It’s the season of giving, and one Twitch streamer is giving fans of the platform’s biggest names something to think about. On a Dec. 23 broadcast, Trainwreck pointed the finger at some of Twitch’s top streamers, claiming their viewership numbers may not always be as they seem.
“I’m under the impression—confidently—that in the top 100, at least 90 out of 100 are not only blatantly view-botting, but we’re talking massively view-botting,” Trainwreck said.
View-botting is a form of fake engagement and is defined by Twitch as “the practice of artificially inflating a live view count, using illegitimate scripts or tools.” Occasionally, view-botting can be combined with chat activity bots, which will engage with a streamer’s Twitch chat to appear as if it’s a legitimate user who is interacting with the streamer and their broadcast.
Twitch will ban a user for artificially increasing their viewers through view-botting, although the platform won’t punish a streamer if someone other than that person is artificially inflating the streamer’s numbers.
And although Trainwreck said his beliefs could all “some schizo-delusional shit,” he claimed he had evidence to suggest that some of Twitch’s biggest names may be view-botting.
Trainwreck says he gained access to the “backend” of Twitch that showed other streamers’ statistics, and based on what he saw and how it stacks up to his own stream, he believes the viewership of these streamers is being artificially inflated in one way or another.
“Me and Summit were one of the only two in the top 100 that maintained a 99-percent logged-in viewership average,” Trainwreck said. “When we went live, 99 percent of our viewers were logged in and had activity somewhere across the site, meaning chat messages … Everyone else ranged from 45-percent logged in accounts to 85 percent logged-in accounts.”
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And for Trainwreck, this raises some question marks.
“To have a consistent 15 percent always watching logged out, you know, statistically, after day three or four, [those viewers] would make a fucking account to log the fuck in because you get—it’s just not user-friendly when you’re logged out,” Trainwreck said.
The streamer made sure to note that it could be fans or viewers who are view-botting instead of the streamers themselves in an attempt to boost their favorite broadcaster’s numbers, or that it could be embeds contributing to the view count.
But to Trainwreck, view-botting is the only possibility that seems to add up.
“That’s the only way I can explain these fucking weirdos—even though they have all the success in the world, or at least it appears they do—why they’re so fucking worried about people half their size,” Trainwreck said. “Now I could be crazy, and I could be comparing things that have nothing to do with each other … but it seems to make sense when I look at these backend numbers.”
