Twitch streamer Devin Nash alleges many top streamers on the platform are viewbotting

Devin Nash, 39, joined several streamers to comment on the ongoing viewbotting controversy concerning the Twitch platform. Reportedly, the broadcaster alleged that most of the top 500 streamers have been artificially surging their viewership.

Recently, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy claimed that most smaller creators on the platform take help of fake bots to inflate their viewership. However, his remark targeting streamers with a limited fanbase was not perceived well by the community, especially several renowned streamers. 

Twitch streamer Devin Nash dropped alleged truth bombs about viewbotting

On July 30, the creator made some significant accusations and revealed a set of debatable points in his elaborate X posts. In his now-viral updates on the platform, he pointed out that the viewbotting procedure is "way more prevalent and destructive for platforms than most people realize."

In his first update on Wednesday, Devin Nash recalled his agency encountering "a weird problem" while running ads on Twitch. Noting the issues that his team faced, he reiterated that his brand's conversions dropped, adding,

"Our brand's conversions were worse the more viewers a stream had. The largest streams have the least sales. 500-1000 viewer streams often have the best sales, and outperform many 30,000+ viewer creators. We initially attributed this to diminishing viewer returns - AKA - not everyone in large streams is as invested as core, small communities. This is untrue though because the few large streams that do have authentic viewership overperform on ad campaigns. So it had to be something else."

His team worked on the obstacle further to realize the actual truth. While "digging" into it, they surprisingly saw "the number of top 500 broadcasters that are being viewbotted or view botting themselves." According to Nash and his agency's evaluations, among 400 to 430 creators in the top 500 category, "not including embeds," are viewbotting.

Continuing with his points and disclosures about the streaming platform, Nash also stated that Twitch does not punish users for raising their viewer numbers "unless a streamer shows it on screen."

The livestream/Twitch viewbot issue is way more prevalent and destructive for platforms than most people realize. It's a difficult problem and no one knows how to fix it yet.

When my agency was running ads on Twitch, we noticed a weird problem:

Our brand's conversions were…

— Devin (@DevinNash) July 30, 2025

Criticizing them, the streamer further informed netizens,

"However even then their enforcement is selective, with celebrities like Ray J openly admitting in July to viewbotting and getting no punishment. Because discovery is non-existent on Twitch and the platform is a Kingmaker system, there's no reason to not view bot unless you have a moral compass - a rare thing in streaming these days."

The inspirational speaker also stated that this system follows the Adpocalypse he discussed on the internet a few months ago. At that time, he predicted a dip in ad revenue by 40% to 50% because of showing polarizing political content. Based on his assumptions, that's exactly what panned out after a while, with the "one-two combo" putting the platform in a precarious position.

Devin disclosed guessing that some of the most prominent viewbotting streamers are expected to be exposed in the next few months, "one way or another." Terming viewbotting as "an open secret in the industry," he revealed that several streamers "know where the bodies are buried." He further penned,

"It's only a matter of time before someone blabs. No one will miss these offenders, and they're usually synonymous with pushing scam sponsors and exploiting their viewers in various ways."

A day after his first shocking X post, he shared some more eye-opening details with his followers on the same platform. Sharing that he has been receiving "a lot of messages" about his agency's methodology, he described a few insights into the steps his team follows "to detect viewbots" that he feels "is difficult for the bot service providers" to fight against. Listing his assessment process, he explained,

"- We checked logged in/logged out user ratios on top streams and compared the % to streams we knew weren't viewbotting.
- We put a bot in the top 15,000 Twitch streams and scraped the chat list and chat every 3-5 minutes. From there we used OCR to look for obvious, common botted messages and the accounts that were sharing them across multiple channels.
- We also looked as usernames and compared them to botnet lists that bot service providers typically used.
- Our conclusions were that most of the top 500 streams were viewbotting with 30-40% of viewers as blatent bots and another 5-15% as embeds."
 

Since I'm getting a lot of messages about our methodology, here's a little of what we did to detect viewbots that I'm confident is difficult for the bot service providers to fight us on:

- We checked logged in/logged out user ratios on top streams and compared the % to streams…

— Devin (@DevinNash) July 31, 2025

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