus 15 points a year ago

I think he's also the guy who tried to cause the petition for saving video games to fail

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4am -15 points a year ago

He just said he didn’t agree with it. Like, poor take but really? Sabotage? Press X to Doubt

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nyctre 4 points a year ago

He made at least two YouTube videos negatively covering it, saying how it's bad for the industry and shit and said he'd actively tell people not to sign it. Why do you keep defending him if you don't know?

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businessfish 0 points a year ago

completely agree - if he sucks so much why dedicate so much mental space to an insignificant stranger who streams games or development or whatever online?

i guess people just love to follow minor e-celeb drama, but the biggest dunk you can make against someone like this is to just stop thinking and talking about them. reading people type about this stuff is like being in high school again lol

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4am -2 points a year ago

Exactly! Like I don’t even disagree with some of the points but like people are making cartoons about it and never cease to comment or shitpost like they took down fascism or something

I mean look how many downvotes I got, how many of those you think justify it by being like “bet you like him” in their head

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Daft_ish 25 points a year ago

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.

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plyth 12 points a year ago

How do other streams destroy existing communities?

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Laser 13 points a year ago

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.

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HK65 6 points a year ago

I guess they hurt discoverability and siphon away viewers?

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timewarp 23 points a year ago

Dang, mad respect for them for taking on bots. Most companies love anything that inflate their membership numbers. Imagine how few users X would have without bots.

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roserose56 18 points a year ago

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.

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arararagi 8 points a year ago

I think that won't get a crackdown since it's still money going to twitch

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Awkwardparticle 1 point a year ago

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Goretantath 15 points a year ago

Nice, stop rewarding the slop and hopefully the good streamers get to be in the top of the listings now.

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you_are_dust 13 points a year ago

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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MehBlah 13 points a year ago

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slazer2au 8 points a year ago

Looking forward to see how social blade represents the data.

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BarrierWithAshes 8 points a year ago

Damn, throw it on the dead internet billboard. We got another one!

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Sam_Bass 6 points a year ago

Had a feeling

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Tollana1234567 4 points a year ago

just like youtube, and reddit. thats why both of these corporations refused to clean up thier problematic bots.

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net00 1 point a year ago

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thatradomguy 1 point a year ago

vtubers, other streamers, etc. etc.

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