Meanwhile, Twitch has had a significant bot spamming problem.

The fact that they can use this number to correlate against contact lists collected from other people.

Now I don't think Twitch itself is doing this, but they may provide this information to marketing platforms such as Facebook which will use this data for ad targeting (and they definitely have a lot of people's contacts and can infer social graphs very well as a result).

The only scammers who know my number are my phone-provider and my mom. Other scammers either never call me, or just don't know the number. Protecting your number is possible.

> Meanwhile, Twitch has had a significant bot spamming problem.

Which can be solved without this. The bot-problem is more about people not using the existing tools well and twitch sucking in their handling. Adding another features they won't use will not make anything better. Especially as the phone-number only rises the bar for bots.

It literally takes only one person who has your number to reveal your number.

And even otherwise, any fuckups there, my bank is liable. My phone number? Outside of changing my 20-year-old number, there’d be nithing I could do.

> And even otherwise, any fuckups there, my bank is liable. My phone number? Outside of changing my 20-year-old number, there’d be nothing I could do.

They really need that verification option just to avoid getting run off the platform.

For friends/family they have my cell# and it only lets calls through if they're in my contacts.

Phone numbers are nice because the marginal cost to a customer is low (they probably already have one) while the marginal cost to a bad actor is high (it's expensive to acquire many of them or to change one once it's been identified as malicious).

My current twitch subscriptions: 11.97€/month

I can’t really see how they need my phone number to make it too expensive to be a bot.

And if that is the thing, then that’d makes them even more shady, claiming it’s for account security when it’s for their bit protection.