I’m polling the streams API endpoint every 3 mins against a specific game.
Then I poll the user API endpoint to get the views count of the streamer.
I found this specific streamer interesting.
It’s views count is 0 so this is a new streamer, but he gets right away 338 so something was already fishy.
By looking at the title of the stream, the dude puts his twitter. I check and found that he actually quite a streamer.
By polling the user endpoint on his main account display name I find a different user_id: 27107346, not 747086264 as in the streams API response.
I checked his page on twitch.tv and the dude is not live.
So let’s assume the API is right, I look at twitchtracker and I see that there are a lot of aliases, likely bots, streaming one time 30 mins, getting 4-5k followers and an average of 2-300 viewers per stream.
I find it suspicious that a new account gets immediately 300 viewers while it has a 0 viewcount, but lets assume that there is a bot behind that create follows, and followers get alerted that the new account is gonna stream, given 5000 followers that could be a valid result.
What do you think of these types of results? Am I analyzing right? or is there any known issues with the Get Streams endpoint returning wrong user_id ?
Anyway, the main issue is the user profile views count, it seems that it does not update. The first update happened after 15 mins, and is very far from what should be returned. Given that there is a 338+ viewers count on the stream on every poll, it should be at least this nr or above, instead of just 5…
The dude/maybe bot stopped after 30 mins so I don’t have more data, but do we know how often the user profile views count updates, and why we get wrong values like in this example?
Sounds like you are “testing” the bottom of the category, where there is general weirdness.
You should also be treating stream, user and game ID’s are strings, not integers.
It’s not something I’ve looked at too much.
Personally I’d not bother looking at the viewcount. Since it’s not a good metric.
If you have a stream
And the streams API says “10 viewers”
The view count might be “20”
As the steam have 5 viewers that are the same user for the entrie stream
And 5 viewers left and 5 new viewers joined, then another 5 reload the page
Which makes 20 views.
Thats my understanding of the counter, but th eview counter is a black box.
if you are looking at the bottom of the directory where weirdness is, Twitch might be ignoring the numbers as part of it’s viewbot/anti spam measures.
And the stream view count is accurate to who is actually watching
But the users view_count is based on a differenent statistic, IE does a user need to have watched the stream for an amount of time before it considers them as a viewer to increase the user view count?
We don’t know. And that is likely the discrepency.
Stream has 5 viewers, that are solidly watching.
Stream has another 5 viewers that keep chaning arriving/leaving.
Best bet is to “consider” the view count on a stream down + a few minutes
