5 ms·

Happy Little Words – Analyzing the Bob Ross Twitch Chat

128 points by stevelosh 11y ago

Dirlewanger 11y ago
Absolutely titilating work. Off-topic: Never heard of you before, but you paint yourself as quite the polyglot for someone your age, I'm a bit dumbfounded and frankly a little upset at myself for not even coming close to what you've produced/created. What's your secret(s) to being so productive?
- stevelosh 11y ago
  To be good at everything you have to accept that you'll never be great at anything. I've made peace with that (for the most part). Also I don't have kids or a mortgage so I have more flexibility than most.
  - msellout 11y ago
    If "everything" is simply interpreted as many things, I believe one can be great at something and good at many things. If you interpret "everything" as a vast number of things, then being good at a vast number of things is a greatness in itself. Peace is good, but I'm not sure this is the right application.
    - pyre 11y ago
      "Making peace with <x>" on a personal level is just "coming to terms with <x>" or "accepting <x>." In this case, OP is probably accepting that he will never be a "master" or "guru" at something, while at the same time reaching "good" status on many things. This acceptance probably helps with not feeling that you are failing all of the time (i.e. not good enough) because you haven't reached some sort of "master/guru" status.
- codyb 11y ago
  There's a lot of hours in the day and a lot of years to life. Steve does seem very accomplished, that's quite a blog and set of projects he's got going on there. If you just set out to accomplish things though, you'll be surprised at how much you can complete, Also exercise (he does it through dancing it seems), you get a lot of energy from that. He's likely bilingual (or tri, or quad, or more) since he's from Iceland. That's super healthy. And he's clearly exercising all the areas of his brain by playing music, writing, engineering, and dancing. Probably doesn't spend too much time reading the news (it's easy to get lost in the rabbit hole that is reddit or hackernews sometimes), probably doesn't spend too much time binge watching things, probably doesn't party too hard too often. That's very different from assuming he never does any of those activities, it's probably just not his de facto constant. So I guess, and this is just an educated guess based on what I can see from him and my own personal experiences, my recommendation to you (and you didn't ask for my advice I know!) would be to limit the amount of time you spend doing things which are easy (reddit, hackernews, reading the news, watching TV), make sure to exercise, make sure to do something creative, and set singular goals for yourself (This week I want to write a blog post, my next goal is to develop a small program to do X). Finally, as you grow and continue to develop healthier habits it gets easier and easier to continue. So if you spend one week making sure to work towards your current singular goal, you're more likely to do so the next week. Also, starting is always the hardest part. Sometimes it's as simple as just opening the computer, closing the browser, and starting to futz around with some code. It takes about ten or fifteen minutes for me and then I'm in there like swim wear! And I can keep going for quite some time. But starting is always a bit arduous. Anyways, this is a bit winding but that's my opinion on your question.
  - stevelosh 11y ago
    > He's likely bilingual (or tri, or quad, or more) since he's from Iceland. Not quite, unfortunately. I just moved here a couple of months ago (I'm from the US). I am taking Icelandic classes though, and I do speak a bit of American Sign Language from my undergrad time at RIT. So I'm working on it. Also yeah, getting the hell off of reddit/facebook/hn is extremely important. Sometimes HN is good for finding interesting reading (I hit hckrnews.com once or twice a day to find good links) but always remember the golden rule of the internet: http://shouldireadthecomments.com http://shouldireadthecomments.com
lemevi 11y ago
As a participant, the chat was fun actually. Usually chat can be super toxic or even useless at the speed at which it was happening on Bob Ross. The RUINED and SAVED meme was interesting and enjoyable. I don't know why it was such fun, but it felt like a great and huge temporary community considerably limited in their ability to interact. One could really only join in the mob at the right time and when I did so it felt pretty rewarding and fun.
- skwirl 11y ago
  I was really surprised at how positive the chat was. I also expected it to be toxic, but instead it was good-natured and often funny. I didn't participate, but I glanced at it whenever something significant happened in the stream.
- seccess 11y ago
  I think my favorite meme was "blue OP plz nerf" whenever Bob mentioned he was using more crimson than blue, because blue was much stronger. I thought that was an interesting mix of gaming and art culture.
  - stevelosh 11y ago
    Similarly "VAC" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat whenever he does something seemingly impossible (like knowing about the stream or doing a particularly impressive save).
  - bla2 11y ago
    I also liked the "gg gb wp" at the end - the standard "good game" and "well played" that got changed to "well painted", combined with Ross's "god bless". "gg gb wp" made its way to some of the regular game chats by now.
- legohead 11y ago
  it was definitely fun after you got used to it. when I first checked out the stream and it was constant spam I felt really frustrated, until I could tell what was going on and my mind joined the hive ;) but if you had a valid question, or wanted to try out a real conversation... nope
degenerate 11y ago
Semi-related curiosity question: When viewing twitch chat as a logged-out user, if someone enters a banned word, it shows me "<message deleted>." However when there are dozens of messages per second like the bob ross chat, the message deleting seems delayed, because you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the bad words before they are "removed". I assume the removal is done with javascript? Are you seeing the non-censored version of the chat when scraping?
- kencausey 11y ago
  I believe the message removal is done by a moderator. This may be a human being or a bot. In either case the message has to appear in the chat before either party can decide whether to leave or remove it.
  - philipov 11y ago
    It's a bot. It's called XanBot [0] Twitch's chat protocol is compatible with IRC, but IRC doesn't support all new features, so things like replacing banned words with <Message Deleted> won't show up. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2dkro7/a_detailed_guide_on_howto_configure_and_operate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2dkro7/a_detailed_g...
- stevelosh 11y ago
  I'm not 100% sure how they're doing it. It seems to be both bad words and spammy stuff (e.g. a line of just "KappaRoss KappaRoss KappaRoss..." a hundred times over will get removed too). The IRC gateway passes through everything so I'm seeing it all unfiltered (as far as I can tell).
- fmueller 11y ago
  In the desktop version of twitch chat the deleted lines are crossed but visible. So I guess it's just some kind of markup which marks a line as deleted.
- renekooi 11y ago
  Messages are sent through plainly first over Twitch's IRC-ish protocol. You can connect to Twitch chat with a simple IRC client, or through the browser. Twitch's own browser chat connects to a WebSocket server that passes IRC commands to the browser, where they are parsed & executed. Twitch has a few additional IRC-ish commands like CLEARCHAT, which deletes messages by a given user. Most IRC clients don't support this, but Twitch's browser client of course does :) In larger streams spammy messages are usually removed by bots like http://www.nightbot.tv/ http://www.nightbot.tv/ or http://twitch.moobot.tv/ http://twitch.moobot.tv/. That's where the delay comes from: messages have to arrive at the moderator first. Interestingly, CLEARCHAT can only delete _all_ messages by a given user (as far as I know), so non-offending messages are also removed. This is done by the client, the chat servers only pass "CLEARCHAT #channel_name user_name". (e; it's all messages by a given user, or all messages in the channel if no username is given) In the Twitch browser client, you can double-click the <message deleted> text to show the original text if you really want to! :) Reference: https://github.com/justintv/Twitch-API/blob/master/IRC.md https://github.com/justintv/Twitch-API/blob/master/IRC.md
jaflo 11y ago
Fascinating to see how much information you can extract from text files and terminal commands (+ lots of piping). Makes you wonder how efficient GUIs really are for data analysis.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  Using terminal commands (w/ "lots of piping") for reproducable analysis that you intend to show to others is not recommended. More importantly, it increases the chance of making a mistake. There's nothing wrong with GUIs for statistical analysis.
  - genericpseudo 11y ago
    I disagree, sort of, a little bit. If I'm writing a shell pipeline for data analysis, I rewrite it as a Makefile. Make is a great tool for this sort of thing. (Use whatever works as long as it's a single command to reproducibly rerun an analysis.)
- qwerty_asdf 11y ago
  GUIs are there to distribute choices and permissible actions across a Cartesian plane, so that you can glance at a field of view, and quickly pick the thing you'd like to do right now, from a memorable/legible spatial arrangement. The reason we benefit from GUIs is the same reason we benefit from our predatory binocular vision. A hunter that can see its prey can home in on a target quickly. Terminal commands are a completely different strategy. Terminal commands only become intuitive, once you memorized chains of commands, and learned their interchangability. Terminal commands gain practicality through practice, like knowing where all your home's light switches are in the dark. After you've lived there for a while, your hands move to them involuntarily, when you get up in the middle of night for a glass of water. But try the same thing in a hotel room. All of this rides on top of a layer of muscle memory, but it's an order of magnitude more advanced, and decoupled. In league with playing an instrument, stenography and taking letters by dictation, that sort of thing. It's all blind and sightless.
Ocerge 11y ago
This looks like it was so much fun to do. One of these days I hope inspiration strikes me out of thin air to do something similar.
cjhveal 11y ago
I really enjoy Steve Losh's blog. I found his post[0] on returning to Vim during a formative part of my own career, and it really influenced my adoption of vim. He's got a great guide[1] on getting mutt set up on OS X for command-line email. And the minimalistic design suits my personal aesthetic. He wrote a post[2] on the design of it, like using the ratios of the dominant 7th chord, implementation of print accessibility/context headers, and even credits his inspirations. [0]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/ [1]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ [2]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-sing/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-sing/
- zhodge 11y ago
  Thank you for the mutt reference. I've been meaning to overhaul my email configuration and this seems like a great place to start. I too am fond of both the content and design of Steve's blog. He chooses to write about really interesting topics I find. Love the git koans :)
Fiahil 11y ago
I stumbled upon the channel by mistake once. What I found to be really interesting was the reactions flooding in the chat. You could, for example, like the author said, see 'gg' appearing in mass at the end of a painting, but not only! There was a beautiful moment where Bob decided to use a large brush and applied brown in a vertical band on the left side of an almost completed canvas ; you could instantly see the 'RUINED' and crying emoticons spawning in the chat. Then, he went on reassuring the audience and starting to add details, so the large band was gently becoming a tree ; he made a very kind comment and this instantly triggered a wave of hearts emoticons. It was very strange to witness the involvement of thousands of people through the chat of an online streaming platform, and I think it was a lot like watching a pet asking for food. Or something like that.
axyjo 11y ago
OP: possible typo? from 2015-11-16 14:30 to 2015-11-16 14:30 (all times are in UTC)
- stevelosh 11y ago
  Yep I'm bad at copy/paste. Fixed, thanks.
n3l50 11y ago
gold
abra0 11y ago
BTW, is there any way to get the chat archive from the original marathon? Is it saved at all somewhere? rechat.org does a similar thing, but its retention period is only one week.
- stevelosh 11y ago
  Not as far as I know. Let me know if you do find it -- I'm kicking myself for not thinking of scraping it then.

128 points by stevelosh 11y ago

Absolutely titilating work. Off-topic: Never heard of you before, but you paint yourself as quite the polyglot for someone your age, I'm a bit dumbfounded and frankly a little upset at myself for not even coming close to what you've produced/created. What's your secret(s) to being so productive?

stevelosh 11y ago
To be good at everything you have to accept that you'll never be great at anything. I've made peace with that (for the most part). Also I don't have kids or a mortgage so I have more flexibility than most.
- msellout 11y ago
  If "everything" is simply interpreted as many things, I believe one can be great at something and good at many things. If you interpret "everything" as a vast number of things, then being good at a vast number of things is a greatness in itself. Peace is good, but I'm not sure this is the right application.
  - pyre 11y ago
    "Making peace with <x>" on a personal level is just "coming to terms with <x>" or "accepting <x>." In this case, OP is probably accepting that he will never be a "master" or "guru" at something, while at the same time reaching "good" status on many things. This acceptance probably helps with not feeling that you are failing all of the time (i.e. not good enough) because you haven't reached some sort of "master/guru" status.
codyb 11y ago
There's a lot of hours in the day and a lot of years to life. Steve does seem very accomplished, that's quite a blog and set of projects he's got going on there. If you just set out to accomplish things though, you'll be surprised at how much you can complete, Also exercise (he does it through dancing it seems), you get a lot of energy from that. He's likely bilingual (or tri, or quad, or more) since he's from Iceland. That's super healthy. And he's clearly exercising all the areas of his brain by playing music, writing, engineering, and dancing. Probably doesn't spend too much time reading the news (it's easy to get lost in the rabbit hole that is reddit or hackernews sometimes), probably doesn't spend too much time binge watching things, probably doesn't party too hard too often. That's very different from assuming he never does any of those activities, it's probably just not his de facto constant. So I guess, and this is just an educated guess based on what I can see from him and my own personal experiences, my recommendation to you (and you didn't ask for my advice I know!) would be to limit the amount of time you spend doing things which are easy (reddit, hackernews, reading the news, watching TV), make sure to exercise, make sure to do something creative, and set singular goals for yourself (This week I want to write a blog post, my next goal is to develop a small program to do X). Finally, as you grow and continue to develop healthier habits it gets easier and easier to continue. So if you spend one week making sure to work towards your current singular goal, you're more likely to do so the next week. Also, starting is always the hardest part. Sometimes it's as simple as just opening the computer, closing the browser, and starting to futz around with some code. It takes about ten or fifteen minutes for me and then I'm in there like swim wear! And I can keep going for quite some time. But starting is always a bit arduous. Anyways, this is a bit winding but that's my opinion on your question.
- stevelosh 11y ago
  > He's likely bilingual (or tri, or quad, or more) since he's from Iceland. Not quite, unfortunately. I just moved here a couple of months ago (I'm from the US). I am taking Icelandic classes though, and I do speak a bit of American Sign Language from my undergrad time at RIT. So I'm working on it. Also yeah, getting the hell off of reddit/facebook/hn is extremely important. Sometimes HN is good for finding interesting reading (I hit hckrnews.com once or twice a day to find good links) but always remember the golden rule of the internet: http://shouldireadthecomments.com http://shouldireadthecomments.com

lemevi 11y ago

As a participant, the chat was fun actually. Usually chat can be super toxic or even useless at the speed at which it was happening on Bob Ross. The RUINED and SAVED meme was interesting and enjoyable. I don't know why it was such fun, but it felt like a great and huge temporary community considerably limited in their ability to interact. One could really only join in the mob at the right time and when I did so it felt pretty rewarding and fun.

skwirl 11y ago
I was really surprised at how positive the chat was. I also expected it to be toxic, but instead it was good-natured and often funny. I didn't participate, but I glanced at it whenever something significant happened in the stream.
seccess 11y ago
I think my favorite meme was "blue OP plz nerf" whenever Bob mentioned he was using more crimson than blue, because blue was much stronger. I thought that was an interesting mix of gaming and art culture.
- stevelosh 11y ago
  Similarly "VAC" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat whenever he does something seemingly impossible (like knowing about the stream or doing a particularly impressive save).
- bla2 11y ago
  I also liked the "gg gb wp" at the end - the standard "good game" and "well played" that got changed to "well painted", combined with Ross's "god bless". "gg gb wp" made its way to some of the regular game chats by now.
legohead 11y ago
it was definitely fun after you got used to it. when I first checked out the stream and it was constant spam I felt really frustrated, until I could tell what was going on and my mind joined the hive ;) but if you had a valid question, or wanted to try out a real conversation... nope

degenerate 11y ago

Semi-related curiosity question: When viewing twitch chat as a logged-out user, if someone enters a banned word, it shows me "<message deleted>." However when there are dozens of messages per second like the bob ross chat, the message deleting seems delayed, because you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the bad words before they are "removed". I assume the removal is done with javascript? Are you seeing the non-censored version of the chat when scraping?

kencausey 11y ago
I believe the message removal is done by a moderator. This may be a human being or a bot. In either case the message has to appear in the chat before either party can decide whether to leave or remove it.
- philipov 11y ago
  It's a bot. It's called XanBot [0] Twitch's chat protocol is compatible with IRC, but IRC doesn't support all new features, so things like replacing banned words with <Message Deleted> won't show up. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2dkro7/a_detailed_guide_on_howto_configure_and_operate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/2dkro7/a_detailed_g...
stevelosh 11y ago
I'm not 100% sure how they're doing it. It seems to be both bad words and spammy stuff (e.g. a line of just "KappaRoss KappaRoss KappaRoss..." a hundred times over will get removed too). The IRC gateway passes through everything so I'm seeing it all unfiltered (as far as I can tell).
fmueller 11y ago
In the desktop version of twitch chat the deleted lines are crossed but visible. So I guess it's just some kind of markup which marks a line as deleted.
renekooi 11y ago
Messages are sent through plainly first over Twitch's IRC-ish protocol. You can connect to Twitch chat with a simple IRC client, or through the browser. Twitch's own browser chat connects to a WebSocket server that passes IRC commands to the browser, where they are parsed & executed. Twitch has a few additional IRC-ish commands like CLEARCHAT, which deletes messages by a given user. Most IRC clients don't support this, but Twitch's browser client of course does :) In larger streams spammy messages are usually removed by bots like http://www.nightbot.tv/ http://www.nightbot.tv/ or http://twitch.moobot.tv/ http://twitch.moobot.tv/. That's where the delay comes from: messages have to arrive at the moderator first. Interestingly, CLEARCHAT can only delete _all_ messages by a given user (as far as I know), so non-offending messages are also removed. This is done by the client, the chat servers only pass "CLEARCHAT #channel_name user_name". (e; it's all messages by a given user, or all messages in the channel if no username is given) In the Twitch browser client, you can double-click the <message deleted> text to show the original text if you really want to! :) Reference: https://github.com/justintv/Twitch-API/blob/master/IRC.md https://github.com/justintv/Twitch-API/blob/master/IRC.md

jaflo 11y ago

Fascinating to see how much information you can extract from text files and terminal commands (+ lots of piping). Makes you wonder how efficient GUIs really are for data analysis.

minimaxir 11y ago
Using terminal commands (w/ "lots of piping") for reproducable analysis that you intend to show to others is not recommended. More importantly, it increases the chance of making a mistake. There's nothing wrong with GUIs for statistical analysis.
- genericpseudo 11y ago
  I disagree, sort of, a little bit. If I'm writing a shell pipeline for data analysis, I rewrite it as a Makefile. Make is a great tool for this sort of thing. (Use whatever works as long as it's a single command to reproducibly rerun an analysis.)
qwerty_asdf 11y ago
GUIs are there to distribute choices and permissible actions across a Cartesian plane, so that you can glance at a field of view, and quickly pick the thing you'd like to do right now, from a memorable/legible spatial arrangement. The reason we benefit from GUIs is the same reason we benefit from our predatory binocular vision. A hunter that can see its prey can home in on a target quickly. Terminal commands are a completely different strategy. Terminal commands only become intuitive, once you memorized chains of commands, and learned their interchangability. Terminal commands gain practicality through practice, like knowing where all your home's light switches are in the dark. After you've lived there for a while, your hands move to them involuntarily, when you get up in the middle of night for a glass of water. But try the same thing in a hotel room. All of this rides on top of a layer of muscle memory, but it's an order of magnitude more advanced, and decoupled. In league with playing an instrument, stenography and taking letters by dictation, that sort of thing. It's all blind and sightless.

Ocerge 11y ago

This looks like it was so much fun to do. One of these days I hope inspiration strikes me out of thin air to do something similar.

cjhveal 11y ago

I really enjoy Steve Losh's blog. I found his post[0] on returning to Vim during a formative part of my own career, and it really influenced my adoption of vim. He's got a great guide[1] on getting mutt set up on OS X for command-line email. And the minimalistic design suits my personal aesthetic. He wrote a post[2] on the design of it, like using the ratios of the dominant 7th chord, implementation of print accessibility/context headers, and even credits his inspirations. [0]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/ [1]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/ [2]: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-sing/ http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/making-my-site-sing/

zhodge 11y ago
Thank you for the mutt reference. I've been meaning to overhaul my email configuration and this seems like a great place to start. I too am fond of both the content and design of Steve's blog. He chooses to write about really interesting topics I find. Love the git koans :)

Fiahil 11y ago

I stumbled upon the channel by mistake once. What I found to be really interesting was the reactions flooding in the chat. You could, for example, like the author said, see 'gg' appearing in mass at the end of a painting, but not only! There was a beautiful moment where Bob decided to use a large brush and applied brown in a vertical band on the left side of an almost completed canvas ; you could instantly see the 'RUINED' and crying emoticons spawning in the chat. Then, he went on reassuring the audience and starting to add details, so the large band was gently becoming a tree ; he made a very kind comment and this instantly triggered a wave of hearts emoticons. It was very strange to witness the involvement of thousands of people through the chat of an online streaming platform, and I think it was a lot like watching a pet asking for food. Or something like that.

axyjo 11y ago

OP: possible typo? from 2015-11-16 14:30 to 2015-11-16 14:30 (all times are in UTC)

stevelosh 11y ago
Yep I'm bad at copy/paste. Fixed, thanks.

n3l50 11y ago

gold

abra0 11y ago

BTW, is there any way to get the chat archive from the original marathon? Is it saved at all somewhere? rechat.org does a similar thing, but its retention period is only one week.

stevelosh 11y ago
Not as far as I know. Let me know if you do find it -- I'm kicking myself for not thinking of scraping it then.