Twitch CEO Dan Clancy is getting serious about cracking down on fake views on the platform, which has been a huge issue for the platform.
“Hacking” the system
It’s an open secret to streamers that there’s a hack that gets you more views: embedding streams to third-party sites. This trick doesn’t only rack up views but also boosts a creator’s rankings. You might have opened a site of gaming tips and didn’t realize a stream is playing.
On his stream, Twitch streamer KingGothalion read Clancy’s email regarding this crackdown. “We were talking about embeds some more and we were looking at ways we could solve it without having the downside impact,” Gothalion read.
While Twitch is thinking of a long-term plan to combat fake views, Clancy said in this email that “the idea is to do something quick by identifying a list of websites that are the worst offenders and prevent autoplay on these websites.”
Clancy directly referenced the website Fextralife as an example, a gaming guide that also runs a Twitch channel and embeds many of its livestreams all across its wiki site. Former Twitch streamer, now YouTube streamer Ludwig called out Fextralife for “stealing views” when he noticed that only half of the view count is active in chat. Moistcr1tikal also accused the site of doing dirty practices as he saw that the channel has active viewers while it is offline.
“It’s good to have a short list of the worst offenders,” Clancy continued. Fextralife and many more have been repeatedly criticized in the past years for being unethical. With Twitch finally taking action, it will be interesting to see how many channels misuse embeds to gain more views. We hope that whatever actions Twitch takes will help make the view counts and stream rankings more fair across the platform.
