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

100 points

9 hours ago

| 21 comments

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!

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flowgrammer

5 hours ago

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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.

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sanswork

1 hour ago

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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.

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vector_spaces

4 hours ago

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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

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vasco

2 hours ago

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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.

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bobsmooth

1 hour ago

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>What does having a family have to do with anything?

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

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john_strinlai

46 minutes ago

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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.

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chundicus

7 hours ago

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What about https://nobody.live/?

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ucarion

2 hours ago

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Leads me to discover: https://www.twitch.tv/chat_loadtest_01 ... neat!

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ellg

7 hours ago

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

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jmpavlec

2 hours ago

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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.

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mister_mort

5 hours ago

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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.

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ellg

5 hours ago

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

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lovehashbrowns

5 hours ago

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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.

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reddozen

6 hours ago

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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.

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john_strinlai

1 hour ago

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>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.

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ellg

6 hours ago

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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

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vintermann

42 minutes ago

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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.

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tuveson

5 hours ago

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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”.

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operatingthetan

6 hours ago

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

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ellg

6 hours ago

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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

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cwillu

5 hours ago

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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.

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ellg

5 hours ago

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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

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Karliss

46 minutes ago

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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.

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cortesoft

2 hours ago

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Maybe they just don’t do that if you don’t have any streamers.

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nefarious_ends

6 hours ago

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

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charcircuit

5 hours ago

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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.

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ellg

6 hours ago

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

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whaleofatw2022

5 hours ago

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

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mememememememo

7 hours ago

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

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password4321

8 hours ago

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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

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JohannesCortez

5 hours ago

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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

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AlphaTheGoat

4 hours ago

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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.

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ellg

4 hours ago

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check out the +filter button on the homepage!

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ellg

8 hours ago

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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

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recursivecaveat

7 hours ago

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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.

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ellg

7 hours ago

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

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munro

3 hours ago

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Awesome haha, they look so shocked when you send a message, and then I get embarrassed and spin again

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nosmokewhereiam

7 hours ago

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

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kimchelgi03

3 hours ago

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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.

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twentyfiveoh1

6 hours ago

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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.

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QuiDortDine

3 hours ago

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Kind reminder that Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is a monster of a company. Check out Owncast and Peertube for alternatives.

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jaequery

7 hours ago

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

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ellg