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Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find and chat with streamers who are streaming alone
- x3haloed 6y agoWe didn’t learn our lesson about cam roulettes last time around?
- WorldPeas 6y agoHonestly, if sites like omegle had just created a dedicated pornographic section, it would have drawn that audience away from what was otherwise a pretty fun experience.
- jotm 6y agoThat... sounds like a good idea. I wonder why PornHub/etc don't try this? Or do they already have such a feature?
- vorpalhex 6y agoIssues with monetization and proving people are legal age.
- gccxsse 6y agoOmegle does have a dedicated adult section. It doesn't stop people from joining the non-adult section and exposing themselves for reactions.
- VectorLock 6y agoI always wonder how Twitch streamers manage to go from 0 to N thousand viewers. What is the most effective way people are using to self-promote? I've seen a lot of panels at PAX talking about how to "grow" streaming but nothing about how to "bootstrap" an audience. This seems like it could be a cool way to do that, if not even just find people to talk to.
- paraxisi 6y agoQuite a nice idea, well done! Very minimalist and clean as well. Few pieces of feedback after playing with it for a few minutes- 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?
- mumphster 6y agoYa due to the way getting acess to this works, theres a 10 minute cache of active streams that get expired in redis and a cron job pulls in a fresh list
- the_duke 6y agoIf you are not already, you could use the GraphQL API that the web app uses, which provides sorting by viewers ASC. That would allow for much more up to date results than iterating the full list with the official API. Not sure how happy Twitch is about external users, but it can be accessed quite easily with some tinkering.
- mumphster 6y agoThis is exactly what its doing, albeit caching results, somce im trying to be nice. Official api sadly does not allow sorting by asc.
- VectorLock 6y agoHopefully they're cool about it. Typically companies like this frown upon ersatz API usage and cache/rehosting of their data.
- riteshpatel 6y agoIs there a reason for a 10 minute cache duration? Even 1 minute would be fine from a performance point of view
- mumphster 6y ago
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoI chuckled as it reminded me of the cams roulettes in the old days. Still, I liked it. I got a random 'mature' stream.
- mobilio 6y agoLike Chaturbate?
- Rinum 6y agoGreat concept for the winner take all world we live in now. It's very difficult to get your name out there in anything these days without having to invest a lot in marketing yourself.
- mysterydip 6y agoAgreed. I'd like to see something similar for the app stores, but don't think it would work with the magnitude of games and apps there.
- polytely 6y agoSomewhat in the same vein is Steam's new game recommendation engine where you have a [popular --- niche] slider so you can filter out the obvious results. I wish more search engines had something like that. 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.
- alharith 6y agoJust to dive deeper into this, with the billions of people on this planet, why is someone necessarily entitled to getting their name out there without having to invest something themselves?
- arkitaip 6y agoIt doesn't help that most streams look identical to each other when your are browsing the directory, i.e. hundreds of thumbnails that look like screenshots of games. There is no way to tell them apart.
- croon 6y agoI'm doing the cardinal mistake of not having clicked the link since I'm at work, but to build on your sentiment: 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.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
- haunter 6y agoHmm there was https://lonelystreams.com/ https://lonelystreams.com/ before but it doesn't work for a long time.
- Pfhreak 6y agoAs someone who has periodically streamed, consider dropping a few chat messages when you land. Twitch's metrics are slow to update and it is not always clear when someone is watching.
- slashink 6y agoHello! I work on the video platform @ twitch. We’ve been working a lot on that issue. Viewer count numbers should be significantly faster today and will get even more responsive soon!
- ben509 6y agoI'd be interested in a short note on what made it slow / what makes it fast.
- raziel2p 6y agoAs a viewer I'm not sure I'd like this happening but for smaller streamers, a notification/message telling you that a viewer has joined or left might be useful.
- arkitaip 6y agoPlease don't. I would avoid certain stream if I knew they were told that I've joined/left because I do that quite frequently without saying anything and don't want to come across as an asshole.
- pietrovismara 6y agoIt's kinda the same reason why I don't watch stories on Facebook. I don't want people to automatically know I watched their stories.
- industriousthou 6y agoIs this a thing? A quick Google search just turned up articles about detecting if someone sees your profile, which of course they can't. Seems weird.
- vpzom 6y agoWhy is the stream area tiny?
- mumphster 6y agoYou can full screen it, I went with the lazy max fixed width approach for "responsive". This whole project is about 4 hours total of dev time, so any feedback like this is nuch appreciated, thanks.
- m1aw 6y agoReally cool idea. Thanks for sharing. 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.
- mumphster 6y agoYa I've heard similar ideas with regards to filtering, I'm gonna play around with that for sure. Thanks for the feedback.
- haunter 6y agoCan you use the Twitch tags? That would be even more useful than simply filtering by games.
- mumphster 6y agoTechnically ya, its just the route im going through to get this data probably has some rate limits that I'd like to avoid hitting. Need to figure out how to poke at this in a friendly enough way.
- baq 6y agofiltering by game while obvious also means creating a filter bubble - it'd be nice if a you could choose just from 'unpopular games' :)
- jerrre 6y agoI thought about both being able to include and exclude games (and non game stuff like IRL, music etc)
- JoshTriplett 6y agoI'd love to have a "not interested in this game" button next to the game, which would add that game to the exclude list and spin the wheel again.
- 6y ago
- darrenkopp 6y agoGreat idea. It'd be great if you could select a game / category. Reason is I'd actually be able to have an actual chat with someone if I knew something about the game.
- billrobertson42 6y agoIf the expose category and tags then passing through the ability to filter based on that would nice too.
- mumphster 6y agoYa I want to add this, I just need to figure out a way to ingest / filter the data in a way that twitch wont ban my account. Looking into this this weekend.
- philliphaydon 6y agoAnyone else using Firefox? It doesn't appear to work very well in FF :(
- mumphster 6y agointeresting, ill test in a bit. The only javascript on the page is from twitch for its embed API, everything else is just some really basic html and server side rendering, so I'm curious what would be breaking
- doublerabbit 6y agoI get a blank white page within Palemoon and Firefox within Linux.
- 6y ago
- ryeguy_24 6y agoThis was so much fun to test out this morning. Most streamers who saw me come in were so excited to have a viewer. Nice idea.
- kawsper 6y agoYes - I said hi to a few, and had some nice conversations as the only viewer, brilliant idea.
- pol4ko 6y agoVery cool idea. I'm having problems to access the website. Maybe the high traffic put it down.
- mumphster 6y agoJust bumped the amount of asgi workers and upped the DO droplet size, should be good now, sorry about that!
- astuyvenberg 6y agoThis is great! One thing that many HN-ers may not know is that Amazon Prime users get a free subscription to give to anyone on Twitch. 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.
- zerocrates 6y agoYou probably can't subscribe to the average streamer with zero viewers: you need to an "affiliate" or "partner" with Twitch for that to be an option.
- formalsystem 6y agotwitch is one of the platforms where I feel like I've struggled the most to get viewers. just playing my main game like Dota wasn't too productive since I'm not a pro or super hot so my value proposition there isn't too compelling. Instead I've been trying to focus more on streaming myself programming and learning new scientific or game programming libraries and have been enjoying it quite a bit. My viewer count is veeery slowly increasing but almost noone is subscribing, many of my friends have expressed interest in watching me so my plan is to start letting them know when I'm about to stream to seed some viewers. Also I've realized that the more specific your brand is on social media the more effective, I've been looking at branding myself as a strategy game buff/developer so will be streaming niche strategy games and Unity game development every weekend. I'll re-asses after a month to see if this plan was effective. I really appreciate this project as going from 0-1 viewers on Twitch where the 1 isn't your friend is challenging.
- twodave 6y agoIt definitely takes a long view approach. A couple important aspects of building a steaming following are structure and consistency. 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.
- andai 6y agoThis! Become part of people's routine.
- kawfey 6y agoIn addition, the most well attended streamers also have a significant following and consistent upload schedule on YouTube. Since Twitch lacks any sort of discoverability algorithm, new streamers will always have very few to no viewers. Having content on YouTube that drives viewers to twitch is nigh a requirement to be successful on the platform.
- MilnerRoute 6y agoSinger Ben Folds once did this during a huge concert. So random people looking for a video chat would suddenly see a man on a stage in front of a huge audience...singing a song about them. ("Hello Mr. Shirtless Man. How are you doin' today? Is it hot in there...?") https://www.pigdog.org/auto/viva_la_musica/link/3203.html https://www.pigdog.org/auto/viva_la_musica/link/3203.html
- geddy 6y agoI remember quite a while back, Chat Roulette song improv was a big thing. It was the guy in the hoodie - PianoChatImprov on Youtube. I just looked it up and, wow, that was 10 years ago. This was also before Chat Roulette became nothing but dongs.
- Nursie 6y agoI'm kinda surprised there was a "before" in that situation. I presumed that was what was going tonhappen from the get-go. Perhaps I am too cynical.
- artursapek 6y agoYou'd think with the state of machine learning these days someone could have another go at it, and ban users who show their dongs
- glasenator 6y agoNot Hotdog
- kripy 6y agoOr for those that want it, have a dong on / dong off preference.
- toyg 6y agoSadly, no. At the beginning it was mostly random people. Unfortunately, you need very little to ruin things - most normal people will not play even with a 10% chance of getting a dong, and the more “normies” leave, the higher that chance gets, in a vicious circle.
- Hamuko 6y agoIs the video supposed to be postage stamp sized?
- mumphster 6y agoNope, whats your viewing setup? OS, browser, device, etc? Still iterating on this from yall's feedback as we speak.
- mrspeaker 6y agoI had the same thing - Firefox on Mac. The video area was 920px wide, but the video player was only 250x150px. 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 https://www.twitch.tv/?no-reload=true - which is just the twitch homepage. [Edit: also, this is a really fun site! Excellent work!]
- mumphster 6y agobeautiful, thank you. I think this is the same css issue around twitch's embed iframe that someone else reported earlier. I'll try to get a fix up after I get off work today. Thanks for checking it out!
- mumphster 6y agoHey folks, thanks for the great feedback. I'm going to continue going through these threads and iterate on this idea some more this weekend. Feel free to give me a follow on my twitch channel https://twitch.tv/ellg https://twitch.tv/ellg -- I do a lot of programming on there and would love to have some more people stop by and chat :)
- sadok 6y agoCan you make the chat to the right and stream to the left? Pretty hard to chat when I have to scroll up/down constantly.
- davedx 6y agoScrew it I'll give this a try! Streaming right now :) https://www.twitch.tv/redskyforgeradio https://www.twitch.tv/redskyforgeradio
- rnotaro 6y agoIt's broken now because of API changes but it's the same concept as LonelyStreams (https://lonelystreams.com https://lonelystreams.com). It's always fun to see some begginner streams.
- hassaanm 6y agoI made a similar site as part of a hackathon at Twitch: https://twitchraids.com https://twitchraids.com 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.
- xmprt 6y agoWhich TwitchCon did you go to? I had the exact same idea but my team ended up going with something else. It's cool that you ended up actually hosting it after the hackathon ended. Do you know how many people are still using it?
- mumphster 6y agoNeat! I've had this idea in my head for a while but could never find a good way to get the data in a way I wanted it. Really neat app though, good work
- chipperyman573 6y agoThis is interesting because you can incentivise people to go to other streams by offering them multipliers for every raid they join (or something). You'd have a network of people who are watching ads for the chance of having their ad watched!
- 6y ago
- sbuccini 6y agoI just listened to a little kid play Fortnite while I did some work in the background. He was very excited to have some unexpected random viewers which made my day.
- neilwilson 6y agoYeah, I do this a lot. But it’s a useful discipline to make sure you push your side project along.
- AmazingTurtle 6y agoWould be nice if you could filter those fortnite kiddies
- LockAndLol 6y agoI don't know how it works, but it would great to check if the streamers are streaming. Clicked on multiple streams that weren't live.
- laurex 6y agoWhat could go wrong?
- BredWinner 6y agoVery cool to drop by and say hello to them. What host did you use? It connects to streams so quickly!
- mumphster 6y agojust a normal cheap digital ocean vps running python + starlette and redis as a data backend, nothing fancy at all
- soylentcola 6y agoHeh...spun the wheel a few times and found someone's re-broadcast of the BBC4 stream.
- MarioMan 6y agoOn a related note, there used to be a site, https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/ https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/, where you could find "uncategorized" streams with no game set. All sorts of strange broadcasts live there, from pirate sports casts to whole movies streamed to the most random garbage, but the owner took most of the site down after Twitch requested that they stop scraping the site (https://twitter.com/CommanderRoot/status/1250486976547106821 https://twitter.com/CommanderRoot/status/1250486976547106821). I haven't been able to find any alternative services that offer this. If anyone has such a service, I'd love to go surfing around the strange part of Twitch again.
- Limb 6y agoThis sounded like a fun idea so I threw together a quick Go project to test it out / learn some go. https://gitlab.com/ibelimb/twitch-no-gameid 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 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/ http://localhost:8080/ and you can browse through streams with no gameid set 50 at a time.
- mumphster 6y agoCool! I went ahead and added category sorting last night to twitchroulette, check out the "unknown" filter to randomly browse through streams with no category set. Theres some weird stuff in there for sure (and quite a few pirated movie streams)
- zbowling 6y agofeature request: language picker. saying hi to someone that doesn't speak my language has got me kicked.
- baalimago 6y agoI'm guessing my suggestion is also buried by about 110 comments by now, but the stream in the UX is far too small and makes the actual stream far less viewable than the chat. A viewer doesn't view for the chat, he views for the stream, the chat's a bonus. To swap the expectation is unrealistic. Twitch.tv isn't a chatting program.
- mumphster 6y agothis was an issue with firefox and I pushed a css fix, sorry about that
- zbowling 6y agoI joined someone streaming on PS4. He said he had been streaming on PS4 for almost a year and had close to 0 people ever viewing his stream.
- olah_1 6y agoI found a streamer that was really cool. Followed. Honestly great product. It's like StumbleUpon but for streamers.
- jupp0r 6y agoIsn’t this already there and called Omegle?
- Kiro 6y agoDid you miss the Twitch part?
- diehunde 6y agoI got a user whose username ended with a + and the site crashed. Cool idea by the way!
- mrkramer 6y agoInteresting idea, I think this should be standalone product. On the other side when I see ChatRoullete it is very popular but for some reason not commercially successful.
- superbaconman 6y agoI think a small improvement may be to use an auto-complete text box instead of dropdown. The items in the dropbox aren't ordered so i can't jump to the game i'm interested in by typing.
- igrekel 6y agoEvery now and then I look at thi. I enjoyed watching people coding now and then, I find its a good way to improve my set up when I am on a new technology. 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.
- mikekchar 6y agoLook in the "Science and Technology" section. It took me forever to figure that out.
- igrekel 6y agoI did try that but still get tons of people apparently streaming games. Also I don't seem to get that many results. Also it would be nice to be able to classify things by language, platform etc.
- d0m 6y agoQuick suggestion: Sort game name A-Z
- mumphster 6y agoDone, thanks!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- XCSme 6y agoIs the site down? I get a 502 error.
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- InvestorTy 6y agohttps://gidient9ja.com/ https://gidient9ja.com/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/9/videos/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/9/videos/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/1/music/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/1/music/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/2/nigeria-hip-hop/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/2/nigeria-hip-hop/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/19/south-africa-music/ https://www.gidient9ja.com/19/south-africa-music/