I come here to complain a little bit. I’ve been using Helix lately and I like it so far. Getting live channel info, getting games, all of those are ok but this Follower endpoint sucks.
It only accepts IDs and returns only IDs. Honestly in my project I don’t need to know all viewers/chatters ID, it’s not necessary until it comes to this follower crap. If I was only working with 1 channel at a time then it wouldn’t be as bad but I’m working with an unlimited number of channels and I REALLY don’t want to collect the ID for all of the potential viewers just so follower alerts will work.
If the follower endpoint would just return the login then I wouldn’t need to make calls to get IDs first.
Doing anything by login is a bad way to handle requests/caching/etc. Even in the past where name changes weren’t available to the public, there was still the slight chance that they could change, which is problematic. This is infinitely more problematic now that users are able to change their name at will to whatever they want. In order to make any sort of reliable long-term database, you need to base it off of a constant value. In this case, and many others, accessing information by ID’s is the way to go. Otherwise, it would be an absolute nightmare to maintain the API. This is evident looking at Kraken v3 and why there was a push to change to ID’s in Kraken v5 and now in Helix.
I understand that, you’re right, but it’s not really a concern for me. If the name of the game here is to reduce data/load then I would think adding an extra field to followers would be less taxing then forcing me to poll for all viewers ID.
If you want to compare load though you also have to consider all use cases. You might need to know the username for each follower, and thus have an extra API request, but there are others where that data would be redundant, so adding an extra field (or multiple fields, as who is to say some users might want display name rather than username) would be needless data for those people, data which would be on every single request regardless of if it’s needed or not.
Only twitch have the data to know what impact additional fields would have, and an idea of how frequently used those fields are.
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