Using bots for getting the advantage over other users and fighting their use to bring these advantages down has become a typical reality for any bigger platform on the internet. Twitch, as a major video streaming service, is one of those cases where this struggle from both sides seems to be never-ending.
Not so long ago, Twitch has identified 7.5 million bots that were used on their platform. This raises a few questions, namely, why bots are so popular on Twitch and what are they used for?
More importantly, if you decide to use a bot yourself, you must know why bots are so unwelcome and how to overcome all the bans and restrictions that are being applied to them. If that’s the case, you don’t need to look anywhere else, for your answers are beneath.
What is a Twitch Bot?
A Twitch bot is an automation tool that allows you to speed up your daily activities and improve the efficiency of managing your accounts. It can also be used for boosting the number of your followers and to catapult your streams into the spotlight so that more viewers could notice and eventually become your regular followers.
This tool is particularly useful when you need to send mass messages, respond to repetitive comments or questions in chats, moderate your chats, organize polls, or do other tasks that don’t require much effort and yet take lots of time to complete.
Simply put, a Twitch bot is used for automating tasks that you would otherwise do manually without any second thoughts as if you were taking care of them automatically.
Types of Twitch Bots
There are several types of Twitch bots, considering the variety of tasks that they are invoked to do.
Viewer Bot
This type of bot performs a function that can be understood straightforwardly by its name. It acts as a multitude of viewers that are not real. A Twitch viewer bot provides automated viewers, chatters, and followers by opening a livestream with all these numbers of fake users piling up on that stream. If you know how Twitch bots work for gaining attention, namely, by imposing your supposed popularity onto those who look for something attractive to watch, you arouse curiosity and attract more real viewers, thus resulting in more real popularity.
Moderation Bot (chatbot)
This type of bot provides you with tools to moderate your chats, such as filtering or deleting offensive comments. It can also create and moderate raffles and polls. These bots are very useful when you don’t have enough hands or time to do these tasks manually and want to maintain your stream uninterrupted. A moderation bot can also insert certain links in chats or anything that you command from time to time without you needing to do this repeatedly. Or it can simply greet new viewers on your behalf.
Cloudbot
This is a more advanced version of a chatbot that provides all its functions with some additional features while reducing the usage of your computer. It adds such things as a loyalty system that can give loyalty points to your viewers depending on how much time they spend watching your streams. A cloudbot can even organize minigames for your viewers where they can win additional loyalty points, making your followers more engaged in this way.
Risks of Using Bots
Frequently, if not always, using bots is treated as if it was illegal, though it is not. Using bots goes against Twitch’s Terms of Service, much like it goes against Terms of Service of any bigger platform.
Bots are unwelcome for giving an advantage to their users. The identification process of these bots is always followed not only by blocking these bots but by certain restrictions directed towards their users. Your access to the site or your account can be restricted for an extended period or even blocked indefinitely.
In their fight against the use of bots, Twitch went as far as asking their users to report any suspicious activities that might indicate someone is using a bot. They have written instructions on what to do in these situations.
However, they clearly state for anyone that is going to report anything that they need to attach every evidence they can gather to their report.
Fake viewers that are produced by bots might watch a certain stream or follow a certain streamer without any knowledge or control of that streamer. To not be identified as bots, they try to imitate real users by following multiple streamers and doing lots of stuff that are not linked to one streamer that is using them for his advantage.
Reporting a streamer that has bots on his stream wouldn’t do any good if it’s not his fault. That’s why doubts about using bots can be dispelled by identifying the IP address of those bots and linking them with streamers’ IP. That puts them at great risk.
Managing the Risks
The issue of the link between a user’s IP address and a bot’s IP address is generally solved by using intermediary servers.
They change the IP address of the user and provide multiple different ones that can be scattered through bots, thus making them more difficult to identify as bots and even more difficult to link them not only with each other but with their user too.
Residential proxies provide the biggest variety of IP addresses that can change over time making bots look like real users that are connecting from different places where their IP addresses lead those that try to identify them.
Proxies allow reducing the risk of getting identified and consequently getting blocked for using bots to the minimum.
Closing Remarks
Using Twitch bots should not be feared when their usage provides more advantages than risks that are posed for violating Twitch’s requirements not to use them. When bots are enhanced with proxies, they are difficult to track and have no trace of their original user.