
Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find and chat with streamers who are streaming alone - mumphster
https://twitchroulette.net/
======
MilnerRoute
Singer Ben Folds once did this during a huge concert. So random people looking
for a video chat would suddenly see a man on a stage in front of a huge
audience...singing a song about them. ("Hello Mr. Shirtless Man. How are you
doin' today? Is it hot in there...?")

[https://www.pigdog.org/auto/viva_la_musica/link/3203.html](https://www.pigdog.org/auto/viva_la_musica/link/3203.html)

~~~
zankly
I feel that this is a violation of trust. A lot of users are there to talk to
another person, they're not necessarily ready or willing to be shirtless in
front of tens of thousands of people. If I was on a jury and there was a
lawsuit, I would award damages.

~~~
stale2002
The other stranger did not consent to being situation where the rando was
shirtless, though.

Them being shirtless without telling the other person in advance, is harm that
theyd be causing in the first place.

~~~
tasogare
Consent was given implicitly by browsing chatroulette. Or so is the mainstream
rhetoric used for third party cookies "consent".

~~~
metamet
By that logic, consent was given to be shown on a projector at a concert by
showing yourself on Chatroulette.

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MarioMan
On a related note, there used to be a site, [https://twitch-
tools.rootonline.de/](https://twitch-tools.rootonline.de/), where you could
find "uncategorized" streams with no game set. All sorts of strange broadcasts
live there, from pirate sports casts to whole movies streamed to the most
random garbage, but the owner took most of the site down after Twitch
requested that they stop scraping the site
([https://twitter.com/CommanderRoot/status/1250486976547106821](https://twitter.com/CommanderRoot/status/1250486976547106821)).
I haven't been able to find any alternative services that offer this. If
anyone has such a service, I'd love to go surfing around the strange part of
Twitch again.

~~~
Limb
This sounded like a fun idea so I threw together a quick Go project to test it
out / learn some go.

[https://gitlab.com/ibelimb/twitch-no-
gameid](https://gitlab.com/ibelimb/twitch-no-gameid)

You'll need to get a set of Twitch API credentials from
[https://dev.twitch.tv/dashboard/apps/create](https://dev.twitch.tv/dashboard/apps/create)
and store the ID/Secret in config.json. Once you start the go program just
point your browser to [http://localhost:8080/](http://localhost:8080/) and you
can browse through streams with no gameid set 50 at a time.

~~~
mumphster
Cool! I went ahead and added category sorting last night to twitchroulette,
check out the "unknown" filter to randomly browse through streams with no
category set. Theres some weird stuff in there for sure (and quite a few
pirated movie streams)

------
hassaanm
I made a similar site as part of a hackathon at Twitch:
[https://twitchraids.com](https://twitchraids.com)

The idea is to raid random channels together with everyone on the site.
Channels are randomly selected and rotate every 5 minutes, and the channel
selection function gives preference to smaller streamers. Users vote on which
channel to raid next.

~~~
chipperyman573
This is interesting because you can incentivise people to go to other streams
by offering them multipliers for every raid they join (or something). You'd
have a network of people who are watching ads for the chance of having their
ad watched!

~~~
Thorentis
Reminds me of those mid 2000s sites where you'd watch ads to earn credits to
either cash out or spend on your own ads. Was always the default answer to
"how to make money online". Forget what the name for that type of site was.

~~~
sabas123
Those were called "click" sites if I'm not mistaken

------
Pfhreak
As someone who has periodically streamed, consider dropping a few chat
messages when you land. Twitch's metrics are slow to update and it is not
always clear when someone is watching.

~~~
slashink
Hello! I work on the video platform @ twitch. We’ve been working a lot on that
issue. Viewer count numbers should be significantly faster today and will get
even more responsive soon!

~~~
raziel2p
As a viewer I'm not sure I'd like this happening but for smaller streamers, a
notification/message telling you that a viewer has joined or left might be
useful.

~~~
arkitaip
Please don't. I would avoid certain stream if I knew they were told that I've
joined/left because I do that quite frequently without saying anything and
don't want to come across as an asshole.

~~~
pietrovismara
It's kinda the same reason why I don't watch stories on Facebook. I don't want
people to automatically know I watched their stories.

~~~
industriousthou
Is this a thing? A quick Google search just turned up articles about detecting
if someone sees your profile, which of course they can't. Seems weird.

~~~
pietrovismara
It doesn't show preofile views, but as far as I know it shows who watched your
stories.

------
formalsystem
twitch is one of the platforms where I feel like I've struggled the most to
get viewers. just playing my main game like Dota wasn't too productive since
I'm not a pro or super hot so my value proposition there isn't too compelling.
Instead I've been trying to focus more on streaming myself programming and
learning new scientific or game programming libraries and have been enjoying
it quite a bit. My viewer count is veeery slowly increasing but almost noone
is subscribing, many of my friends have expressed interest in watching me so
my plan is to start letting them know when I'm about to stream to seed some
viewers. Also I've realized that the more specific your brand is on social
media the more effective, I've been looking at branding myself as a strategy
game buff/developer so will be streaming niche strategy games and Unity game
development every weekend. I'll re-asses after a month to see if this plan was
effective.

I really appreciate this project as going from 0-1 viewers on Twitch where the
1 isn't your friend is challenging.

~~~
heed
That’s because discovery on Twitch is almost non-existent. If you want to grow
your Twitch channel start on YouTube, advertise your twitch channel there, and
slowly try to convert people.

~~~
chongli
Yeah. Generally the way to become established on Twitch (without relying on
YouTube) is to become part of a pre-existing community as a viewer and
subscriber yourself, and then to receive raids from established streamers in
that community.

Most of my viewing experience is with retro game speedrunning and the specific
advice for that community is to pick a game you want to learn and follow the
best players. The world record holders and their friends tend to be very happy
to share advice and tips for their game with new runners. This is great
because it helps you establish a relationship with them without being “that
guy” who is just there to try and promote his streaming channel (those people
are universally reviled and often banned for unsolicited promotion). Instead,
if you’re a legitimate member of the community, learning and improving at the
game, then the big streamers may be happy to send you a raid.

It’s very much not a get rich quick scheme. It’s more like moving to a small
town. You need to put yourself out there and ingratiate yourself to the
community in order to gain trust and become a respected member. The above
advice should be largely adaptable to any form of streaming with an
established community.

~~~
formalsystem
This is great advice, contribute to various Discord and Slack communities and
once you establish trust start plugging your stream and even have various
people from the community as guests. I guess key is to give give give before
you expect people to reward you with their attention.

------
ryeguy_24
This was so much fun to test out this morning. Most streamers who saw me come
in were so excited to have a viewer. Nice idea.

~~~
kawsper
Yes - I said hi to a few, and had some nice conversations as the only viewer,
brilliant idea.

------
Rinum
Great concept for the winner take all world we live in now. It's very
difficult to get your name out there in anything these days without having to
invest a lot in marketing yourself.

~~~
hombre_fatal
You act like this wasn't always true or that celebrity never existed.

~~~
Rinum
It wasn't always true. The internet made it globalized. Prior to the internet
a person's reach was much less powerful. I honestly don't even know who my
local leaders are anymore, but I definitely know about PewDiePie. I think this
has to do with Dunbar's number as well. More global celebs taking the spots of
others.

------
m1aw
Really cool idea. Thanks for sharing.

I could totally see myself using this more if you added 2 options, language
and game.

Also interesting would be to display not only 0 streams but also streams with
<10 viewers.

~~~
mumphster
Ya I've heard similar ideas with regards to filtering, I'm gonna play around
with that for sure. Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
haunter
Can you use the Twitch tags? That would be even more useful than simply
filtering by games.

~~~
mumphster
Technically ya, its just the route im going through to get this data probably
has some rate limits that I'd like to avoid hitting. Need to figure out how to
poke at this in a friendly enough way.

------
darrenkopp
Great idea. It'd be great if you could select a game / category. Reason is I'd
actually be able to have an actual chat with someone if I knew something about
the game.

~~~
mumphster
Ya I want to add this, I just need to figure out a way to ingest / filter the
data in a way that twitch wont ban my account. Looking into this this weekend.

------
paraxisi
Quite a nice idea, well done! Very minimalist and clean as well. Few pieces of
feedback after playing with it for a few minutes-

Not sure if I'm getting unlucky or the results are cached but quite a few of
the streamers who popped up were offline. Using the twitch api under the hood
I assume?

~~~
mumphster
Ya due to the way getting acess to this works, theres a 10 minute cache of
active streams that get expired in redis and a cron job pulls in a fresh list

~~~
the_duke
If you are not already, you could use the GraphQL API that the web app uses,
which provides sorting by viewers ASC. That would allow for much more up to
date results than iterating the full list with the official API.

Not sure how happy Twitch is about external users, but it can be accessed
quite easily with some tinkering.

~~~
mumphster
This is exactly what its doing, albeit caching results, somce im trying to be
nice. Official api sadly does not allow sorting by asc.

------
igrekel
Every now and then I look at thi. I enjoyed watching people coding now and
then, I find its a good way to improve my set up when I am on a new
technology.

That being said, I find it extremely difficult to find streams of people
coding. Maybe that exist but I'd like something where I can pick a platform of
programming language or type of dev. I know there are a few tags like this on
switch but there are almost no results and some of them still look like people
gaming.

~~~
mikekchar
Look in the "Science and Technology" section. It took me forever to figure
that out.

~~~
igrekel
I did try that but still get tons of people apparently streaming games. Also I
don't seem to get that many results. Also it would be nice to be able to
classify things by language, platform etc.

------
mumphster
Hey folks, thanks for the great feedback. I'm going to continue going through
these threads and iterate on this idea some more this weekend.

Feel free to give me a follow on my twitch channel
[https://twitch.tv/ellg](https://twitch.tv/ellg) \-- I do a lot of programming
on there and would love to have some more people stop by and chat :)

~~~
sadok
Can you make the chat to the right and stream to the left? Pretty hard to chat
when I have to scroll up/down constantly.

------
sbuccini
I just listened to a little kid play Fortnite while I did some work in the
background.

He was very excited to have some unexpected random viewers which made my day.

------
astuyvenberg
This is great! One thing that many HN-ers may not know is that Amazon Prime
users get a free subscription to give to anyone on Twitch.

It'd be neat if there was a button here that would allow a user to subscribe
with Prime; I'm sure these streamers would love that.

~~~
zerocrates
You probably can't subscribe to the average streamer with zero viewers: you
need to an "affiliate" or "partner" with Twitch for that to be an option.

------
davedx
Screw it I'll give this a try! Streaming right now :)
[https://www.twitch.tv/redskyforgeradio](https://www.twitch.tv/redskyforgeradio)

~~~
lemiffe
Great stream! Except for the intermittent glitches due to 4g... but the mixes
were great, keep up the good work!

~~~
davedx
Thanks! Next time I’ll run a cable outside :)

------
haunter
Hmm there was [https://lonelystreams.com/](https://lonelystreams.com/) before
but it doesn't work for a long time.

~~~
mumphster
Good catch! Must have used an old API that doesnt exist anymore, thanks for
the heads up

~~~
haunter
Glad you made this new site!

------
x3haloed
We didn’t learn our lesson about cam roulettes last time around?

~~~
WorldPeas
Honestly, if sites like omegle had just created a dedicated pornographic
section, it would have drawn that audience away from what was otherwise a
pretty fun experience.

~~~
jotm
That... sounds like a good idea. I wonder why PornHub/etc don't try this? Or
do they already have such a feature?

~~~
vorpalhex
Issues with monetization and proving people are legal age.

------
VectorLock
I always wonder how Twitch streamers manage to go from 0 to N thousand
viewers. What is the most effective way people are using to self-promote? I've
seen a lot of panels at PAX talking about how to "grow" streaming but nothing
about how to "bootstrap" an audience. This seems like it could be a cool way
to do that, if not even just find people to talk to.

------
Hamuko
Is the video supposed to be postage stamp sized?

~~~
mumphster
Nope, whats your viewing setup? OS, browser, device, etc? Still iterating on
this from yall's feedback as we speak.

~~~
mrspeaker
I had the same thing - Firefox on Mac. The video area was 920px wide, but the
video player was only 250x150px.

Also, I went to leave a comment on the stream and it asked me to log in. After
jumping through the reset-your-password stuff and logging in I came back and
tried to comment again (after refreshing). It said "you aren't logged in"
(even though I am) and popped up the twitch homepage instead of the login box.
The query param seemed to be something like ?popup=true, then it redirects to
[https://www.twitch.tv/?no-reload=true](https://www.twitch.tv/?no-reload=true)
\- which is just the twitch homepage.

[Edit: also, this is a really fun site! Excellent work!]

~~~
mumphster
beautiful, thank you. I think this is the same css issue around twitch's embed
iframe that someone else reported earlier. I'll try to get a fix up after I
get off work today. Thanks for checking it out!

------
philliphaydon
Anyone else using Firefox? It doesn't appear to work very well in FF :(

~~~
mumphster
interesting, ill test in a bit. The only javascript on the page is from twitch
for its embed API, everything else is just some really basic html and server
side rendering, so I'm curious what would be breaking

~~~
gorhill
On my side, when I use `grid` instead of `table` for the `.row` style, the
`min-height` of the video row is respected, otherwise it's disregarded for a
reason I do not understand.

~~~
mumphster
thats uh, weird. I'll look into that, thank you for digging into the issue.

~~~
gorhill
Simple solution: set the `min-height: 600px` on the Twitch `iframe` instead of
on the `.embed` class.

~~~
mumphster
Sorry this took so long, added this fix, as well as basic filters. Thanks
again for the help!

------
baalimago
I'm guessing my suggestion is also buried by about 110 comments by now, but
the stream in the UX is far too small and makes the actual stream far less
viewable than the chat. A viewer doesn't view for the chat, he views for the
stream, the chat's a bonus. To swap the expectation is unrealistic. Twitch.tv
isn't a chatting program.

~~~
mumphster
this was an issue with firefox and I pushed a css fix, sorry about that

------
olah_1
I found a streamer that was really cool. Followed. Honestly great product.
It's like StumbleUpon but for streamers.

------
zbowling
feature request: language picker. saying hi to someone that doesn't speak my
language has got me kicked.

------
pol4ko
Very cool idea. I'm having problems to access the website. Maybe the high
traffic put it down.

~~~
mumphster
Just bumped the amount of asgi workers and upped the DO droplet size, should
be good now, sorry about that!

~~~
brachi
just of out of curiosity, what size was your droplet and how was your asgi
config?

~~~
mumphster
had it on a $5 vps with a single worker, bumped it up to a 3 cpu vps and 8
workers. This is using starlette + uvicorn + redis

------
soylentcola
Heh...spun the wheel a few times and found someone's re-broadcast of the BBC4
stream.

------
diehunde
I got a user whose username ended with a + and the site crashed. Cool idea by
the way!

------
rnotaro
It's broken now because of API changes but it's the same concept as
LonelyStreams ([https://lonelystreams.com](https://lonelystreams.com)).

It's always fun to see some begginner streams.

------
superbaconman
I think a small improvement may be to use an auto-complete text box instead of
dropdown. The items in the dropbox aren't ordered so i can't jump to the game
i'm interested in by typing.

------
mrkramer
Interesting idea, I think this should be standalone product. On the other side
when I see ChatRoullete it is very popular but for some reason not
commercially successful.

------
AmazingTurtle
Would be nice if you could filter those fortnite kiddies

------
laurex
What could go wrong?

------
LockAndLol
I don't know how it works, but it would great to check if the streamers are
streaming. Clicked on multiple streams that weren't live.

------
zbowling
I joined someone streaming on PS4. He said he had been streaming on PS4 for
almost a year and had close to 0 people ever viewing his stream.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I chuckled as it reminded me of the cams roulettes in the old days. Still, I
liked it. I got a random 'mature' stream.

~~~
mobilio
Like Chaturbate?

------
BredWinner
Very cool to drop by and say hello to them. What host did you use? It connects
to streams so quickly!

~~~
mumphster
just a normal cheap digital ocean vps running python + starlette and redis as
a data backend, nothing fancy at all

------
d0m
Quick suggestion: Sort game name A-Z

~~~
mumphster
Done, thanks!

------
vpzom
Why is the stream area tiny?

~~~
mumphster
You can full screen it, I went with the lazy max fixed width approach for
"responsive".

This whole project is about 4 hours total of dev time, so any feedback like
this is nuch appreciated, thanks.

------
jupp0r
Isn’t this already there and called Omegle?

~~~
Kiro
Did you miss the Twitch part?

------
XCSme
Is the site down? I get a 502 error.

------
neilwilson
Yeah, I do this a lot. But it’s a useful discipline to make sure you push your
side project along.

