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The endpoint exists so the website can show a list of users watching. For it to return IDs instead would be counter-productive to that goal. For it to return IDs on top of the username would be significant unnecessary overhead. Just speculation though.

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You’re totally right, for Twitch that endpoint doesn’t need to contain id’s since it’s only used to return the viewers list. But without it there’s no other way for developers to get the viewers list, so with this name change thing, how are loyalty bots supposed to assign points to viewers? Isn’t this change going to end them? So with this problem I was suggesting adding (not replacing) the viewer id to the endpoint fixing this problem for everyone.

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Username changes certainly doesn’t end loyalty bots in any way. Not having an endpoint that’s similar to chatters but provides user ID’s is not a problem, just an inconvenience, as there are ways to translate username into user ID already which allows these apps that track users to keep the usernames in their database current. Yes it is additional API calls compared to before usernames could be changed, and yes there could be a better solution implemented but it certainly doesn’t break any loyalty bot that adopted to tracking by user ID when this change was announced last year.

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A good loyalty bot should cache user ids with the last known name of the user associated with that id. Then upon refreshing a channel viewer list the loyalty bot should lookup the ids of usernames the bot has never seen before and compare with the cache of user ids and update the last known username for any ids whose usernames have changed and add a cache item for those who are genuinely new.

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