twitch things i want for myself

11/06/22 GDLP

I want this website to do a little bit more and I know the direction I want it to go in but I don’t have the specifics yet. The direction is liiiike… do you ever watch Twitch? It doesn’t matter if you don’t. People stream live content, audiences watch and comment as they enjoy the content and that’s that. But there’s a few things I’ve noticed on Twitch that I really enjoy, and I wonder if there’s a way of folding those things into TWP or if I should just appreciate the features where they are and move on.

The first is raiding. Say a streamer has 20K people watching them but they’ve been streaming for 8 hours and it’s time to have dinner and call it a day, they’ll raid somebody else’s channel. This means they’ll choose someone else’s channel, click raid, and it will send all 20K of their audience over to the other streamer. It’s seamless. Like, the video you’re watching will just change, and then it says ‘[original streamer] is hosting [new streamer]. I love it because it means creators share their audiences and there’s no break in content for the audience - - and sometimes you end up watching a streamer you never knew about, love them, and then you have a new channel to enjoy.

{ I thought about writing this because I was watching a young Apex streamer get raided last night by a more popular guy. The streamer ordering the raid had told all of his viewers to be nice and say hello, and they did. The thousands of people who have been transferred over saw that this was unusual for the young streamer and told him to run some ads so he could cash in on this moment. He kept saying he didn’t like to run ads because he didn’t want to interrupt the game for everyone, so cue an influx of messages like ‘give us ads get your bag king,’ ‘piss all over me with ads,’ ‘we want ads now or riot’ and the more straightforward ‘I will stay for ads.’ I thought about how backwards that attitude is in many other places online and elsewhere, and how lovely it was that these strangers were like run ads so you can get paid we are begging you??? }

So, what would TWP equivalent be? We use our websites to post the reviews and essays we write. People read those texts, come to the end and there’s nothing. At the end of the text, I would love to be able to seamlessly send readers over to something else they can read. Maybe it could be a text by someone else, the previous TWP text icymi/a random TWP text from the archive, or a button that lands you somewhere else as a surprise. Could be a video or a fun game. It could never be as effective I guess because we don’t have a captive audience all reading at the same time, and we can’t control if they click on anything else once they get to our website. But would be cute wouldn’t it. Yeah. The next one is harder to parse »»

Say you get a notification that your fave streamer is live but you have work to do, and you wanna support the stream but you can’t commit to watching right now, there’s something called lurking. Lurking can also refer to people who watch but don’t comment, but it can also be a kinda action. On some streamers’ channels you can type !lurk just to let them know you have a tab open with the stream on but it’s muted, you just wanna give them the viewer count to hype them up. I know numbers shouldn’t matter but I find this really sweet????? Imagine if people just left a tab open on our site or re-opened texts in different browsers or on their phones; imagined if they played the podcast on mute. Idk, is that lying? Is lurking lying too? I don’t know if it would boost us that much because we aren’t bound to numbers for the sake of adverts or pay or anything — and the numbers of how many people reading our texts aren’t visible in the same way live viewer counts are — but at the same time, we are trying to get a podcast sponsor at the moment so the numbers would help us there I guess. Plus, on google analytics, you can see the average amount of time people spend on each page of the website, and on our podcast uploader thing (Anchor) we can see how long people listen to episodes for. I wish everyone listened from beginning to end but obv that’s not the case, some people turn an episode off after a minute and it is what it is. But now I know about lurking I just want everyone to lurk forever haha. I wanna lurk other people as well!!

I like that when you subscribe to streamers, you can unlock their own emojis - - we have our equivalent kinda, whereby anyone who has supported us on Patreon/Paypal and Kofi can join TWP Discord server and there is a growing emoji collection there. But hmmmmmm more to come.

I’ll update this when I see more twitch things, or general website features, that I want to absorb here :) see ya soon