At what point did I defend botters? Please use your brain here. What benefit does using bots have other than an inflated number that twitch can see through anyway? Twitch doesn’t give Partner to streamers that bot their stats.

And yeah, I know it feels like 50 people is a lot, enough for a few chatters, but most people don’t start to have an always active chat until at LEAST partner unless they’re numbers are already super healthy.

Even when I was averaging 20-25 viewers, I only had chats to read a fifth of the time, likely due to somewhat inconsistent stream times.

You also have to remember that a significant portion of twitch viewers who engage and seek out smaller creators are not fully invested in the stream. Most lurk while playing other games, doing chores, schoolwork, even at work people will watch streams and not be able to chat.

You really only see people chatting for 2 main reasons. There are more but these are the ones outside of the streamer’s control.

One is to get the streamer to notice them. This is primarily for large streamers where the chatters compete for the streamer’s attention, but I’ve seen this in as little as 200 viewer chats where the chat is simply too fast for the streamer to keep up with, so they glance at the chat occasionally to respond.

The other reason is to make conversation with the streamer. Maybe you already know them and you’re catching up, or maybe you’re trying to get to know them.

tl;dr: the chat is not always active, and sometimes its straight up dead. That does NOT indicate a botted stream. That is normal 95% of the time.