Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find live streamers who need views the most(twitchroulette.net)
126 points by ellg 12 hours ago | 61 comments
- Lorean1 3 minutes agoI'm not sure about the framing from the title, it's like "find businesses which need your money the most" - not a great advertisement
- muppetman 1 hour agoOh my god I love this. I tell every one I load up how terrible they are and to give up now.
I think I’ve discouraged about 250 so far!!
What a wonderful project.
[-]- torlok 36 minutes agoNo, stop, you're misusing it. The purpose of this site is to build parasocial relationships with strangers online.
- flowgrammer 9 hours agoGreat 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.[-]
- sanswork 4 hours agoI 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_spaces 7 hours agoMaybe I'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't successful on first brush notice and realize that it takes more than simply starting a stream to build a sticky audience.
Also, there are many people out there who lead fulfilling lives without families and partners. Either way, I don't think you should pity people so readily. At best it's somewhat condescending and missing much of the complexity and nuance of what it is to be a human person
[-]- mmarvin 8 minutes agowhy would you stream on Twitch then? just because it‘s „fun“? come on
- monssooon 1 hour agoIt can also be a way yo practise or find like minded
- vasco 6 hours agoWhat does having a family have to do with anything? I see many people with different hobbies that aren't "successful", do you also think if they have families or not?
I don't even get the implications, presumably it'd be worse to stream all day if you have a family you're neglecting, but even that is making wild assumptions.
[-]- carlosjobim 1 hour agoIf you have a family, why would you be screaming into the void while playing video games? Go spend time with your family, where there's endless company and good to be done.
- bobsmooth 5 hours ago>What does having a family have to do with anything?
Presumably that at least one of their family members would be pity watching.
- chundicus 10 hours agoWhat about https://nobody.live/?[-]
- ucarion 5 hours agoLeads me to discover: https://www.twitch.tv/chat_loadtest_01 ... neat![-]
- nubinetwork 3 hours agoTheres a lot of weird channels on twitch, I run into ones with "ingest" in their name quite often.
- ellg 10 hours agoalso neat! never heard of it, seems like we have a bit different ways about browsing similar data. very cool site
- john_strinlai 4 hours agothese 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.
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/game/etc data.
and, probably not your fault, but, probably 1/2 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 "preparing the stream" and "an intern stepped on a wire while your stream was setting up". i am signed in, so not sure what is going on there.
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.
[-]- Akronymus 2 hours agothose preroll "ads" are the alternative to mid stream ads.
- mister_mort 9 hours agoPerhaps you can add a check to see if the stream is behind a login/agegate? I pushed the random button and got a stream that I was locked out of.[-]
- ellg 8 hours agoill check, I honestly didnt even know that was a thing, thanks for letting me know
- jmpavlec 5 hours agoVery nice. Currently on mobile where it mostly works in landscape. (Unusable in portrait). Will check it out on desktop later.
Love the idea of making someone's day.
- lovehashbrowns 9 hours agoreally 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'm on a BG3 playthrough I'm pretty sure.
- JohannesCortez 9 hours agoGreat concept! Brought me to a girl playing COD. She only has me as a viewer.
She thanked me so I stayed for a while lol
- monssooon 1 hour agoIs there something like this for YouTube?
- mememememememo 10 hours agoOld discussion has lots of comments too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114103
- password4321 11 hours agoSimilar in spirit to IMG_0001⁰, IMG_0416¹, and astronaut.io² for YouTube but live on Twitch!
⁰https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308547
- ellg 11 hours agoCheck out a cool real time feed of people discovering new streamers here: https://twitchroulette.net/discover
And some neat global stats around twitch streams here: https://twitchroulette.net/stats
[-]- recursivecaveat 10 hours agoFor 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.[-]
- ellg 10 hours agoya it's why I have the default set to 0-5, theres weirdness in what twitch counts as a viewer
- AlphaTheGoat 8 hours agoGreat 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.[-]
- ellg 8 hours agocheck out the +filter button on the homepage!
- nosmokewhereiam 11 hours agoThere are some soundcloud and mixcloud versions that might need inventing ...cool concept!
- munro 7 hours agoAwesome haha, they look so shocked when you send a message, and then I get embarrassed and spin again
- kimchelgi03 7 hours agoCool 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.
- twentyfiveoh1 9 hours agomy first one was junk essentially. I don'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.
- xyrox1 1 hour agoGood job
- QuiDortDine 7 hours agoKind reminder that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a monster of a company. Check out Owncast and Peertube for alternatives.[-]
- sudo_cowsay 1 hour agomonster yes, but also very powerful
- jaequery 11 hours agoi am actually even more impressed that you got this to front page[-]
- ellg 11 hours agodid I do something wrong or something[-]
- password4321 10 hours agoNot that I can see. I think most on HN root for the underdog.[-]
- R_D_Olivaw 9 hours agoNext up: HackernewsRoulette[-]
- dezgeg 1 hour agoRoulette to find all those vibe coded apps with zero users, sounds great!
- dzonga 11 hours agothis is pretty dope !!
was the only viewer to some guy playing far cry
- saadn92 8 hours agoCan we make a version for YouTube as well? I'd love to be discovered haha
- deringeorge2 1 hour ago[dead]
- hikaru_ai 3 hours ago[dead]
- newgrit1004 4 hours ago[dead]
- genie3io 2 hours ago[dead]
- reddozen 10 hours ago[flagged][-]
- john_strinlai 4 hours ago>Dan Clancy is totally ok with his contracted streamers constantly live streaming terrorist training videos
who is streaming terrorist videos?
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 some of the biggest streamers on the platform and have no idea what you are referencing.
- ellg 10 hours agono comment on the political bits, but the fact that 80% of twitch is streaming to themselves cant be cheap to run
I do wish they would revamp their discoverability process
[-]- vintermann 4 hours agoI think there's a big "control premium" attached to these things. Not necessarily even that they will manipulate and censor rampantly, but that they could, I think the market prices highly.
- tuveson 9 hours agoTwitch 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”.
- operatingthetan 9 hours agoI mean if they are streaming to no clients, is there actually video being transmitted?[-]
- ellg 9 hours agoyoure 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[-]
- cwillu 8 hours agoTranscoding is only guaranteed for twitch partners, and the cdn doesn't actually distribute the video to a given datacenter until at least one viewer using that datacenter requests it.[-]
- ellg 8 hours agoya 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[-]
- Karliss 4 hours agoTwitch can forward the stream as is without transcoding it. That'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.[-]
- saltmate 3 hours agoThat feature exists by now, called "Enhanced Broadcasting".
- cwillu 3 hours agoIn addition to the other reply, forwarding to one region in the cdn is not the same as forwarding to every region.
- vscode-rest 7 hours ago[dead]
- cortesoft 6 hours agoMaybe they just don’t do that if you don’t have any streamers.
- nefarious_ends 9 hours agodo you think they get a blank check for AWS resources?[-]
- ellg 9 hours agohonestly not sure, but it would explain how they can keep it running[-]
- whaleofatw2022 9 hours agoWell, I know a year (or 3?) Back they changed their retention of long videos, my guess is to lower storage spend.
- charcircuit 8 hours agoIt'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.
- sulplisetalk 10 hours ago"Twatxh Loulette"