Lessons from my first year of live coding on Twitch (2017)
meow.noopkat.com
meow.noopkat.com
I've tried a little bit of streaming my coding on Twitch. I had no viewers during that time, and I was worried quite a lot to hide sensitive things - mainly about making sure password, api keys, IP addresses, etc were hidden.
I considered looking into the OBS or display driver code to automatically blur either previously configured things "please blur this rectangle out" "please ensure this string is always blurred", "never show this file", "please blur email and password input boxes" - in theory could one of these be possible on Linux?
I archive this with a simple setup using xephyr + dwm (or i3) + chromium. I capture the xephyr window with OBS. With this simple setup I'm able to keep all sensitive information and sometimes a script doc on the "host" env.
You can compensate by having a much higher resolution landscape display where certain windows are portrait, but the text won't be that readable on stream without dynamic zooms.
I think the real value is that if you're having motivational issues and streaming gives you more consistent motivation then it may offset the downsides. Writing some code in a suboptimal environment is better than writing no code in an optimal environment.
For me, streaming myself code on Twitch encourages me not to open those time sink websites. Also, the "Programming" community on Twitch is much smaller and more focused than the wider "Gaming" community, so you don't get too many toxic people. Mostly it's just people who are interested in learning.
Personally, I trawled twitch for a while looking for someone working with C++.
Does anyone have recommendations?
Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid and The Witness) sometimes streams[2] development of his language, Jai. He does write some C++ when he digs into compiler internals, but it's mostly in Jai.
[0]: https://handmadehero.org/
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA
C++, OpenGL, and ingenious offbeat procedural animation.
YouTube comments/chat are notoriously awful, probably worst than /b/ at times. Then you look at the events surrounding YouTube as a whole: Jake Paul, the ad-pocalypse, Pewdiepie being labeled a Nazi, racist and sexist hiring practices.
By comparison, the last time Twitch made the news was because Amazon bought them. Chat moderation is in a pretty decent place: each channel has enough freedom to dictate what the community around it is like. From the gaming end, Twitch is very well integrated with your gaming profiles to the point where you can get in-game rewards for watching. Relevant content is incredibly easy to find thanks to how things are structured, whereas in Youtube I have to "search" for things.
YouTube has really been going the extra mile.
Twitch is gathering a large passionate community that is worth to reckon with. If I did streaming, I guess I would A/B test whether YouTuBe or Twitch gave me better results in terms of number of viewers and overall “impact”. Are there studies on this ?