
Taking legal action against the most active sellers of viewbot services - xPaw
https://blog.twitch.tv/on-artificial-viewers-followers-and-chat-activity-317906f1c7ea
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Houshalter
Fighting them legally might work temporarily, but eventually new viewbot
services will arise in other countries that can't be reached legally.

I'm very interested in what measures they use to detect viewbots now. What's
stopping twitch themselves from buying a viewbot package for a fake streamer,
then shadow banning all the accounts and IPs that show up? There also may be
clever statistical methods to detect them.

Ad companies and big websites like youtube also face this problem. It's not
unique to twitch. In fact I think most sites with user content have had to
deal with spam bots at some point.

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Fogest
I think they rely a lot on users reporting channels that are viewbotting. It
is usually pretty easy to spot even for a human. You'll notice a channel that
is for some reason pretty popular despite being some unknown person. You go
check out the streamer and often times in these cases there is very little
activity going on in the channel itself. Not many people chatting. This is odd
if a stream had a lot of viewers.

It is hard to punish a channel for viewbotting though because you usually
can't prove they hired the company to view bot for them. Because someone else
could easily try to get a channel in trouble that way by view botting someone
else.

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tsao
I think the biggest giveaway is the low quality content. Two of the biggest
Hearthstone streamers are so unfunny and not entertaining at all but still get
the top spots.

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Fogest
Oh yeah for sure! I have seen so many people like this. It is pretty obvious
when you enter a streamer's channel and it looks like they just started
yesterday and have no one talking in chat yet have a couple thousand viewers.

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a_small_island
Any legal minds who think this actually has teeth?

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minimaxir
The blog post notably downplays the severity of the linked lawsuit.
([http://cl.ly/013D2U0t2U0C](http://cl.ly/013D2U0t2U0C))

It is thorough, especially with an invocation of the CFAA.

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Natsu
I thought they didn't let the CFAA turn private ToSes into criminal acts. Am I
missing something here?

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jbronn
Although technically in the criminal code, 18 U.S.C. §1030(g) allows a civil
cause of action.

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zarriak
I think eventually this will work its way out with people using popular
streamers as consultants for how to improve streams, potentially with them
taking a cut of the stream revenue. It is something that will probably happen
as some streamers no longer want to stream or do it as a side job or something
to do to reduce the overall days of streaming. I assume that although one
might enjoy streaming, after enough time on twitch I am guessing streamers
would like to take a few months off and this seems like the most relevant way
to maximize the expertise they have gained.

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tsao
Can Twitch force the defendants to give out information about it's customers?

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J_Darnley
A big lot of hot air (and wasted money) over nothing.

~~~
foota
I don't see how it's either of these things? Seems like they are at the very
lease violating the TOS.

