Twitch accused of lying to users after “accidentally reverting” to old payout rules

Twitch has been accused of lying to its users after reportedly “accidentally reverting” an old Twitch Help article to say that the payout threshold had been raised.

On November 15, journalist Zach Bussey published a series of tweets onto X where he showed that a Twitch Help article about streamer payouts had been updated that day to say that payouts now started at $100 – twice as high as the previous $50 limit.

This had been done without Twitch notifying users about the new rules.

However, the Twitch Support X account quickly replied to Bussey’s tweet to say that it’d been a mistake.

They wrote: “We’ve been cleaning up and updating a lot of our articles recently and this one has been accidentally reverted to a previous version.

“The payout threshold has not changed, apologies for any confusion. We will fix this in the article shortly.”

However, Bussey said he didn’t fully believe the answer as he claimed: “I don’t fully trust the defense, as I have copies of every change they’ve ever made. This text was all new.”

He went on to post screenshots of the article in question in four different versions after it had clearly been edited and rewritten by the platform.

While the screenshots do not include any time stamps, they show the rewrites that have been made. According to Boussey, the screenshots show the article from “3 hours ago, 7 Days ago, 2 Years ago (right after they announced $50 payouts.), and 3 Years ago (before the $50 announcement)”.

Each screenshot shows the article having clearly been thoroughly re-written each time, with the format and text having changed.

Fellow X user, Dan Saltman, has previously been very vocal about his criticism of Twitch and its ongoing issues, such as concerns about alleged antisemitism on the platform.

He reposted Bussey’s tweets while claiming the streaming platform of “screwing over” new streamers by raising the minimum payout threshold to $100, and directly aimed his criticism at Twitch CEO Daniel Clancy.

He wrote: “It is my opinion that Twitch intended to sneakily roll out an increase to the minimum payout rate today, but got nervous when it was called out.

“Calls were made and they immediately backed out of it and gave a completely bogus response of “we did a oopsie” I think that Twitch is just flat out lying. @djclancy999 can not be trusted.”

Neither Twitch or Clancey have yet to make any further comments about this, but we’ll make sure to update this if they do.