Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find live streamers who need views the most(twitchroulette.net)
97 pointsby ellg9 hours ago22 comments
  • john_strinlai22 minutes ago
    these 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.

  • flowgrammer6 hours ago
    Great 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.
    • sanswork40 minutes ago
      I 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_spaces4 hours ago
      Maybe 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

    • vasco2 hours ago
      What 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.

      • bobsmoothan hour ago
        >What does having a family have to do with anything?

        Presumably that at least one of their family members would be pity watching.

  • chundicus7 hours ago
    What about https://nobody.live/?
  • jmpavlec2 hours ago
    Very 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.

  • mister_mort5 hours ago
    Perhaps 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.
    • ellg5 hours ago
      ill check, I honestly didnt even know that was a thing, thanks for letting me know
  • lovehashbrowns5 hours ago
    really 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.
  • reddozen7 hours ago
    I will never understand how Amazon hasn't shuttered Twitch yet. Dan Clancy is totally ok with his contracted streamers constantly live streaming terrorist training videos. I guess the adpocalypse only came for YouTube and never Twitch.
    • john_strinlaian hour 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.

    • ellg6 hours ago
      no 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

      • vintermann18 minutes ago
        I 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.
      • tuveson5 hours ago
        Twitch 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”.
      • operatingthetan6 hours ago
        I mean if they are streaming to no clients, is there actually video being transmitted?
        • ellg6 hours ago
          youre 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
          • cwillu5 hours ago
            Transcoding 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.
            • ellg5 hours ago
              ya 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
              • Karliss22 minutes ago
                Twitch 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.
              • vscode-rest3 hours ago
                [dead]
          • cortesoft2 hours ago
            Maybe they just don’t do that if you don’t have any streamers.
      • nefarious_ends6 hours ago
        do you think they get a blank check for AWS resources?
        • charcircuit5 hours ago
          It'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.
        • ellg6 hours ago
          honestly not sure, but it would explain how they can keep it running
          • whaleofatw20226 hours ago
            Well, I know a year (or 3?) Back they changed their retention of long videos, my guess is to lower storage spend.
  • JohannesCortez5 hours ago
    Great 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

  • password43218 hours ago
    Similar in spirit to IMG_0001⁰, IMG_0416¹, and astronaut.io² for YouTube but live on Twitch!

    ⁰https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308547

    ¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42314547

    ²https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772

  • AlphaTheGoat4 hours ago
    Great 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.
    • ellg4 hours ago
      check out the +filter button on the homepage!
  • ellg8 hours ago
    Check 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

    • recursivecaveat7 hours ago
      For 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.
      • ellg7 hours ago
        ya it's why I have the default set to 0-5, theres weirdness in what twitch counts as a viewer
  • munro4 hours ago
    Awesome haha, they look so shocked when you send a message, and then I get embarrassed and spin again
  • nosmokewhereiam7 hours ago
    There are some soundcloud and mixcloud versions that might need inventing ...cool concept!
  • kimchelgi033 hours ago
    Cool 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.
  • mememememememo7 hours ago
    Old discussion has lots of comments too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114103
  • twentyfiveoh16 hours ago
    my 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.
  • QuiDortDine4 hours ago
    Kind reminder that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a monster of a company. Check out Owncast and Peertube for alternatives.
    • 3 hours ago
      undefined
  • jaequery7 hours ago
    i am actually even more impressed that you got this to front page
    • ellg7 hours ago
      did I do something wrong or something
      • password43217 hours ago
        Not that I can see. I think most on HN root for the underdog.
  • dzonga7 hours ago
    this is pretty dope !!

    was the only viewer to some guy playing far cry

  • saadn924 hours ago
    Can we make a version for YouTube as well? I'd love to be discovered haha
  • newgrit1004an hour ago
    [dead]
  • sulplisetalk6 hours ago
    "Twatxh Loulette"