Twitch Streamer Claims Top Streamers are View-Botting
A popular Twitch streamer, Trainwreck, has made some shocking allegations against the platform’s top streamers. During a recent broadcast on December 23, Trainwreck accused many of Twitch’s biggest names of artificially inflating their viewership numbers.
Trainwreck confidently stated, “I’m under the impression that out of the top 100 streamers, at least 90 of them are not only blatantly view-botting, but doing so on a massive scale.”
Understanding View-Botting
View-botting refers to the practice of artificially increasing a stream’s view count using illegitimate scripts or tools. Twitch defines it as a form of fake engagement. Sometimes, view-botting is combined with chat activity bots to make it appear as if the streamer has real viewers engaging with their content.
If a user is found to be view-botting, Twitch will ban them. However, the platform does not punish streamers if someone else is inflating their viewer numbers.
Despite acknowledging that his beliefs may sound “schizo-delusional,” Trainwreck claims to have evidence suggesting that some of Twitch’s biggest names are involved in view-botting.
Data from the “backend” of Twitch reportedly showed other streamers’ statistics, and Trainwreck compared this to his own stream. Based on the differences, he believes that the viewership of these streamers is being artificially inflated in some way.
Trainwreck highlighted, “Out of the top 100 streamers, only me and Summit maintained a 99% logged-in viewership average. Everyone else ranged from 45% to 85% logged-in accounts.”
This raises questions for Trainwreck. He questions why there would consistently be 15% of viewers who remain logged out, stating that statistically, after a few days, those viewers should create an account to log in since being logged out is not user-friendly.
The streamer acknowledges that it could be fans or viewers who are view-botting to boost their favorite streamer’s numbers, or it could be the result of embeds contributing to the view count. However, Trainwreck believes that view-botting is the only explanation that makes sense.
“That’s the only way I can explain these strange behaviors. Even though these streamers have tremendous success, they seem overly concerned about smaller streamers. I may sound crazy, but when I look at the backend numbers, it all seems to add up.”