Popular Kick streamer Trainwreck is never afraid to share his opinions about rival platform Twitch. In his latest public rant, he questioned the Amazon-owned company’s anti-bot update, which was completed in late July to clamp down on content creators using viewbotting to boost viewership numbers.
their average concurrent viewers dropped by up to 50%
Trainwreck believe the actual impact of the change was that many legitimate smaller and mid-sized channels were flagged and their average concurrent viewers dropped by up to 50%. Notably, shortly after commenting on the matter, he deleted the X post without providing any reason:
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy is on record saying that some of the new updates were “overly aggressive” and sometimes incorrectly flagged legitimate views. One hypothesis is that “lurkers” who weren’t interacting by chatting or clicking on a stream were considered bots.
Some bigger streamers, including Mizkif and xQc, also noted a drop in their viewership. The latter believes that talent agencies are a big part of the viewbotting problem, as their commissions grow as viewership numbers rise.
