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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

It seems that a malicious person A who has a strong dislike or enmity for person B's projects could do some real harm by buying upvotes/clicks/likes for person B's projects, getting them banned from various services.

Make it look like person B naively went out and paid a third party upvote/promotion service, and make it obvious enough to be noticeable.

to use some old internet terminology, make it look like a joe-job astroturf?

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Twitch famously does not ban people for botting unless they have evidence that the streamer themselves ordered the bots.

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/how-to-handle-view-follow-b...

I'm a bit doubtful, as even gaining real followers rapidly has apparently been a problem. That happened around 2 months ago with new members of the Hololive streaming group, as all their fans followed the new accounts.

That is for YouTube, not Twitch. Hololive is mostly on YouTube except for a few exceptions, mostly for watchalongs with Amazon Prime.

I just misread Twitter instead of Twitch.

And Twitch are well known for applying their rules fairly and consistently, to streamers big and small. /s

At this point the divergence between the rules-as-written and rules-as-applied(-in-each-case) has become so apparent that I'd treat Twitch's help pages like comments on a decades old poorly maintained code base - any match between them and reality is almost accidental and cannot be relied upon.

From what I have seen this is indeed Twitches prescribed approach, even for small streamers. I had a friend that was getting viewbotted when his channel was just starting to grow and remember being surprised he was worried it'd actually make him look bad to viewers (like he himself was trying to inflate his channel since his chat was dead vs the view count) but never worried Twitch was going to do anything to his account for it.

Have you seen different for this topic or is that a generic reaction for any time Twitch help pages are linked?

Agreed in general but for bots it anecdotally seems to be the case. For example Massan was blatantly viewbotting for a long time but he wasn't banned for several months at least (I don't remember the time).

Apparently this was the move for a while on amazon: buy upvotes for the people who are listed higher than you so they get removed.

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