The Real Reason xQc Just Lost 2 Million Followers

On the internet, bots are just a fact of life you have to deal with. Regardless of the platform, you can never be too sure if the person you're interacting with is a real human or a soulless digital being made up of 0s and 1s. Yes, that means the person you're talking to on Tinder could actually be a computer in a closet somewhere. You could be falling for someone who runs Windows 10 right at this very moment. Think about that.

Bots have become such a nuisance that, every once in a while, websites will do a sweep to try and bounce these virtual phonies from their respective clubs. Twitch just did this recently, and managed to clear out over 7.5 million accounts it deemed were "follow-botting and view-botting." Unfortunately, this had a negative effect on the follower counts of some Twitch streamers. But it's xQC — one of Twitch's most controversial stars — who may have taken one of the biggest hits of anyone on the platform.

A look at TwitchTracker shows that, in the past week, xQc lost roughly 2.5 million Twitch followers. His current number is 5.5 million, which means xQc lost over 30 percent of his followers in the last few days, presumably thanks to Twitch's bot-destroying rampage. For comparison's sake, Pokimane currently sits at over 7.5 million followers on Twitch. But in the past week, Poki only lost a little over 8,000 followers. That's a pretty drastic difference.

Assuming all those xQc followers were bots, it begs the question: why were so many following him? Sadly, we may have to wait for a comment from Twitch to learn more — that is, if the platform even offers one.

For what it's worth, xQc himself hasn't tweeted out an update on the matter. In fact, he hasn't tweeted for almost a week. He did stream Grand Theft Auto today, though it's unclear if the topic came up during his broadcast. It's possible the follower loss isn't all that big a deal to the streamer — as stated, he still has about 5.5 million people following him. At last check, his recent broadcast came in at around 90,000 live viewers. Still, one can't help but feel there's more to the story of why xQc in particular had so many bots, while other larger streamers weren't dinged quite as hard by Twitch's spring cleaning.

This could be something to keep an eye on in the future. For now, xQc — who's had his fair share of shady moments — appears to be doing just fine.