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Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

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Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#211

Post by gmfawcett »

theNJR wrote: post #84
degenerate wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same boat. I find a chill streamer that doesn't talk much and plays a game I like. I set the TV to 30 minute timer and watch for ~10 minutes before falling asleep. This is similar to people that fall asleep to shows they like -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurama_Sleepers/

Whoa. I am a The Office sleeper and had no idea that was a thing. There's something comforting about knowing I'm not the only one.

Once upon a time, a huge segment of Western civilization used to fall alseep to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. :)

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#212

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it'…

I know a guy who made millions by getting in early on Crypto. I had to room with him for a month, and it wasn't until then that I realized he watched Twitch all day. I mean, literally all day. 95% of the time I saw him that month, he was either watching a stream or playing Fortnite.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#213

Post by closetohome »

Reedx wrote: post #104
degenerate wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same boat. I find a chill streamer that doesn't talk much and plays a game I like. I set the TV to 30 minute timer and watch for ~10 minutes before falling asleep. This is similar to people that fall asleep to shows they like -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurama_Sleepers/

Something I'm curious about is where that comes from. Why do people like falling asleep to the TV? Why is it preferred over white noise?

If you grew up in a big family and got used to there always being voices and activity in the house, it can be kind of comforting just to have quiet, familiar voices as background noise.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#214

Post by eamike261 »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it'…

I don't mean to be rude but you are way off course about who/why people watch Twitch streams. Sure some of the Twitch viewerbase fits your description but plenty of people will tune in for a short period of time. ESPECIALLY people who don't have a lot of time because it can satisfy people's video game urges without actual investing tons of time in playing.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#215

Post by calgoo »

I was working from home for about 1.5 years. My daily contact was a morning phone call with the others on the team. Having a twitch stream open for 8+ hours in the background works really well for me as its more like having a radio on then a TV. Its not that you are sitting there watching every thing that the streamer is doing. You are more listening and glancing at it once in a while.

A second aspect that i really enjoy in relation to twitch streams is the chat community and the interaction you can have live with the streamer. Its basically a IRC chat channel that the streamer is the owner of. So even when the stream is offline, you can hang around chatting with friends that you make online. It really remind me of my old mIRC days. Its all about finding a community that you enjoy, not all stream chats are the same. Some can be quite toxic but most streamers have Mods that ban people quickly for hate speech etc.

There are also people that are coding on twitch these days, and i really enjoy having one of those streams open while coding myself. Whenever i get stuck on something, or am thinking about an issue / design I like watching what the streamer is coding for a few min. It tends to help me work out the problems quicker and the designs are normally better thought out.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#216

Post by ghuntley »

Twitch isn't just about playing games. There's a growing community of people like myself who use the platform to teach people how to write software. In my case as an opensource maintainer I use it as a way to break down opensource and introduce people to what the role entails.

Follow me at https://twitch.tv/geoffreyhuntley and https://youtube.com/c/geoffreyhuntley and https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#217

Post by Ologn »

metalliqaz wrote: post #14

What I don't understand about Twitch is how anyone has time to consume this content. When it comes to sitting on your butt and watching something, the traditional TV show is moving to an on-demand model. Twitch is a step in the other direction, where if you faithfully consume content from any Twitch channel, you have to sit down and watch for hours every night when the streamer is online. Who does that? I imagine it'…

This was pre-Twitch, but I used to work at a company where the tech team after hours would play Age of Empires for fun. We kind of got into it, we would read strategy guides, blog comments over whether it was best to be Assyrians or Babylonians or Choson etc. Some people (not us) would really get into it and spend hours measuring things like how long it took for a catapult to get from one side of the map to the other, measuring each second and pixel carefully.

I'm sure if Twitch were around and some of the best players broadcast their games with live commentary we would have watched them for pointers. I used to play Quake and remember watching a pre-Twitch video of one of the best Quake players, "Thresh", and observing how one of the best (perhaps the best) Quake players played the game.

In terms of time, it's like people taking golf lessons to get a better swing and get their par down, or people reading chess endgame books to learn how to properly do a bishop and knight checkmate, or what have you. I guess you're right about students and single young professionals, as that is when I had the time to spend on improving my skill at various games.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#218

Post by rezashirazian »

prefferot wrote: post #44
minimaxir wrote: post #9

Per Twitch's stream analytics, on one of my data science programming streams on Twitch the majority of my viewers came from the Explore page, under the relatively-less-popular Programming category. I wonder if there's a bit of game theory in play where it's impossible to be discovered when playing a megapopular game like Overwatch/Fortnite, and it's more advantageous to play relatively more obscure games. It wouldn't…

Reading this made me curious. I'll probably check out the programming category tonight if I have time. How is the quality of those programming streams? What goes on in them? Do the streamers answer questions about techniques, etc? Is it just shoptalk/circlejerking? I'm usually a self-starter on learning things, but I can lose interest quickly if I don't get some sort of feedback or have someone to ask questions. MOOC…

The quality is poor. It's mostly gamer streamers trying out something different. They're usually going through a udacity course or hacking a crud web application.

There is lot of blindly looking at the screen, reading tutorials or getting frustrated with compilation errors.

They do not like to be helped.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#219

Post by Ologn »

ghuntley wrote: post #216

Twitch isn't just about playing games. There's a growing community of people like myself who use the platform to teach people how to write software. In my case as an opensource maintainer I use it as a way to break down opensource and introduce people to what the role entails. Follow me at https://twitch.tv/geoffreyhuntley and https://youtube.com/c/geoffreyhuntley and https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley

Yes. There is a contest that exists called "Ludum Dare" where a theme is announced, and within 2-3 days people have to design a video game fitting that theme.

One person who took up the challenge was Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson ( https://www.twitch.tv/videos/38122415 ). You see him coding for 11 hours or so, and at some points (like in the beginning) he talks about what his gameplan for coding the project are. Throughout you see a screen share of him coding, or drawing a tile map, or the like. It's an interesting thing if you want to see how a very successful game programmer that had to put a finished game together within 2-3 days would go about it.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#220

Post by rossdavidh »

So, I'm just going to say this, even though probably everyone already knows it: there are way, way more people looking to make a living off of producing content (Youtube, Twitch, etc.) for the internet, than there are people thinking, "If only there were more content on the Internet, I would pay some money or put up with some ads for that." There's nothing wrong with putting it out there if you want to, but expecting any kind of financial reward or other validation from the size of your audience seems like injecting yourself into a pretty vicious zero-sum game.
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