I recently started to use the new api, what i wanted to achieve was to get the amount of followers a user/channel has.
With the new api it seems as if i would have to make multiple requests to “Get Users Follows” (https://api.twitch.tv/helix/users/follows?from_id=) and use the pagination to get all followers, which seems rather exessive to me.
What i am wondering now is, why is the total follower count information not included in the “Get Users” api response.
Also there is a mistake in the api documentation of “Get Users”:
view_count int Number of users following this user. <- the view_count is actually the total amount of views and not the follower count
I noticed this as well. Running through a user’s follows isn’t viable for users with large follower counts, plus you can’t just add new follows to the count as they come in because that won’t account for users unfollowing.
Something tells me Twitch is moving away from follows as a KPI because its no longer surfaced below the stream like “views” are.
Yeah, I’m just hypothesizing. It’s no longer below stream with “viewers” and “views,” which in addition to its omission from the user object could mean that they are focusing on it less as a performance metric and more as a quantity like the “video” count in the same row.
I hope it’s not the case, but it seems like a weird thing to be missing if it’s not intentional.
Yeah i hope too that this is not intentional, since in my oppinion total views is kind of a unmeasurable metric (that doesn’t really tell us much about the channel). In general i hope that the new api provides more informations about channels in the future (maybe some stats regarding average viewers, country, …), at the moment the new api seems to be lacking in that regarding.
My solution for now was to use the old api to get these kind of informations.
Since there was no official reply, yet here, i would like to push this topic once again so we can maybe get some infos as to why the follower count is missing in the new api
Also throwing my support in for getting total follower count into one of the endpoints. Seems like a ridiculous ask that to get a users follow count that we would have to count paginated results, for instance, if a user has 1M followers, that’s 10K requests at 100 results per page, seems like we’d hit rate limit concerns or just be thrashing the API for no good reason.
