Kick co–founder Bijan Terahni expresses his criticism towards Twitch saying: "They won't ban famous streamers".
Another Conflict Between Kick & Twitch
The showdown between the two biggest live stream platforms continues. Twitch’s latest announcement clarified how they would deal with streamers using viewbotting to increase their concurrent viewers.
On Friday 8th of May Bijan Tehrani retweeted a post talking about Twitch’s newest interventions against viewbotting. According to him, the new actions Twitch promises are just to improve the optics instead of really helping against the Problem. He also says that Twitch was already capping viewer counts for years and it didn’t help a lot.
In his opinion it is way more difficult to be viewbotting on Kick compared to any other social media or streaming platform. In addition, he says Kick really wants to take away the advantages of botting instead of just making viewer counts look better in the first place.
According to Kick's other co–founder Edward Craven, Twitch’s new rules just disguise a “big streamer protection program”. He adds an example in which he sees twitch protecting the brand and ad revenue from their workhorses by just overlooking their botted CCV’s.
In addition, he says that Twitch would never fully enforce these rules on their biggest partnered streamers. According to Kick’s co–founder, major creators just generate too much money and attention for being penalized by Twitch.
Craven states that the system would mainly focus on smaller streamers, who might even just be inflicted from hate–botting. If this turns true smaller creators might just get confronted with consequences for something they are not responsible for. In the long run this could be a big problem for streamers, getting view caps for a period without having any chance to grow on the platform.
In general, he says it seems more like a PR–move so the audience sees them addressing the problem, while in his opinion they genuinely don’t care.
Regarding accusations against Kick and their absurdly growing viewer counts, it seems more like arguments portraying Kick as the better company protecting smaller creators, while Twitch is just prioritizing the profit.
The War Against Viewbotting
While Twitch published a detailed statement about how they would handle the situation the reaction from Kick was taking shots against Twitch. They also stated they’re having massive breakthroughs right now regarding the topic. But didn’t published further information.
The way to go is not portraying the other party as unreliable or irresponsible but to focus the main substance of the topic and maybe find a solution together. A utopian fantasy regarding the history the two platforms have with each other.
It is unclear whether Twitch’s regulations will be successful or Kick really has an innovative software to treat the problem accordingly. The only thing we can say for sure is that to have a fair competition in the streamer ecosystem, viewbotting must stop. If not, the only people really profiting from the whole situation are the companies that make viewbotting possible in the first place.
