Twitch Removes Following Since from General View

Over the last week or two, Twitch has been removing access to the "Following Since" feature for users in chat. Following Since has historically shown when an account joined the community, giving insight into whether someone is a long-time member. Twitch Streamers and their moderators can still see this information locally in their specific channels from the Creator Dashboard or from Mod View.

Context:

Twitch has regularly been removing visibility features over the last couple of years. They removed Friends lists, then public Following Lists, then removed the ability to query the API to see who they followed. This, and the updates that preceded it, is likely a move driven by safety policy.

My Thoughts:

On the surface, I understand why they are doing this if it is safety-driven. (If someone is both new to Twitch AND new to the community, they may be susceptible to malicious Whispers.) Following Since has been a pretty good indicator of whether the community is just lawless chaos or whether the person causing the chaos is a long-term community member and thus gets a pass. It also helped to pick who to give subs to - do I give it to the person who's been here 2 years or 2 minutes? So, that's a definite L here.

The community is even more frustrated with this change, feeling Twitch is doing it to let viewbots hide more openly and also to block third-party monitoring of fraudulent viewers. However, MerryKish (Twitch Head of Community) says bad actors were scraping the data to improve viewbots.

Check out the conversation about this on Twitter, Bluesky, or Threads.