Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 365 posts

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#191

Post by SurrealSoul »

rapt wrote: post #155
SurrealSoul wrote: post #36

I personally know Markipler (youtube, 23M+) as well as follow some other people here and there. There is a youtuber; BloominBanana I subbed around the same time I subbed to Markipler 2010ish, they both do (did?) the same horror gameplay except Bloomin' has about 12 subs on youtube. Mark as I knew him was the king of 'going out there' he was never afraid of marketing, publicity stunts and was honestly humble to his hu…

Do you mind going into more detail about how Markipler marketed his youtube channel, besides publicity stunts, bots and click bait titles?

I don't know his marketing plan by any means, and I certainly can not claim he botted views, am I actually fairly certain his views are mostly authentic but that is just me going off of what I know of his moral judgement.

I do know he was extremely outgoing, almost weirdly so. I don't know the full extent of his 'hustle' but it wasn't just booting up amnesia every week.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#192

Post by [deleted] »

apeace wrote: post #51

I too have met kids who say they want to be a Youtuber or Twitch streamer when they grow up. It makes me sad. I love watching Twitch, and watch 5-7 gamers regularly (almost every night). From what I can tell, most of them: - Are in their mid-20's to early 30's. - Live with their parents. - Make just enough from Youtube/Twitch/Patreon/merch to fund their gaming rigs, buy new games, buy their own food, and maybe pay fo…

[deleted]

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#193

Post by zouhair »

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'…

A lot of people just put the stream on the background and go about doing their thing, it's like turning the radio while working for some.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#194

Post by kiddico »

ktross wrote: post #15
ryandrake wrote: post #3

> Despite the sometimes psychologically taxing nature of trying to get noticed on Twitch, some continue to persevere despite the cold indictment of the zero. Maybe I’m advocating a bit of a dark pattern here, but couldn’t Twitch keep streamers engaged by seeding streams with a few fake AI bots as viewers? This seems like it might be a little of the Empty Restaurant Effect. People hesitate to go into a restaurant if t…

I started streaming on Twitch a few months ago, and there are a few third party bots that join every channel they can find, such as "commanderroot" (used for collecting data), but they don't interact at all. I also have a theory that there are people that artificially inflate view counts of certain games, though I'm not sure if it's game developers or other streamers trying to grow the audience for the games they pla…

Oh! That's why commanderroot was always popping into my streams.

I've set all my streams to be placed in the 'Small Streamer' community. In theory people go to streamers in that community and watch for a bit to help boost your viewers, and make it easier for people to find your channel while browsing. Whoever made the community also set up a few bots to join after you've been streaming for a while.

I've noticed that although they show up in the viewers list in chat, the actual viewer count doesn't go up. I wonder if twitch viewers are counted with the number of RTMP streams going, instead of just the number people in chat.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#195

Post by Applejinx »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #7

In the far future when food, shelter, and other necessities are basically free, attention will be the last valuable commodity. There will always be a scarcity of attention.

This is true, but we have a lot of work to do before we have the first part sorted.

Right now we're looking at a scenario where attention's becoming a marketable commodity, but the penalty for failing to maximize it is starvation and ruin, because food and shelter are far from being a given.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#196

Post by kup0 »

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'…

Twitch has VODs as well, though, and the majority (but not all) of Twitch I watch is VOD.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#197

Post by Applejinx »

Negative1 wrote: post #40
ryandrake wrote: post #3

> Despite the sometimes psychologically taxing nature of trying to get noticed on Twitch, some continue to persevere despite the cold indictment of the zero. Maybe I’m advocating a bit of a dark pattern here, but couldn’t Twitch keep streamers engaged by seeding streams with a few fake AI bots as viewers? This seems like it might be a little of the Empty Restaurant Effect. People hesitate to go into a restaurant if t…

It's disappointing that you have to take it there but you're probably not alone and Amazon/Twitch have probably considered something like this and decided against. This is incredibly disingenuous, throwing the entire services credibility into question. If streamers realized they were being manipulated, you can bet the backlash would be huge. It also creates a slippery slope; "data shows that if there is an uptick in…

>These are people -- tricking them into helping to increase your websites monetization is just unethical and wrong.

This only persuades me that they're doing it. I don't believe backlashes are effective in this kind of scenario, as there's no power on the backlash side.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#198

Post by hiccuphippo »

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 put twitch in my second screen while playing videogames. I guess it's the same for most watchers.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#199

Post by humbleMouse »

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've witnessed large groups of programmers in open offices who all have twitch running on their iphones and are listening in with headphones. They literally watch/listen to twitch all day every day at work.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#200

Post by hw »

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'…

The thing is you don't have to sit down and watch a streamer for hours at a time. There's a variety of content that you can just switch over to someone else you follow that's streaming, or just watch the past broadcasts of streams you missed. It's kind of like watching youtube videos, or even traditional couch-surfing.

I spend an hour or so every night just browsing through streams to look for interesting content, swapping between games and IRLs. It's a good shift away from production TV content.

Post reply on HN