On the livestreaming platform Twitch, almost every streamer aims to become more well-known and gain more viewers. This includes numbers like followers and subscribers. The Twitch streamer Evan_Gao recently experienced a huge fail and deleted over a year of his work in just a few seconds.
This is how followers and subscriptions work on Twitch: Followers and subscribers behave differently on Twitch than on the video platform YouTube. While you can subscribe to someone for free on YouTube to see their activities, you must follow someone on Twitch to know when that particular streamer goes live.
Subscriptions on Twitch are paid and start at 3.99 euros per month. However, a subscription does not indicate whether a person is going live or not.
Followers on Twitch are a small indication of how well-known a person is – of course, a streamer still wants to grow in this area, as it suggests interest from a potential long-term viewer.
What are follower bots? Some people enjoy confronting streamers with follower bots for fun. For money, you can send a certain number of fictitious Twitch accounts to the streamer, who then follow him. However, this is forbidden and can lead to a ban from Twitch in the worst case.
Some streamers play it safe and use a tool from CommanderRoot to quickly delete these fictitious Twitch accounts from follower bots (via Twitch-Tools). You can set specific filters for the timeframe and users you want to remove from your follower list.
However, streamer Evan_Gao made a small mistake in the process to his dismay.
Streamer Evan_Gao bans and deletes all his followers
When the streamer was attacked by a follower bot, he didn’t waste any time and casually went to the CommanderRoot tool. “Bye, bots, you are not cool, but cringe,” he cheerfully waved goodbye to the camera, deleting and banning the supposed bots.
It wasn’t until 40 minutes later that the fail became apparent: He not only deleted and banned the bots but also his real, almost 7000 followers.
Evan_Gao couldn’t believe it at first: “Are you kidding me?” he responded to his friend when he slowly became aware of his mistake. “Is there a way to undo this?” Evan_Gao asked desperately.
Later, the streamer joked that he could also post the incident on reddit, it would be a perfect fail.
Whether he is really taking it so lightly is questionable; he continued, “Then I need to work my way back up.” However, his Twitch channel currently has this headline in capslock: “I deleted all my followers, I am desperate – Follow for Follow, please.”
In January 2021, the Twitch streamer started with 12 followers and was able to build a following of nearly 7000 people by January 2022. Whether he can regain them all remains to be seen. Currently, Evan_Gao has about 500 followers, which are still growing by the minute.
