Twitch streamer tries to purge bot followers and everything goes totally wrong
Twitch: Evan_GaoTwitch followers are important to tell just how popular a streamer is, and for smaller creators they’re even more crucial. Every person is important, although bots can get in the way. This is why one little mistake for ‘Evan_Gao’ has turned into a nightmare after he tried to purge those bot followers.
For small-time streamers trying to make it big, every Twitch follower counts. The number goes a long way to getting partnered with the platform, and it also is a sign of popularity. Followers get notified of when you start a stream too, which can help you get viewers.
It makes it all the more important to keep them there and not accidentally remove them — which is a lesson ‘Evan_Gao’ is learning right about now.
Evan, who had around 6,800 followers (key word: had), was trying to thin it out a bit and remove all the bot followers and keeping all the authentic ones. While there’s been streamers botted for millions of followers, Gao was sure there were a few dozen, maybe a couple hundred to purge.
Instead, he removed all of his 6,768 followers — all because he forgot to apply one filter.
Twitch: Evan_GaoHe only realized once some regulars came into his chat asking why they weren’t following anymore. “Wait chat, I think I screwed something up. It says I have 232 followers,” he said, rather confused.
“What did I do? I think I messed up when I did the CommanderRoot thing. That’s so weird.”
Evan went into a bit of a panic. He was hoping the changes weren’t permanent, that he could somehow regather his following. However, the damage had been done.
“I was so confused because I remember inputting it but I didn’t apply filters. I blocked everybody? Oh my god,” he said.
The rest of Evan’s Twitch stream was derailed for the rest of the day. No more study — which is what he was doing — instead he was frantically trying to troubleshoot. Funnily enough though, this is not the first time it’s happened: he looked up “how to undo CommanderRoot” to try and see if he could reverse it. The big warning? You can’t.
“That actually sucks. I’ve banned literally thousands of people because I went through a list of known bots. Now it’s going to be impossible to tell between the real people and the bots,” he added.
He eventually unblocked everyone and the follows starting rolling back in, but it’s a long climb back to where Evan was. At the time of writing he currently has just under 500 followers, so here’s nearly a tenth of the way back. However, next time he gets rid of the bots he’s going to be a bit more cautious with his hard-earned followers.
He did manage to see the bright side of it though: “Ryan [someone in Twitch chat] said ‘this is content’ and if I don’t salvage something out of this, then that’s going to be a problem.
“This is big LSF content.”
