Being realistic, Phil does not have 300 real viewers who just happen to be very participative lurkers who always like his streams. If you're a lurker, you're gonna look for someone with a pleasant voice, who is doing something not very attention demanding, so you can work or doze off or whatever. Phil CAN be okay background noise, when he's edited. Nu Phil is just shit. You're either paying attention for the goldust or getting constantly assaulted with a barrage of snorts, burps and begging tirades. Lurkers typically tend to go for atmospheric games, horror, and calm personalities. You don't put on a super clownmode streamer yelling their lungs out and calling everyone sons of bitches at DBD if you just want to have some background noise. Someone explaining the Silent Hill lore and calmly getting through it would be fine. Someone screeching in reaction to a Slenderman jumpscare would not.
He's got a sock army and a handful of whales, and he's running this scam to make that look legit. Botting is way more common than you'd think. It's no exaggeration to say that most people who aren't established streamers do it. Blame Twitch and Youtube for piss poor discoverability, but it's just how the game goes. If you're not on the front page, you might as well not be there at all. Networking with other smaller streamers might help you out in the short term, but if you want to find an actual audience, which you need to find actual people willing to throw money your way, you need to appear on their feed. And to do that, you need numbers you're never gonna get. The easy solution is botting.
Viewbots on the autism vortex are not exactly news, it's just that the new batch of detractors look more into stuff than we used to back in the day. There's a lot more actual investigation going on with Piece's tip tracker and Phil getting exposed in the bank leaks. Actually used to crunch the numbers, but it wasn't as easy, as Phil hid a lot more of his income back then, and wasn't constantly turbobegging. Just get bots if you wanna see how they work: They trickle in at the start of the stream, so it's not a huge uptick of viewers all of a sudden, then gradually dip a little bit, and if you stop streaming, they're all gone. This is to prevent them from participating in raids, not that Phil would ever do one, since a botting streamer could potentially get crazy value from that for all their friends, or use it to try and get somebody banned, as the botting dent did back then.
Most detractors wouldn't even hatewatch the guy. Most normies don't even know who he is and he vets pretty hard for only people willing to suck his dick and give him money, turning most stream watchers away at the door. How is this stallfest, begathon of a stream gonna break 300 viewers and only have 10 chatters? If his chat was popping with Derich-like messages all day, I wouldn't doubt there's 300 dents there, but only ten of them ever chat. Phil complains about this pretty often, in fact, which I assume is code for the mahds and whales to get socking and chatting. If he had something closer to reasonable, I don't know, 50 chatters, it would be much more believable. but comparable streamers have much, much more active chats. 300 are BIG numbers. As much as Phil likes to call himself a small streamer, he's anything but. He's not top tier, but he's up there, at least going just by his numbers.
