Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chinese livestreaming platforms have an addiction to inflating numbers, so I'm not sure if those are all real, or just growth hacking and user retention tricks. Since it's just senconds long and users will switch if they don't like the first few seconds, the sunk cost is relatively low.
I heard their algorithm is quantized — first your video is “piloted” with a small set of people that are guaranteed to see it. Then, if it passes a metric, it graduates to a bigger pool of people. And then one more level.
I mean, what's stopping them from doing this, everyone seems to be happy about it.
Initially they called these numbers "viewer count", but apparently it got too embarrassing even for themselves, one streamer reached 5.9 billion. Then they call it "popularity index" since everybody knew it's fake.