Day 2 of viewbotting drama in r/LivestreamFail: Mod investigations lead to a “whiteknight” getting ousted
Context:
Yesterday, a streamer named ExtraEmily accidentally revealed an open tab on her browser for a viewbotting website mid-stream. Viewbotting is the practice of paying for "fake viewers" (i.e. bots) to make your stream look more popular than it actually is, which has benefits such as influencing the streaming website's recommendation algorithm, etc. This is against Twitch's terms of service and is something of a boogeyman in the streaming community, with people constantly accusing streamers of doing it, and some people believing that every single popular streamer does it. When what seemed like cold-hard proof of a high profile streamer using one of these services finally dropped yesterday, the Livestreamfail forum exploded.
Until it didn't
One mod left a comment that he had "confirmed" that the open window was merely a popup ad from the website she was on. The post was quietly deleted and any further posts about it were whack-a-moled over the following 24 hours or so.
The mod team decides that people asking for proof of the popup theory are engaging in "targeted harassment", and anyone who pointed out that the viewbotting website was in an incognito window while the "popup generating site" wasn't were promptly banned.
The update: Statement from the Mod Team
[...] Today, it started to become more apparent that this moderator may have lied, or fabricated the claim of a pop-up, to seemingly protect ExtraEmily. Through more digging, we were able to confirm that they are an avid Extra Emily clipper, poster and a very active member of her community and Discord. Mods are going to have biases and be viewers, but we cannot allow that bias to influence how we moderate or what rules we follow [...] we have decided to remove this mod from the team.
commenters point out that the "bias" mentioned in the mod statement may have been an understatement.
is The Mod a viewbot himself?
That is 100% a bot, no comment is longer than like 6 words and every single one starts with an emoji
Reaction to this action by the mod team is mostly positive, but some question how this mod could have been given so much power in the first place.
The mod who recruited him answers the question:
To be clear here, I was the one who recruited this mod, without any input from the rest of the team. And I did so with the full knowledge that they were a super fan because I wanted more positive mods and less antifan mods that cause drama.
As for why I was ok with recruiting a mod that had an obvious bias my reasoning was that since I was the top dictator mod I could just overrule them on anything biased that they did.
This whole line of thinking, goes completely off the rails after I lost the top position of course XD
With that logic let everyone in since you can correct later.
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Edit: that former mod who recruited the white knight might be familiar to you: he was ousted a couple months ago for using LivestreamFail to promote a crypto scam in a scandal that also involved ExtraEmily
Editing the post on the mobile app seemed to break markdown. Sorry, don’t know how to fix the formatting