Update on v5 Rate Limiting

Announcements
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Hey Everyone,

My name is Chris and I run the engineering team responsible for the third-party API platform at Twitch in partnership with my colleague Travis, Director of Developer Relations.

First off, we made a mistake. We haven’t done a good enough job explaining what we’re trying to do and how we’re going to go about doing it. Travis and I take responsibility for that, apologize, and want you to know we’re committed to doing better.

So what are we going to do about it?

We will delay the implementation of v5 rate limiting until further notice. It’s not reasonable to ask people to migrate off of an old thing before the new thing is ready! There is good news on that front though.

The engineering work required to migrate all of the legacy functionality we have committed to supporting in the new Twitch API has been completed. So we’re close to being able to provide the community with a migration path off of v5. In the next few weeks, we’ll be gathering feedback from members of the community on this functionality and then making it generally available once we’re confident all the bugs have been worked out.

We’re making these changes in order to be better partners to all of you. Managing disparate systems can be burdensome and lead to errors, so we’re encouraging developers to migrate to our new system. Imposing measures such as rate limits is designed to curb and prevent abuse. We want to continue to serve the community, yet some bad actors can spoil it for others. We hope this helps illustrate the balance we are intending to strike with our plans, and demonstrates our continued commitment to Twitch Developers.

Stability is important, but Twitch is constantly growing and evolving. A completely immutable system isn’t compatible with that. For instance, we recently announced v5 changes to the streams endpoints due to a migration to a new backend system that deals with live channels. The previous system was at its scaling limit and we had to build something new. To make the new system scale, we had to make some tradeoffs in functionality. These things will continue to happen as we grow, but it’s our responsibility to communicate those to you clearly and transparently.

Twitch and the developer community are partners. We’ve heard your feedback and are working on it. A vibrant third-party developer community is important to Twitch and we’re committed to working together with you in the future.

Chris
Director of Engineering - API & Browser

Travis
Director of Developer Relations

19 Likes
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Can’t wait to see the migration path - this is great news! Thanks for listening to the community.

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This is how it should be communicated and done, I appreciate that the feedback was listened to before the changes went into effect.
Now let’s hope the important functionalities of v5 made it into helix, I can’t wait for the migration path.

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Not the first time i read something like that, but i hope it’s true this time

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It is not trivial to manage a platform, developer API, and the millions of users of both.

However, this is a well-documented and solved problem of managing upgrade and deployment PROCESS. Twitch has clear issues with understanding these processes while disturbing the user-base as little as possible for the 3rd party developer-side of the platform.

As a community of developers, many of which were burned by Twitter and their ‘no developer shall write an application’ approach, we are very sensitive to changes and highly invested in the success of the API platform. We want it to evolve. What we don’t see is new features being added, capabilities that match the end-user experience, or a test platform for us to test our integrations with future updates.

I look forward to more communication on this front in the future

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That’s great news!
I can’t wait to see the new changes to Helix, and then finally be able to fully migrate over.

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To provide Feedback: Are there opportunities to participate, or is this a closed beta?

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I hate to be the pessimist, but I’ll see it when I believe it.

There’s still an exponential amount of stuff that’s not accessible via the new API and it’s been a while since it’s been out. I’m glad that you’re listening to developer feedback on this though. Here’s hoping that all, if not most of it, will become available in the new API soon.

6 Likes
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The amount of developers in this comment section of which I’m in discords for is >= 2… lol

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It is a closed beta.