Twitch streamer ExtraEmily taking a break for her mental health after viewbot pile-on controversy

I’m going to start and end this with a call for us all to just be nice. There’s enough nonsense going on in the world without piling on to people we don’t know, about things that ultimately mean nothing to us. With that said, are you sitting comfortably?

Popular Twitch Streamer ExtraEmily has announced she is to take a step back from streaming and go dark on social media for the sake of her mental health after a controversy over fake viewers of her stream popped up.

Stemming from a second of her stream where Emily accidentally displayed her browser tabs, things escalated quickly from there.

Because people are weird, the stream was clipped and zoomed in to see what tabs she had open, and seemingly one was for a site called Viewbot AI – a site which seemingly can inflate Twitch viewers using nefarious means.

As people have nothing better to do, a pile-on ensued. The alleged owner of the Viewbot site produced a receipt tied to ExtraEmily’s email address, and a fellow streamer, Mizkif, got involved in the finger-pointing, and everything continued to escalate until we reached the point we are at now, with some mad internet pile-on and everybody calling for ExtraEmily’s head.

No, I know we should not be bothered either, but there is nothing more the internet loves than to try to bring somebody down.

The furore has now caused ExtraEmily to step back from her work, and while she says she doesn’t think it is the end, it has obviously got to her enough to be concerned about her own mental health. Not something she would have expected when her browser accidentally appeared on screen for a nanosecond last week.

Who is ExtraEmily?

With close to a million followers, ExtraEmily is one of the more popular streamers on Twitch over the past year and is rumoured to earn around $80k a day, according to some sources. So why would she, or her management, be involved with Viewbots, if indeed they are? Who knows, maybe inflated numbers are needed for certain things, but either way, why does the average Joe actually care?

Why do we care?

There’s a weird thing going on with gaming and the internet at the moment, where there seems to be a desperation for failure so we can say, “I told you so.” You probably know my views on Steam review-bombing, or sites that, within two days of a game’s launch, are running stories about how a game like Marathon is dead because its initial player count has dropped.

The end result is that the game disappears, and people lose their jobs. Streamers we like disappear, and we no longer get their content. Websites disappear, and real people lose their jobs because people shout “AI SLOP” at everything, and what ultimately happens? We all have less cool stuff. It kinda needs to stop. As I said at the start, can we all just be nice?