If you thought the rivalry between Twitch and Kick couldn’t get any pettier, Edward Craven just raised the bar. The Kick co-founder is currently taking shots at Twitch’s latest attempt to solve its oldest problem: viewbotting.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy recently announced a new enforcement tactic. Instead of just banning bots, Twitch plans to “cap” the concurrent viewer count for channels found to be using artificial traffic. The idea is to make botting useless by physically preventing the number from increasing.
But according to Craven, this is less a solution than a PR stunt.
The “Big Streamer” Protection Program
Craven’s main beef isn’t with the technology, but with the politics. He took to social media to claim that Twitch will never actually apply these rules to its golden geese. He suggested that if a top-tier streamer with a massive contract was suddenly outed for having 20,000 bots in their lobby, Twitch would look the other way to protect their brand and ad revenue.
It is a bold claim, especially since Kick has faced its own mountain of accusations regarding inflated numbers. Craven is essentially leaning into the “we’re the honest rebels” persona, painting Twitch as a corporate machine that only punishes the little guy while the giants get a free pass.
Detection or Deflection?
The technical side of this is equally messy. Twitch says the caps will be based on “historical data” of a creator’s real traffic. Craven argues this is a recipe for disaster. He pointed out that smaller creators are often the targets of “hate-botting,” where someone else buys bots for a stream just to get the creator banned. Under this new system, a victim of hate-botting could have their growth capped for weeks through no fault of their own.
Kick, meanwhile, claims to have had “massive breakthroughs” in its own bot detection recently. They chose a different path: stripping payouts from creators with suspicious stats rather than just capping a visible number.
The Bottom Line on Bots
At the heart of this feud is the advertisers. Companies are starting to realize they might be paying for millions of “eyeballs” that are actually just lines of code running on a server in a basement.
Twitch is trying to show advertisers they have a handle on the situation. Kick is trying to show streamers that Twitch is an unfair landlord. Both platforms are essentially trying to fix a leaky boat while simultaneously throwing buckets of water at each other.
In a world of fake views and capped counts, the only person truly winning is the guy selling the bots. He gets paid regardless of whether the number actually shows up on the screen.