WAAAAIT this is actually interesting
Asmongold was originally a lame gamer grifter. Barely political at all. He was always slightly reactionary but which gamers aren’t? His huge right wing shift was caused by feedback he was getting from numbers… Except, 50% are bots.
This is a fascinating thought. You can change a streamer and cause them to double down on a specific type of content by botting them into it.
I had never considered this at all but it makes sense. It’s the reason breadtubers always get so lame as they grift themselves into a wetter and wetter position seeking to appeal to a bigger and bigger audience, which ultimately means a libber and libber audience. Everyone driven by numbers is susceptible to manipulation by manipulating those numbers.
If you can successfully manipulate the numbers, you can manipulate the content that anyone who is focused on them produces.
If you’re willing to get into the blackhat of this there is a lot to explore.
This is part of why brigading types use bots. They want to manipulate the appearance of popularity/unpopularity of specific angles on a topic. This has the effect of energizing their positive targets to take that same stance and keep focus on that topic and for negative targets to avoid the topic, give up on the platform, or get banned.
I hate that I know this term, but it is an important part of grooming a lolcow for the more toxic “fanbases”.
base and superstructure in the age of webcams
Conservatives do this all the time with their rhetoric as well. Look at how often they say things like “I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking” or “I represent the silent majority” their goal is to produce an artificial popularity of their ideas and trick people into thinking they are more popular than they are, which in turn makes people assume that there must be something to them, or simply adopting them for fear of being left behind.
What actually happened? I’m not watching an hour of streamer bullshit to get the nitty-gritty details. Ate shit? How? Bots? What were they doing? Bot crackdown? When did this happen? Who is cracking down on bots? Is there some sort of private bot info or something that got leaked? And other such questions.
Every twitch stream has a live viewer counter. This counter measures the number of times that the stream is being simultaneously played. I think this is sort of primitive and doesn’t even do IP checking. If you open the video in 10 tabs, the stream shows +10 viewers.
View count matters because internet users are more likely to click on a stream which has the most viewers. People have the assumption that a stream with many viewers will be better than a stream with 0 viewers. This also impacts advertisers because companies will pay more money for more ad views and product placement. Creating fake views to get payed more money by advertisers is illegal and fraud.
Every twitch channel also has a twitch chat. Twitch chat uses a modified version of the IRC protocol and some IRC clients are even able to connect to the twitch chat. Twitch chat only works if you log into the website. Twitch chat even has it’s own external chat clients such as Chatterino. There is also a recorded number of users in the twitch chat.
Some people have the idea chat users are real viewers and non-chat users are fake viewers (bots). So what they would do is take the number of stream viewers, subtract the number of chat users, and then declare the difference in number represents the number of bots watching a stream. This is not accurate for a number of reasons. I watch twitch every day and I don’t have a twitch account, so I would be considered a bot by that metric. Also it’s possible for botters to make accounts or buy stolen twitch accounts, make them join the chat. Also there are some weird people who join twitch chats to yap but don’t watch the stream.
Another botting accusation panic came around when twitch tried to fuck with adblockers. Adblocking on twitch used to be simple, the ads could be blocked any simple adblocker like ublock. Within the last few years, twitch started embedding the ad video into the stream video so that simple adblockers could not detect or remove the ad. So people made new ad blocking software which could detect when an ad was being played and then it would open the stream a second time where the ad is not playing. To the twitch viewer, this made stream uninterrupted by ads. On streamer side, streamers began noticing that their viewer count was going up by like 20% every time they press the run ad button. This is because the new ad blocker addon was opening a secret stream to skip the ads from playing.
So the video says that 2-3 days ago, many streams had a noticeable drop in live viewer count. This is not based on an official announcement. Twitch announced that they would crack down on viewbots on July 28, which was 3 weeks ago. There is not public information about what happened 3 days ago or how twitch determines what is a bot or how twitch removes a bot.
https://xcancel.com/TwitchSupport/status/1949893119341687168#m (July 28 twitch tweet)
The claim that twitch cracked down on bots 3 days ago is based on speculation from viewing twitch viewer count data. One website that you can view the data is twitchtracker.com . Type in the channel name and it will show you data about the channel over time.
The claim is made first by xQc. xQc is a french canadian streamer who originally became famous by streaming Overwatch. After becoming famous by playing overwatch, xQc moved on to promoting cryptocurrency casino. Twitch banned cryptocurrency gambling and then kick.com was created to stream cryptogambling. I have reason to believe that kick.com is secretly owned by stake.com. xQc is contracted with kick.com . xQc could be motivated to say that twitch has viewbots because he wants to promote kick. I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just pointing out possible motives.
https://xcancel.com/xQc/status/1959263297053548740#m
The next person to make the claim that twitch cracked down on bots 3 days ago is Moist Critical (penguinz0 on youtube). In the video that he uploaded today, he says there is channel on twitch called “mira” which he believes to be heavily botted. After the suspected twitch crack down, the mira channel went from 2000 live viewers to 200 live viewers. Moist Critical also says that twitch tracker shows a high drop in viewers on Asmongold’s channel (zachrawrr) and several other OTK channels. OTK is Asmongold’s streamer organization. A Music Label is a company that promotes musicians and finds them deals. A streamer organization is like that for streamers. OTK is mostly made up of WoW players I think and not necessarily right wingers like Asmongold.
Asmongold also agrees with the claim that his channel was botted and that a crack down occurred 3 days ago. This presumes that Asmongold believes that somebody else was adding fake viewers to his channel for motivations unknown.
https://xcancel.com/Asmongold/status/1959287658158371225#m
This screenshot shows Asmongold’s viewer count for the last 15 days. It goes from 50k average to around 30k.
This screenshot shows Tectone’s view count. He’s a right wing streamer who has defended sexual assault. He is accused of being a sexual assaulter and his father was a prolific sexual assaulter in the military, to the extent that is in the US Congressional record. It goes from 5k to 3k.
This screenshot shows the “Mira” channel that Moist Critikal mentioned. It seems to have fallen in viewers a week sooner than Asmongold.
Twitch announced that they would crack down on bots on July 28. Who is affected and by how much and when, seems like speculation. You can search channels on twitchtracker.com
TLDR, you got a video I could watch instead?
Seriously though, I appreciate you breaking this down for everyone. It’ll take me a while to digest all this information, but it just sounds like some sloppy wet boys are continuing to be sloppy and wet online.
This was very easy to read and informative, thank you
Everything I learn about streamers is against my will
can we get a summary that doesn’t involve me watching hasan piker?
the title kind of is a summary no?
Is penguin guy right wing or something?
He’s like the normiest “commentator” imaginable, 98% of the time his views align with general public sentiment and aren’t particularly deep. He did publicly go to bat for trans rights and specifically the right for trans kids to medically transition so he’s better than the average lib youtuber.
He tends to be actually apolitical but once took the pro-trans position in a discussion with some chud streamer a while back.
Centrist “Apolitical” fence sitter, while he’s clowning on all botters generally, Hasan is adding crucial context Penguin isn’t by pointing out almost all of the worst botters are right wingers
From the limited stuff I’ve seen. Just a typical dude. Probably more left leaning liberal
the title is missing details like “what does eat shit mean?”
Fair enough. I just thought it was obvious that for streamers viewer count is everything so eating shit meant a huge drop in viewers
what is a huge drop in viewers?
From what I googled for that roach asmongold it was like 20k viewers out of 50k. And that’s just the bots they took out. No way that’s all of the bots
eat shit in what way? are we talking views or chat numbers or donations or what?
bots dont donate. so views
the online equivalent of a street performer putting their own money in their hat
Probably gets them motion right. So it works out financially
unlike the street performer, streamers got transaction fees. still probably works out but who the hell knows
to what extent?
this + the fallout between Ethan Klein and DGG has given me enough schadenfreude drama slop to feast like a king for the next year
I’m having a good time, I’m not gonna lie lmao
Does anyone have a chart with the numbers? Or just the numbers? Like I feel like that will tell a much more interesting story than trying to scrub through an hour long video to find the 10 seconds of actual data that is shown. I will never not say that video is the worst medium for information.
What about a video of a slide show?
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
