Comment by lovehashbrowns

This is not like Twitter or Instagram where you get things or clout purely on your follower numbers. Twitch has viewer counts during a livestream, and it's easy to tell botted accounts or inflated viewer counts based on chat participation. It's relatively easy to spot inflated viewer counts when there are 1,000 viewers on a channel but very few comments in the chat, for example.

And most streamers have a long history of streaming. For example, some of the bigger ones I can think of, Reckful, Destiny, Lirik, Alinity, Tyler1, Day9, etc.