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Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find live streamers who need views the most
Hey HN, I re-launched an old site I remembered back in the day that someone made called twitchroulette.net with a lot of new features and stats and I would love for people to check it out. The idea is you can easily browse the less browsed parts of twitch and find cool and new streamers to say hi to, and maybe make some new friends.
I also added some real time stats and breakdowns per channel and I think some of the things they show are pretty interesting. Check it out!
- nosmokewhereiam 6mo agoThere are some soundcloud and mixcloud versions that might need inventing ...cool concept!
- Lorean1 6mo 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
- realharo 6mo agoYeah, it makes it sound like your attention is given as an act of charity. A lot of online discourse tends to be very "creator-first" framed, rather than "audience-first".
- ellg 6mo agoCheck out a cool real time feed of people discovering new streamers here: https://twitchroulette.net/discover https://twitchroulette.net/discover And some neat global stats around twitch streams here: https://twitchroulette.net/stats https://twitchroulette.net/stats
- recursivecaveat 6mo 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.
- RugnirViking 6mo agowhats the other end of some of these? you showed which categories tend to have 0-1 viewers, what categories have the least? what categories have lowest average age of accounts with 10+ viewers etc. What should you do to stand out?
- password4321 6mo agoSimilar in spirit to IMG_0001⁰, IMG_0416¹, and astronaut.io² for YouTube but live on Twitch! ⁰https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308547 ¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42314547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42314547 ²https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772
- jaequery 6mo agoi am actually even more impressed that you got this to front page
- ellg 6mo agodid I do something wrong or something
- password4321 6mo agoNot that I can see. I think most on HN root for the underdog.
- R_D_Olivaw 6mo agoNext up: HackernewsRoulette
- dezgeg 6mo agoRoulette to find all those vibe coded apps with zero users, sounds great!
- jaequery 6mo agowhat? no, i love projects like these. but re-reading my comment, it does sound a little messed =p. what i meant was it gave me old HN vibes, back when weird, fun projects popped off instead of everything being AI-wrapped.
- dzonga 6mo agothis is pretty dope !! was the only viewer to some guy playing far cry
- chundicus 6mo agoWhat about https://nobody.live/ https://nobody.live/?
- ellg 6mo agoalso neat! never heard of it, seems like we have a bit different ways about browsing similar data. very cool site
- ucarion 6mo agoLeads me to discover: https://www.twitch.tv/chat_loadtest_01 https://www.twitch.tv/chat_loadtest_01 ... neat!
- nubinetwork 6mo agoTheres a lot of weird channels on twitch, I run into ones with "ingest" in their name quite often.
- mememememememo 6mo agoOld discussion has lots of comments too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114103
- reddozen 6mo ago[flagged]
- ellg 6mo 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
- nefarious_ends 6mo agodo you think they get a blank check for AWS resources?
- ellg 6mo agohonestly not sure, but it would explain how they can keep it running
- whaleofatw2022 6mo agoWell, I know a year (or 3?) Back they changed their retention of long videos, my guess is to lower storage spend.
- charcircuit 6mo 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.
- operatingthetan 6mo agoI mean if they are streaming to no clients, is there actually video being transmitted?
- ellg 6mo 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
- sulplisetalk 6mo ago[flagged]
- twentyfiveoh1 6mo 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.
- flowgrammer 6mo 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.
- vector_spaces 6mo 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 6mo agowhy would you stream on Twitch then? just because it‘s „fun“? come on
- victorbjorklund 6mo agoYou think everyone on instagram/tiktok with a public profiles tries to become an influencer?
- esperent 6mo agoI think that way more of them than would ever admit to it - even to themselves - want that, yes. But aside from that, nearly everyone on Instagram has followers, at least their families and friends.
- jasonlotito 6mo ago
- lovehashbrowns 6mo 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.
- Gracana 6mo agoWas it Wirtual? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C98AjMOklB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C98AjMOklB4
- lovehashbrowns 6mo agoNo it was someone playing a street car drifting game idk which. They were doing car reviews of people’s designs
- JohannesCortez 6mo 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
- mister_mort 6mo 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 6mo agoill check, I honestly didnt even know that was a thing, thanks for letting me know
- AlphaTheGoat 6mo ago[flagged]
- ellg 6mo agocheck out the +filter button on the homepage!
- saadn92 6mo agoCan we make a version for YouTube as well? I'd love to be discovered haha
- munro 6mo agoAwesome haha, they look so shocked when you send a message, and then I get embarrassed and spin again
- QuiDortDine 6mo agoKind reminder that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a monster of a company. Check out Owncast and Peertube for alternatives.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- sudo_cowsay 6mo agomonster yes, but also very powerful
- kimchelgi03 6mo 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.
- jmpavlec 6mo 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.
- newgrit1004 6mo ago[dead]
- john_strinlai 6mo 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 6mo agothose preroll "ads" are the alternative to mid stream ads.
- QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago> 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" Twitch pre-roll played an ad for me on mobile in the web browser. Maybe you have an ad blocker in the browser you are using so it’s not loading the ads themselves and instead falling back to some twitch-related message? Also I only got preroll on the first one not on the second or third. Maybe if you have an ad blocker it keeps trying prerolls more often?
- john_strinlai 6mo agoi do have an adblocker, but i use the same browser to regularly watch twitch and have never seen those specific pre-rolls before. only when using the roulette. which is why i thought it was a bit weird. might have something to do with it being embedded instead of directly watching twitch or something.
- hikaru_ai 6mo ago[dead]
- genie3io 6mo ago[dead]
- deringeorge2 6mo ago[dead]
- muppetman 6mo 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 6mo agoNo, stop, you're misusing it. The purpose of this site is to build parasocial relationships with strangers online.
- bombcar 6mo agoThe danger with small streamers is you might accidentally develop a social relationship since they have nobody else to talk to!
- schaefer 6mo agoFYI: muppetman’s profile says “don’t take me seriously”, so I think this is a joke?
- KMnO4 6mo agoWhile tone often portrays poorly over text, I think this is an example where the sarcasm is very overt. I don’t think anyone would think the comment is serious.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- xyrox1 6mo agoGood job
- monssooon 6mo agoIs there something like this for YouTube?
- ferreyadinarta 6mo ago[dead]
- 56745742597 6mo ago[dead]
- bombcar 6mo agoMST3K is completely incomprehensible!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo agoI once scrolled all the way to the bottom of the streamers and it was a little kid trying to stream Fortnite using a phone camera and it kept falling down and he was happy to have one viewer. It was adorable
- tasuki 6mo agoMhm, I clicked the thing and got shown World of Warcraft. I'm not sure the streamer needs the views the most. Perhaps it's a single mother desperately trying to raise money through streaming to feed her ten children?
- drunkan 6mo agoAm I crazy or is this just social/financial charity roulette for streamers. Also is there not inherently an issue building the foundations of a friendship on the predicate of one person being watched and the other having to watch and potentially pay the other? If one side doesn’t like or subscribe are they friends. The idea that people turn to streaming to either support themselves or make friends and people feel the need to help them do so is everything right and wrong with society. It’s nice people are willing to support someone else and wrong that the most supported are often the worst and really we should just support people socially and financially outside of the streaming charity system we have created. I find it all a bit mind boggling.
- tyjen 6mo agoEgalitarianism for Twitch, nice project. A friend of mine who has streamed for years, maybe garners 3 viewers at the most, but he's absolutely terrible at viewer engagement. Despite having a dual monitor setup, it often takes him 5 minutes to recognize a single line in his chat and respond. Growing a base followership on Twitch seems like it'd be an interesting challenge considering how saturated the market is.
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoOn the other hand, this might be like buying someone's overpriced mediocre product at the artisanal weekend market: probably better not to encourage them so they drop the delusion and do something else. Like that time I spent $9 on some guy's 8oz "turmeric milk" and he said I was the first sale all day, so thanks for the support. Felt bad for making him think this thing has a shot.
- zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago[flagged]
- zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago[flagged]
- zephyrwhimsy 6mo ago[flagged]
- logicallee 6mo agoThis was an interesting site and was the first time I tried Twitch. It seems like video-based social interaction is an interesting field in general, since it's easier and cheaper than going someplace for an event (which is naturally limited by space, as well). How does Twitch work in general? Can you tell me a little bit more about it?
- jpcrs 6mo agoAppreciate it. I don’t use Twitch or watch popular streamers, but sometimes when I’m bored I look up small streamers with 1–3 viewers and chat with them. It’s usually pretty wholesome.
- tosti 6mo agoThese are really just chatboxes? Edit: it's a bit different now. Instead of loading one from the homepage, it always loads a stream. And it has a play button on every one of them. Nothing happens when I press it. Anyone else has this?
- djmips 6mo agoI ended up with someone as their only viewer and we bonded quickly, he was happy to have someone there because he was in a really tense situation in Arma - he said he'd never been more frightened. I can vouch - it was a sticky situation - was riveting to watch but he managed to beat all odds and come out on top. He was stoked! Friend for life. ;-)