Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find live streamers who need views the most

(twitchroulette.net)

59 points | by ellg 5 hours ago ago

32 comments

  • AlphaTheGoat 4 minutes 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.

  • mister_mort an hour 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.

    • ellg 43 minutes ago

      ill check, I honestly didnt even know that was a thing, thanks for letting me know

  • chundicus 2 hours ago
    • ellg 2 hours ago

      also neat! never heard of it, seems like we have a bit different ways about browsing similar data. very cool site

  • flowgrammer an hour 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.

  • lovehashbrowns an hour 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.

  • reddozen 2 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.

    • ellg 2 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

      • tuveson an hour 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”.

      • operatingthetan 2 hours ago

        I mean if they are streaming to no clients, is there actually video being transmitted?

        • ellg 2 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

          • cwillu 38 minutes 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.

            • ellg 21 minutes 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

      • nefarious_ends 2 hours ago

        do you think they get a blank check for AWS resources?

        • charcircuit 28 minutes 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.

        • ellg 2 hours ago

          honestly not sure, but it would explain how they can keep it running

          • whaleofatw2022 an hour ago

            Well, I know a year (or 3?) Back they changed their retention of long videos, my guess is to lower storage spend.

  • JohannesCortez an hour 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

  • password4321 3 hours ago

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

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

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

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

  • ellg 3 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

    • recursivecaveat 3 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.

      • ellg 2 hours ago

        ya it's why I have the default set to 0-5, theres weirdness in what twitch counts as a viewer

  • nosmokewhereiam 3 hours ago

    There are some soundcloud and mixcloud versions that might need inventing ...cool concept!

  • twentyfiveoh1 an hour 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.

  • mememememememo 2 hours ago

    Old discussion has lots of comments too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114103

  • jaequery 3 hours ago

    i am actually even more impressed that you got this to front page

    • ellg 3 hours ago

      did I do something wrong or something

      • password4321 2 hours ago

        Not that I can see. I think most on HN root for the underdog.

  • dzonga 3 hours ago

    this is pretty dope !!

    was the only viewer to some guy playing far cry

  • sulplisetalk 2 hours ago

    "Twatxh Loulette"