The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one.
July 26, 2018 7:58 PM   Subscribe

The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one. An aspiring streamer needs to be performing at all times, even if nobody is watching, just in case someone happens to show up. [...] It’s a solitary practice where you have to pretend someone is listening, with no idea how long it might be before someone shows up, or if they ever will.
posted by Memo (29 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody…
posted by signal at 8:21 PM on July 26, 2018 [16 favorites]


As the kids say "It me!"

Honestly, why not? The whole cult of the celeb thing is bullshit. Back in the day streaming was for fun. Now everyone needs to wear a fake mustache and leather jacket and pretend they're a badass with a fake persona on Twitch.

My nephew does a decent job of running his and his wife's stream - all the accoutrements, donations, contests, etc... It's cool. But it's work. Work I don't care for.

Me? If I'm in the mood to stream, I open up OBS, let the crappy Droste effect occur when switch from OBS to the game. Then, I drunkenly ramble about bullshit. Who watches? Maybe a couple of my friends, maybe if I have it tagged, a rando viewer for that tag... IDC, and really, why should anyone? For some bullshit fame? Ask Cobain how well that wirjs,

But these days, man, everybody wants their fucking 10 minutes, and it's... IDK, Maybe I'm an "old" fart (tail end Gen X (Xennials? Xenical?)) but the cult of celebrity is bullshit, and most of these assholes who become internet famous are precisely that: assholes.

A related aside:

I used to be in a band. I never expected to "make it big" but boy - everybody and their mother would be like - wouldn't it be great if you were famous? Not really. I mean sure a following would be nice. But whatever. I figured we might make a nice local scene. Someone in the band *cough cough* was lazy and there was an intervention about "your heart not being in it - should we carry on" the consensus was that loser fucking bass player really didn't have the heart for it.

My friend who was the drummer in that band is now in a local band and over the past near 20 years put forth a LOT of effort, touring many states, across the US, and playing SXSW, NXNE and Riot Fest Chicago. They've released 3 beers under their band's name, which is pretty damn "successful", even hitting some good metal charts.

But in the end, you prolly don't know they're name, because... Fame is fleeting. Fame is hard. Fame is work when you don't have the industry pouring money down your throat.

I'm lazy, though. All the work it takes them to get there? Whether being a band or streaming... Fuck that noise. Let me just play and have fun. If someone else enjoys my drunken rambling, so be it.

When you do something, you do it for the love, not because you want to be some fucking celebrity. If you do it well, and fortune presents you an audience that digs it, then cool, you get fame. But if you don't? Well if you love doing it, you'll do it regardless. But if you're only doing it for fame, and you don't get it, then you'll fail.
posted by symbioid at 8:26 PM on July 26, 2018 [14 favorites]


For a few years now my counterargument to a lot of things people assert about how you "have to be" to stream or make youtube videos has been PreRec.

Well, they just quit because their whole "not being that way" thing wasn't working. So I guess the joke is on me, and indeed all of us.
posted by seraphine at 8:28 PM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


This made me sign up to twitch and find someone without viewers and I've been watching for a while. Some sort of sisyphean dragging a lamp around in a snowstorm thing happening in Ravel. Hope it brightens up their day.
posted by unliteral at 8:39 PM on July 26, 2018 [11 favorites]


Youtube and Twitch seem to fall prey to exactly the same stuff that any kind of self-employment always has: It's not enough to just be available and want to work. Even if you're pretty good at it. You have to do marketing. I have a friend who goes through these periodic ideas that they're going to be a streamer, but also periodically that they're going to get into blogging, or making online courses, or freelance web development, or a bunch of other things, all of which depend on eyes, customers, sales. Said friend is the most shy and antisocial person I've ever met. Pointing this out... well, there's no point in pointing it out.

This has left me suspecting, honestly, that a lot of the people who want this and desperately want to be a big deal don't actually really want to be famous, they just don't want jobs that require them to sleep normal hours and leave the house, and you can't do that with a casual number of viewers. The overlap between people I know who've talked about this and the larger subset of people I know with significant depression issues is pretty big. And I'm not saying they can just walk out and find other jobs that work with their issues--they can't, so I can see what the appeal is. It feels like it's the non-mom's work-from-home scam. I'm sure some people want to be huge, but a lot of people seem to want to just be able to enjoy work and make ends meet and get enough of an audience for personal validation, and like... it'd be nice to say that they should be able to find a career elsewhere that will provide that stuff? But man, if you were born after 1980, that's an awfully hollow thing to say.
posted by Sequence at 8:46 PM on July 26, 2018 [20 favorites]


This is a bit like pirate radio, if pirate radio were legal and there were an unlimited number of frequencies to broadcast on.
posted by davejay at 10:01 PM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sounds like being a late night DJ at a low-power college radio station. Not that I would know anything about that...
posted by pagrus at 10:35 PM on July 26, 2018 [26 favorites]


This article is making me happy I ignored all those chirpy emails Patreon used to send out to creators suggesting they grow their audience by Getting On Youtube!!!1!!!1!. Trying to put on the Youtube Voice while streaming my drawing to nobody sounds like hell.
posted by egypturnash at 10:42 PM on July 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


I mean, I've wanted to be internet famous that's that's 100% because I would like my opinions to matter. I find it really discouraging to shout into the void like this, though, so I usually start petering out after a few weeks. I expect I'll never have an internet following, and at this point I've made my peace with it. But sometimes I look at my friends with their gimmick account and two thousand followers, and I do get a little envious.

(It doesn't help that I've got a bit of a complex about external validation, which I'm still trying to work through.)
posted by Merus at 10:44 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've a friend who does creative streaming and it's kinda low stress fun to have it on the background while I do stuff that doesn't require too much thinking... chatting with them and the half dozen or so regulars in the chat and watching them paint and draw. The creatives (I really can't be doing with games) who are v popular... well the extent of the interaction is shout-outs really and I don't tend to watch them so often. But the creative side of twitch seems really nich.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:03 AM on July 27, 2018


When you do something, you do it for the love, not because you want to be some fucking celebrity. If you do it well, and fortune presents you an audience that digs it, then cool, you get fame. But if you don't? Well if you love doing it, you'll do it regardless. But if you're only doing it for fame, and you don't get it, then you'll fail.

This.

I stream on Twitch occasionally when the mood takes me. Mostly strategy games. Might even stream some Magic The Gathering: Arena tonight as I'm enjoying the beta and my wife is at a work drinks event all evening.

I don't expect hordes of viewers though. Mostly it's about five people if I'm lucky, and it's a mix of people who have stumbled across me by chance and those who know me from real life, here, Twitter or my writing.

But that's what I enjoy about it. I get to play games whilst having a chat with people of the same mindset who, if they're familiar with those games, I can also bounce ideas off. And if something amazing or terrible happens to me in the game then I get to share that moment with others. Indeed when I'm playing Railway Empire it's bloody useful to have someone watching who can sanity check my track layouts!

Do I have a USP or funny hat? Not really, although my streams do tend to be punctuated by impromptu beer reviews as I tend to have a broad variety in my fridge whenever I play. I'm also prone to doing the odd EU4 tutorial if asked. But that's just me be being me.

And I think that's really the point here. I can totally understand why those who are growing up seeing streaming as a viable path to celebrity or to making money would want to take a swipe at doing that. Why wouldn't they? It's no different from how my friends and I used to dream about being "games testers" growing up. In both cases, it sounds like a way to make money doing what you love.

Of course the reality is different - the number of people who can make money doing what they love without having to change their approach to it is tiny, in any field. Streaming is no different.

If it happens that the way you enjoy playing gets the viewers in then congratulations! But chances are it won't. At that point you need to decide: am I trying to do this as a job, or to enjoy myself? And if it's the former, then you need to assess it in the same way you would any job, in terms of time invested vs money earned. You also then need to grind out the hours but also do the gimmicks, the social media effort and everything else that you need to do if you're going to build - and more importantly maintain - a large following. The gaming is the easy bit. It's that stuff that's hard, and that stuff that really controls how much you can make.

Me? I'm a 37 year old man who likes playing games and being social. Most of the streamers I really enjoy watching are in the same bracket, and I like - and mostly watch - streamers with a lower viewer count and a sense of community between themselves and chat. Indeed when I'm hunting for something to watch I'll often look for a game I like and then hunt through the low-viewer streams for a fun one.

And so that's how I stream too. I noticed the other day that I'd finally hit the 50 follower mark, so at some point I'll probably start doing a few more regular streams on Sundays so that I can unlock affiliate.

I don't ever expect that to make me money though. And that's fine. I don't need it to. It's not what I want out of streaming. What I want is that same sense of casual camaraderie you used to find in the arcade, back in the day. And, on a good day, that's exactly what it provides me with.
posted by garius at 1:31 AM on July 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


•puts her 20p up on the glass•
posted by Iteki at 1:58 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


The main reason I never used Twitch / Youtube streaming was the delay - around 12 seconds even on low latency mode. It was so painful having each viewer interaction have a 24 second gap between question and reply. I preferred using Steam screen sharing or Skype to share gameplay with friends, which was true realtime.

Apparently there's a new low latency mode on Twitch that cuts latency down to 1-3 seconds currently in testing so I might get into it...

Sometimes I don't feel like playing a game when I get home, I want to watch a friend play a game. I once watched my housemate play the entirety of one Final Fantasy game and it was pretty much just as fun as playing it myself, in fact, more convenient, since during the boring parts I could do other things and surf the internet...
posted by xdvesper at 2:10 AM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I watch some streamers who are on the low-latency beta and it makes a real difference.

Sometimes I don't feel like playing a game when I get home, I want to watch a friend play a game. I once watched my housemate play the entirety of one Final Fantasy game and it was pretty much just as fun as playing it myself, in fact, more convenient, since during the boring parts I could do other things and surf the internet...

I do this with a lot of PS4 RPGs / Narrative games I know I'll never play (don't have one) but want to enjoy the story from.

Oh, and you have honest to god never lived until you have watched Jerry and Ryan from the Penny Arcade team start playing, and then complete, Doki Doki literature club without ANY idea what they are getting into.

It's some of the finest television ever, let alone streaming.

(If there wasn't such an anti-PA undercurrent on here for reasonsTM then I'd have FPed the six video collection a long, long time ago)
posted by garius at 2:21 AM on July 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


My Instagram is two photos of a dented piece of an Ikea bed frame and yet I have 41 followers.
posted by srboisvert at 3:04 AM on July 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


My Instagram is two photos of a dented piece of an Ikea bed frame and yet I have 41 followers.

But is it truly art?
posted by garius at 4:07 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I am still surprised by how much I enjoy watching Twitch and YouTube gaming streams. How I watch and who I watch very much depends on what mood I'm in. Occasionally I'm wanting to be in a giant room with so many other thousands of people. There's no real enjoying chat in this type of stream/room but there's this kind of weird enjoyment of being together with a bunch of others and watching what so many other people are enjoying. This isn't my normal go to though.

I actively hunt out low follower count streams. I want to find someone playing a game for the very first time, with a few other people in the room. It lets you chat and talk about the game and what they're experiencing, it feels personal and the personality I'm watching is more accessible. I've made some great friends this way and I've hopped on their streams and gamed with them here and there at various points. That's what I'm after. That sweet spot of 5-15 followers/viewers is what I'm chasing. When it gets larger than that, it sort of becomes too much for me and turns into something more like an esport and it just loses that special something that I enjoy.

I have no interest whatsoever in ever streaming myself. I don't think I'd be good at it. I don't have the patience to be that dedicated about a game. I play games really badly and I often enjoy the talking about gaming more than the gaming itself (as evidenced by my MetaFilter brand).
posted by Fizz at 4:33 AM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


So are there people yet who livestream themselves watching livestreams and then some mukbang around mealtimes?
posted by XMLicious at 4:51 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Doki Doki literature club without ANY idea what they are getting into.

..derail but learn something exists that you could not imagine, and then at the end of the website:

This game is not suitable for children
or those who are easily disturbed.


oh my goodness...
posted by sammyo at 5:00 AM on July 27, 2018


Coming into a stream with zero viewers (and thereby becoming the ONE VIEWER) can be intensely awkward, like coming to a party and realizing you're the only guest. Which, combined with the structural disadvantages that the platforms create by listing streams in descending order of viewer counts, makes streaming a bit of an all-or-nothing affair: either you commit to spending a great deal of time at it, or you never escape the zero-viewer pit.
posted by Pyry at 5:19 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I just took my kids to their first “concert”. It wasn’t a concert but one of their favourite youtubers, Jack Septiceye, who was performing a show in our city, to a sold out crowd. They begged to go just like I begged to be allowed to go see The Cure 30 something years ago.

As we walked past the venue 1.5 hours before showtime, heading for a bite to eat, the lineup was already snaking down the street. It was a reserved seating show so there was no need to be there so early. People were literally hopping up and down with glee. They had on their t-shirts, ball caps and hair dye that made reference to the youtube channel and the games the host plays. The crowd was pre-teen children to college age, with a sprinkling of parents.

Once inside we found our seats and then joined the huge line for merch. When it became clear we wouldn’t make it to the cash in time the kids went to the seats while I stayed in line. The teenager behind me burst into tears when the youtuber hit the stage. She apologized and talked about how much he meant to her and how he had saved her life, twice. Made me teary. The audience screamed approval louder than any concert that size I’ve seen.

To my ears and eyes the show was fairly standard inspirational stuff. Basically we all have tough times but work hard, fight obstacles and you can do anything no matter your race, gender or sexuality. Be your best self. There were a few swear words, jokes and some video game playing tossed in. It was participatory since the crowd knew the tag-lines he used and the games and references he made, and he called a few people on stage to play. Not bad considering what else is on youtube. The crowd loved it and they loved him. Like hero worship.

After seeing the spectacle I can completely understand why people might start their own channels or stream. The fairytale that this youtuber talked about started with feeling alone and like a failure. He did not have friends but then, through luck, hard work and passion, built an online community to the point that he now has millions and millions of followers. But he started out just like all of those people in the audience. One of the people invited to the stage to play said she went by the screen name “ordinary” on youtube. Of course a lot of pre-teens and teenagers want to grow up to be famous youtubers or twitch streamers, just like in my generation they took up drums or guitar because they wanted to get famous in a band. Some of them want to be extraordinary but I bet a lot of them just want to be part of a community, and belong, maybe have someone look at them from time to time. That should resonate with long time lurkers and members of this website, including those of us who are grown ups, write comments like this and hope that someone will read them and nod.
posted by Cuke at 5:30 AM on July 27, 2018 [20 favorites]


Great comment Cuke and completely agree.

Every generation finds its own community space (with some overlaps to the previous and next ones). It's important to recognise and embrace that, even if a lot of the time that might mean looking at them from the outside and going:

"I don't really get this. It doesn't work for me."

Because that's fine, you probably already have your way of consuming and networking.

To be honest, I have the same attitude to things like Star Wars, Trek and Doctor Who these days. If the new stuff over laps with what I want then brilliant. But if it doesn't then that's cool, because it's not really for me - it's for new kids who need new heroes. I already have mine, and I can still watch them any time I like.

Which, coming back on topic, was why the recent Twitch Presents event streaming a whole bunch of old Who back to back was fecking brilliant.

Seriously, watching fans old and new shipping Babs and Ian, the meta-commentary, the memes... it was a whole new way of watching stuff I'd watched so many times before in a brilliant and entertaining new way, with a whole new community.

L O N D O N 1 9 6 5
posted by garius at 5:48 AM on July 27, 2018


Coming into a stream with zero viewers (and thereby becoming the ONE VIEWER) can be intensely awkward, like coming to a party and realizing you're the only guest.

Interesting how everyone has such a different online experience. I personally feel more comfortable with this as it lets me warm up to the streamer, ask some questions, sort of have a light back and forth. It's friendly and low-stakes.

Once there are too many people in the channel, it feels like I get lost and I have to be in the right mood to be in one of those, watching someone like Ninja play Fortnite with thousands of people is much different experience and feels more like being at a concert and less like hanging out with a friend.
posted by Fizz at 6:10 AM on July 27, 2018


"According to people who have gone through it, lacking an audience is one of the most demoralizing things you can experience online."

I can think of worse.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:33 AM on July 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm not often in the mood to play a game myself, but when I do I'll stream it. I have one regular viewer who I direct message when I'm about to go live. She lives in Lisbon, Portugal of all places. There's a few other regulars who drop in from time to time too(all from Europe, for some reason). I had a notion of becoming a streamer, but even when I was streaming on a regular basis, I never got more than ten people in my channel at a time. From the article, apparently I was doing better than most.

Mostly, I just didn't want to play video games for hours and hours every day. It gets tiring. And my dog needs a walk and I want lunch and the games I like to play aren't the big draws anyway and I have to work at a real job so I can't be online as often as I should. There were a lot of reasons I was never going to make a living at it.

But I watch a lot of streams. Here I am, a 40-something year old woman... yet I enjoy watching Ninja stream Fortnite. I can't explain it, other than to say, I find the skill involved fascinating.

The best streamer I watch is Dan Olson, aka. Foldable Human. He deliberately plays the worst games ever made; mostly movie tie-in shovelware. Imagine the same critical analysis he brings to his YouTube channel, except for crappy video games, done in real time. It's delightful.
posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss at 7:06 AM on July 27, 2018


I tend to watch mostly LoadingReadyRun streams. They are a collective with a streaming schedule that goes from PUBG and Minecraft and Magic to painting miniatures and modding an old Dreamcast to board games. They have what I understand to be a middling numbers of followers, but they always appear to be genuine and having fun.
You can find them at https://www.twitch.tv/loadingreadyrun.
I enjoy the fact that they are mostly streaming random things that they find interesting, even if I don't, and they put out enough content that I can always find something interesting in their backlog.
They've managed to build a channel to the point that stuff that would probably have no or few viewers elsewhere will have a bunch of people simply because the community of viewers is so good (and well-moderated).
posted by PennD at 7:29 AM on July 27, 2018


To my ears and eyes the show was fairly standard inspirational stuff. Basically we all have tough times but work hard, fight obstacles and you can do anything no matter your race, gender or sexuality. Be your best self.

Jesus Cuke how would your teenage self have felt if The Cure had been like "eat your vegetables and believe in yourself" instead of playing a twenty-minute long version of A Forest
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:49 AM on July 27, 2018 [9 favorites]


While my (then girlfriend, now) wife was in Japan for a year, I used twitch to broadcast games to her so we could chat while I played (she enjoys watching games while I play them, and, despite me trying, has very little interest in learning to play any of the more complicated RPGs). I'd set up my stream, she'd hit the link and we'd be going. I left chat off because we were connected via skype. Exactly once, someone random wandered in. I had titled the room with bad Nihonglish (It said, in katakana, Foru [my wife's name approximated in katakana]). Chat was off, it was just the game, I was intentionally being as anti-social as I could, wanting to broadcast to exactly one person. When the random person entered the room, it was intensely creepy. I soon disconnected them without a word, which I acknowledge was kind of rude, but I hadn't thought that I'd need to make the room private (which would also have involved upgrading my twitch account).

Reading this article, I wonder, for the first time, what that person who wandered into my stream with a non-Japanese title in katakana, only game sounds, and chat disabled. I do hope that my rudeness didn't make them give up their quest to find some other, random streamer who had next to no audience.
posted by Hactar at 9:55 AM on July 27, 2018


I tend to watch mostly LoadingReadyRun streams.

How can you mention LoadingReadyRun and not talk about the awesomeness that is Desert Bus?
posted by xedrik at 12:22 PM on July 30, 2018


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