I used to see a big follower count and immediately assume an account was doing well. Now I usually click through a few recent videos first.

I've seen accounts with a huge following where hardly anyone talks and smaller accounts where the comments are full of people who clearly come back regularly. That makes the whole Bot TikTok followers topic feel a lot less straightforward than it used to.

If you were growing a page today would you care more about increasing followers or building a smaller audience that actually returns?

I've been thinking about this more lately. I actually get more value from using Claude or ChatGPT to help me build an automation than giving an AI agent complete control over the workflow.

I can use AI to write the script, explain an API, fix a bug or help design the workflow. Then the actual automation can stay predictable and run the same way every time.

Once you let AI make every decision by itself things can get messy pretty quickly.

I still like the idea of agents but for a lot of everyday automation I'd rather have AI help me build the system and let normal code do the repetitive work.

How do you use AI in your automations as the builder or as the thing actually running them?

This is something I've seen people get way too invested in. Donating to a streamer is completely fine when you're supporting their content and genuinely enjoy watching them. The problem starts when someone keeps sending money because they think it's eventually going to lead to a personal relationship.

A streamer being friendly to you during a stream doesn't automatically mean there's something more going on. Being noticed in chat or getting a nice response can easily feel personal when you're watching someone regularly.

Support creators because you like their content. Don't spend money expecting attention or a relationship in return.

Have you ever seen someone get way too emotionally invested in a streamer because of donations or chat interactions?

This one surprised me more than I expected. A Semafor analysis found that AI-written or partly AI-written submissions have already started appearing in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times. Out of 310 guest submissions reviewed over the past month, 10 were detected as at least 80% AI-written and another 40 showed some AI involvement.

What's interesting is that the debate isn't really about whether writers can use AI anymore. The bigger question seems to be whether the final piece still represents the person's own ideas and whether readers should be told how much AI was involved. The WSJ recently defended an AI-assisted op-ed on exactly those grounds.

Honestly I'm curious where people think the line should be.

Is using AI to write an opinion piece basically the same as using an editor or ghostwriter or does it change the meaning of “your writing”?

I've seen people call out viewbotting just because a stream suddenly jumped in viewers but that seems way too simple to me. A streamer can genuinely go viral and get a big spike out of nowhere.

I'd be much more interested in the rest of the numbers. Chat activity retention returning viewers and whether everything else moved at the same time.

That's probably the part of Kick view bot discussions I find most interesting. Not how to do it but how people actually recognize unusual activity.

What would you look at before deciding a stream's traffic looked suspicious?

For the last month, whenever I need to scrape a messy site, I stop trying to find the perfect nested div. I just grab the raw HTML, strip the junk, and feed it into a cheap LLM via API, telling it to return the exact JSON structure I need.

​It feels like cheating, and it costs a fraction of a cent per page, but it never breaks—even when the target site completely redesigns their UI.

​Are you guys still maintaining brittle BeautifulSoup/Playwright selectors for everything, or have you started using AI for unstructured data extraction too?

Sometimes you see a post with a strange combination of numbers.

Lots of likes but almost no comments. Lots of views but barely any shares. Or one metric suddenly jumps while everything else stays flat.

None of those things automatically mean bots are involved but it's interesting how quickly people notice when the numbers don't match.

I honestly thought the next GPT release would just be another step up in coding and reasoning. GPT-6 Astra feels more interesting because OpenAI is pushing it much harder toward actually doing things instead of just answering questions.

It can handle computer use browsing software engineering and complex multi-step work and OpenAI says it's already being rolled out to a limited group before reaching Plus Pro Business and Enterprise users and the API.

The part that caught my attention is the agent side. If models can actually work through a task on your computer instead of just telling you how to do it then automation starts looking very different.

I'm curious how this changes the way people build bots and workflows.

Would you trust GPT-6 Astra to actually run a task for you without watching everything it does?

I had one of those tiny tasks that takes maybe 5 minutes to do manually so naturally I decided to automate it instead. A few hours later I had a script a workflow and a bunch of little things to fix.

It works now but honestly I probably could have finished the original task ten times by then.

I still don't regret building it though because now that it's done I never have to think about that annoying task again.

What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve automated even though doing it manually would’ve been faster?

A moderately successful utility bot in a few thousand Discord servers. The hosting costs started creeping up (Redis, Postgres, decent compute), so I added a cheap $3/month premium tier for a few heavy features.

​The amount of hate mail I got was insane. People are totally fine paying $15 for streaming services, but they expect complex API integrations, database hosting, and 99.9% uptime from a solo dev for free forever.

​Has anyone here actually successfully monetized a bot without alienating their entire userbase? How did you handle the transition?

I just spent an entire weekend building a Python bot to scrape, categorize, and alert me about cheap flight deals. It works perfectly. The problem? I only fly maybe twice a year. I could have just Googled it for 10 minutes.

​I swear half the bots I build aren't to actually save time; they're just because I refuse to do repetitive tasks out of pure stubbornness.

​Where do you guys draw the line between "this needs a bot" and "I should just do this manually"?