24 comments

  • flowgrammer7 hours ago
    Great idea. One of my saddest projects was making a site to help Twitch streamers get sponsorship for playing games. You automatically got picked if your view count was high enough. I saw thousands of people streaming on Twitch by themselves for weeks with no viewers whatsoever. Surely many of them had families and partners, but I'm also sure many did not.
    • sanswork2 hours ago
      I used to live code on Twitch regularly with zero viewers and it didn't really bother me. It forced me to actively talk through my decision making processes just by streaming which slowed me down but was often useful. I'm not sure what the family/partners part is about, I certainly had both while streaming.
    • vector_spaces5 hours ago
      Maybe I&#x27;m naive, but my sense is not everyone streaming on Twitch is trying to make a career out of it. Even for those that are -- everyone starts somewhere. Hopefully those that aren&#x27;t successful on first brush notice and realize that it takes more than simply starting a stream to build a sticky audience.<p>Also, there are many people out there who lead fulfilling lives without families and partners. Either way, I don&#x27;t think you should pity people so readily. At best it&#x27;s somewhat condescending and missing much of the complexity and nuance of what it is to be a human person
    • vasco4 hours ago
      What does having a family have to do with anything? I see many people with different hobbies that aren&#x27;t &quot;successful&quot;, do you also think if they have families or not?<p>I don&#x27;t even get the implications, presumably it&#x27;d be worse to stream all day if you have a family you&#x27;re neglecting, but even that is making wild assumptions.
      • bobsmooth3 hours ago
        &gt;What does having a family have to do with anything?<p>Presumably that at least one of their family members would be pity watching.
  • chundicus8 hours ago
    What about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nobody.live&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nobody.live&#x2F;</a>?
    • ucarion3 hours ago
      Leads me to discover: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitch.tv&#x2F;chat_loadtest_01" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitch.tv&#x2F;chat_loadtest_01</a> ... neat!
      • nubinetwork1 hour ago
        Theres a lot of weird channels on twitch, I run into ones with &quot;ingest&quot; in their name quite often.
    • ellg8 hours ago
      also neat! never heard of it, seems like we have a bit different ways about browsing similar data. very cool site
  • john_strinlai2 hours ago
    these types of projects are always fun, whether it is the old youtube videos with no views, or the few other twitch ones like this i have seen. thanks for sharing it.<p>it would be great to be able to filter by language, but i have no idea if twitch exposes that information or if it would have to be some hack with the title&#x2F;game&#x2F;etc data.<p>and, probably not your fault, but, probably 1&#x2F;2 of the spins give me a 10-second pre-roll. weirdly, it isnt an advert, but some twitch-related thing i have never seen that says stuff like &quot;preparing the stream&quot; and &quot;an intern stepped on a wire while your stream was setting up&quot;. i am signed in, so not sure what is going on there.<p>anyways, spun the wheel for awhile and had fun talking with a few people. crazy amount of people still playing call of duty, i had no idea.
    • Akronymus24 minutes ago
      those preroll &quot;ads&quot; are the alternative to mid stream ads.
  • mister_mort7 hours ago
    Perhaps you can add a check to see if the stream is behind a login&#x2F;agegate? I pushed the random button and got a stream that I was locked out of.
    • ellg7 hours ago
      ill check, I honestly didnt even know that was a thing, thanks for letting me know
  • jmpavlec3 hours ago
    Very nice. Currently on mobile where it mostly works in landscape. (Unusable in portrait). Will check it out on desktop later.<p>Love the idea of making someone&#x27;s day.
  • lovehashbrowns7 hours ago
    really fun! already found an MLB stream, someone streaming Age of Empires 1 no talking and chat in emote mode, someone going absolutely crazy on a racing game I think multi-streaming with their audience primarily on YT. and now I&#x27;m on a BG3 playthrough I&#x27;m pretty sure.
  • mememememememo8 hours ago
    Old discussion has lots of comments too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23114103">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23114103</a>
  • password43219 hours ago
    Similar in spirit to IMG_0001⁰, IMG_0416¹, and astronaut.io² for YouTube but live on Twitch!<p>⁰<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47308547">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47308547</a><p>¹<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42314547">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42314547</a><p>²<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20432772">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20432772</a>
  • JohannesCortez7 hours ago
    Great concept! Brought me to a girl playing COD. She only has me as a viewer.<p>She thanked me so I stayed for a while lol
  • ellg9 hours ago
    Check out a cool real time feed of people discovering new streamers here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitchroulette.net&#x2F;discover" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitchroulette.net&#x2F;discover</a><p>And some neat global stats around twitch streams here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitchroulette.net&#x2F;stats" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitchroulette.net&#x2F;stats</a>
    • recursivecaveat8 hours ago
      For anyone who is curious btw: twitch will count you as your own viewer. So anyone with their own chat open in a browser (almost everyone so they can read it) will have that 1 viewer. Which is why the bottom of the distribution is so weird looking.
      • ellg8 hours ago
        ya it&#x27;s why I have the default set to 0-5, theres weirdness in what twitch counts as a viewer
  • AlphaTheGoat6 hours ago
    Great idea for when you bored and want to discover new twitch channels. Just a suggestion: it would be better if you can ask the user what their preference is and then suggest accordingly.
    • ellg6 hours ago
      check out the +filter button on the homepage!
  • nosmokewhereiam9 hours ago
    There are some soundcloud and mixcloud versions that might need inventing ...cool concept!
  • munro5 hours ago
    Awesome haha, they look so shocked when you send a message, and then I get embarrassed and spin again
  • kimchelgi035 hours ago
    Cool concept! Discovery is the hardest part for small streamers — most viewers only see the top channels and never scroll down. The real-time stats breakdown sounds interesting.
  • twentyfiveoh17 hours ago
    my first one was junk essentially. I don&#x27;t even think the host was there. They said they were streaming music videos, which is already questionable. Instead they were streaming an interview with a music artist.
  • QuiDortDine5 hours ago
    Kind reminder that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a monster of a company. Check out Owncast and Peertube for alternatives.
  • jaequery9 hours ago
    i am actually even more impressed that you got this to front page
    • ellg9 hours ago
      did I do something wrong or something
      • password43218 hours ago
        Not that I can see. I think most on HN root for the underdog.
  • dzonga9 hours ago
    this is pretty dope !!<p>was the only viewer to some guy playing far cry
  • saadn926 hours ago
    Can we make a version for YouTube as well? I&#x27;d love to be discovered haha
  • hikaru_ai1 hour ago
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  • genie3io40 minutes ago
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  • newgrit10043 hours ago
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  • reddozen8 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • john_strinlai2 hours ago
      &gt;<i>Dan Clancy is totally ok with his contracted streamers constantly live streaming terrorist training videos</i><p>who is streaming terrorist videos?<p>you say it like everyone is, but i have never seen one myself. not that i watch all of the big streamers, but i definitely watch <i>some</i> of the biggest streamers on the platform and have no idea what you are referencing.
    • ellg8 hours ago
      no comment on the political bits, but the fact that 80% of twitch is streaming to themselves cant be cheap to run<p>I do wish they would revamp their discoverability process
      • vintermann2 hours ago
        I think there&#x27;s a big &quot;control premium&quot; attached to these things. Not necessarily even that they <i>will</i> manipulate and censor rampantly, but that they <i>could</i>, I think the market prices highly.
      • tuveson7 hours ago
        Twitch gets a big cut of individual creators’ subs, and I’d bet most people that stream also sub to other channels. Keeping people in the ecosystem is probably worth it, even if there’s some amount of “freeloading”.
      • operatingthetan7 hours ago
        I mean if they are streaming to no clients, is there actually video being transmitted?
        • ellg7 hours ago
          youre still encoding to like, 4 different formats and pushing bytes to a cdn for 80k+ streams in real time. I think the actual serving of hls chunks is the cheap part
          • cwillu6 hours ago
            Transcoding is only guaranteed for twitch partners, and the cdn doesn&#x27;t actually distribute the video to a given datacenter until at least one viewer using that datacenter requests it.
            • ellg6 hours ago
              ya but 99% of streamers have their stream up in their dashboard or on a side monitor, so its always going to be sending and transcoding something
              • Karliss2 hours ago
                Twitch can forward the stream as is without transcoding it. That&#x27;s what transcoding not being guaranteed means. It will be a worse experience for viewers but it can work. Few years ago they even announced working with OBS on feature where streamers themselves can transcode and send multiple streams further reducing need for twitch to spend their compute resources on unprofitable streamers.
                • saltmate1 hour ago
                  That feature exists by now, called &quot;Enhanced Broadcasting&quot;.
              • cwillu1 hour ago
                In addition to the other reply, forwarding to one region in the cdn is not the same as forwarding to <i>every</i> region.
              • vscode-rest5 hours ago
                [dead]
          • cortesoft4 hours ago
            Maybe they just don’t do that if you don’t have any streamers.
      • nefarious_ends7 hours ago
        do you think they get a blank check for AWS resources?
        • ellg7 hours ago
          honestly not sure, but it would explain how they can keep it running
          • whaleofatw20227 hours ago
            Well, I know a year (or 3?) Back they changed their retention of long videos, my guess is to lower storage spend.
        • charcircuit6 hours ago
          It&#x27;s important that they have a proper budget and pay near the sticker price that way they can play accounting games to make Twitch look unprofitable.
  • sulplisetalk8 hours ago
    &quot;Twatxh Loulette&quot;