Twitch is preparing to take action against streamers who use dirty tactics to boost their views and is supposedly asking streamers for help. Streamer Gothalion claims Twitch has emailed him asking for his help in identifying these offenders.
According to Twitch streamer Gothalion, he received an email from Twitch CEO Dan Clancy asking him to list channels that embed their streams on wikis. Gothalion even read part of the email on stream.
At the time of writing, Twitch has an ongoing controversy involving some streamers embedding their streams on a game’s wiki page to boost their view counts. If you’ve ever visited a game wiki looking for a guide or an item, you might have seen something like this. By visiting a game’s wiki, you are essentially tuning into someone’s stream without actually doing so, and this boosts the Twitch channel’s view count. This is considered a dirty tactic by Twitch streamers.
One of the biggest offenders of this practice has been FextraLife, who was not only called out by Gothalion but also by other streamers like Moistcr1tikal, Ludwig, and Asmongold. In one of FextraLife’s streams, Ludwig reported that the stream had 60,000 viewers, but something was off.
How can you tell if someone is embedding their video on the game’s wikis? Simple: Look at the Twitch chat. This controversy started when many people noticed some channels with over 50,000 viewers but far fewer people in their chat. When Ludwig took a look at FextraLife, he realized that despite being live for over a day and having those 60,000 viewers, the amount of chatters they had over that time was almost half their viewer number.
If what Gothalion says is true, Twitch is about to launch a not-so-by-the-book attack on the worst offenders until it devises a long-term solution to the problem. Goth has been pretty active on his Twitter with pointing out such offenders, so there is reason to believe the email is genuine.
Hopefully, the channels that rake in fake views will soon be a thing of the past.
