I really appreciate this project as going from 0-1 viewers on Twitch where the 1 isn't your friend is challenging.
If you give people a clear idea of what to expect from your stream and when it will be live, and if you don't make too many drastic or sudden changes to either of those variables, then those who like your content enough to make time for it will do so.
If you keep making changes, show up late or just don't seem dedicated, then people won't feel like they can rely on you. Because of that, people won't factor you into their decisions about how they spend their time.
Glad to see you're giving it an effort! I wish you the best of luck.
Most of my viewing experience is with retro game speedrunning and the specific advice for that community is to pick a game you want to learn and follow the best players. The world record holders and their friends tend to be very happy to share advice and tips for their game with new runners. This is great because it helps you establish a relationship with them without being “that guy” who is just there to try and promote his streaming channel (those people are universally reviled and often banned for unsolicited promotion). Instead, if you’re a legitimate member of the community, learning and improving at the game, then the big streamers may be happy to send you a raid.
It’s very much not a get rich quick scheme. It’s more like moving to a small town. You need to put yourself out there and ingratiate yourself to the community in order to gain trust and become a respected member. The above advice should be largely adaptable to any form of streaming with an established community.
unless twitch gives users incentive to go down the streamer list twitch as a growth platform is doomed. streaming is niche, gaming is even more niche. a platform thats solely for streaming gamers is isolated, thats why they've been trying to push just chatting and other endeavors outside of gaming but inevitably the majority of the userbase is made of gamers (in the slur sense) and make it difficult for non-gamers to become invested.
Youtube and Facebook streaming dont have these issues bc theyre built on platforms meant for everyone
Visibility. Dota and the likes have a large audience and are very easy to stream. Take a twist on it, or stream something else so you are easier to find.
Stream quality and viewer interaction. Talk to your chat and say their names as often as possible. In addition to that, have fancy overlays, a good cam and a good mic.
Now, actual communities in something like Matrix? Totally agree, would be very useful and insightful.
That's expected though. It's also true of YouTubers, and Instagram 'influencers'. Because the barrier to entry is low, you're competing with hundreds of thousands of other streamers for the same set of eyeballs. Except for a tiny minority, the vast majority of you will never make a penny from streaming. Do it as a hobby, but don't expect to make a living off of it.
What's your Twitch name?
I'm slowly getting better at it too and am planning on streaming some Julia Differential Equations stuff tomorrow PST.
My stream setup is open source on GitLab https://gitlab.com/NickBusey/CodingStream
Here's an article I used in my early days to help get going https://medium.com/@suzhinton/my-twitch-live-coding-setup-b2...
I'm not recommending that, it's something that Twitch are hotter about catching and banning these days, but it has meant that there has been an entrenched set of "big streamers" for some time now with less ability to break in.
Really the only way is to be playing a game for a while that suddenly gets big so you can be one of the better players for a while, or be playing a niche game that a 'big streamer' happens to play and you'll pick up some viewers when they inevitably move on to the next thing.
I'm sorry but this is not true. There have however been perception issues around viewbotting. One such:
For most of the life of host mode when a small stream would get hosted by a big stream, nearly all of the transitioned viewers would stay (through inaction) in the host's channel. Many would be AFK. The small streamer ends up with a large viewercount but a disproportionally "dead" chat, leading to cries of viewbotting.
Coincidentally, big-to-small hosts like this are frequently how fantastic but relatively undiscovered streamers get their "big break", further entangling the accusations with their success.
Source: Worked for five years at Twitch, built host mode
(PS: As someone who became good friends with some of these "big streamers" and those at Twitch combatting viewbotting, I can't help but feel insulted on both their behalves that the amount of invisible effort they pour into their craft so frequently gets shat on.)
For programming related streams I follow Jonathan Blow because he has a unique viewpoint around programming and also because I trust him because he's shipped multiple succesful games.
Be succesful IRL seems to be one of the best ways to get a popular stream.
This was also before Chat Roulette became nothing but dongs.
Perhaps I am too cynical.
The editing is very good: https://youtu.be/W6DmHGYy_xk
Them being shirtless without telling the other person in advance, is harm that theyd be causing in the first place.
Thank you /a lot/ for working on this!
I stream for artistic expression, BTW so an audience or not matters little
Thats a great tip, I didn't even know that was possible with Twitch.
The idea is to raid random channels together with everyone on the site. Channels are randomly selected and rotate every 5 minutes, and the channel selection function gives preference to smaller streamers. Users vote on which channel to raid next.
I could totally see myself using this more if you added 2 options, language and game.
Also interesting would be to display not only 0 streams but also streams with <10 viewers.
For anyone unaware, you can go to the Browse tab [0] and filter all live channels by a tag, which includes languages. You can also pick a game or category like "Just Chatting" first, then filter by language.
This is how I discover random korean streamers. You can also sort by "Viewers (Low to High)" or "Recently Started".
In general there is so much cool stuff out there on the edges of culture, but your really have to hang around in weird circles to stumble upon the hidden gems.
Is it binary between searching for 0 viewers and not 0< viewers?
If so I'd suggest implementing the option of searching for less than <arbitrary number of users>, so someone new actually can grow a bit from this tool before potentially taking off organically.
Not sure if I'm getting unlucky or the results are cached but quite a few of the streamers who popped up were offline. Using the twitch api under the hood I assume?
Not sure how happy Twitch is about external users, but it can be accessed quite easily with some tinkering.
https://gitlab.com/ibelimb/twitch-no-gameid
You'll need to get a set of Twitch API credentials from https://dev.twitch.tv/dashboard/apps/create and store the ID/Secret in config.json. Once you start the go program just point your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and you can browse through streams with no gameid set 50 at a time.
That being said, I find it extremely difficult to find streams of people coding. Maybe that exist but I'd like something where I can pick a platform of programming language or type of dev. I know there are a few tags like this on switch but there are almost no results and some of them still look like people gaming.
Also, I went to leave a comment on the stream and it asked me to log in. After jumping through the reset-your-password stuff and logging in I came back and tried to comment again (after refreshing). It said "you aren't logged in" (even though I am) and popped up the twitch homepage instead of the login box. The query param seemed to be something like ?popup=true, then it redirects to https://www.twitch.tv/?no-reload=true - which is just the twitch homepage.
[Edit: also, this is a really fun site! Excellent work!]
Feel free to give me a follow on my twitch channel https://twitch.tv/ellg -- I do a lot of programming on there and would love to have some more people stop by and chat :)
It'd be neat if there was a button here that would allow a user to subscribe with Prime; I'm sure these streamers would love that.
This whole project is about 4 hours total of dev time, so any feedback like this is nuch appreciated, thanks.
He was very excited to have some unexpected random viewers which made my day.
It's always fun to see some begginner streams.
