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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

I'd be interested in a short note on what made it slow / what makes it fast.

Having spent a lot of time working on making the backend compute this with very low latency, you wouldn't believe how happy finally seeing this become a reality on the actual site would make me. :)

Thank you /a lot/ for working on this!

Thank you! As another small viewer base streamer, that will be quite helpful. Although, if nobody is around, I just natter on like always because there is always someone who will want to have a peek at the VODs.

Oh joy, more background JavaScript

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.

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.

I don't know about other streamers, but I, for one, expect people to hang out for about 5-15 minutes. I do a coding stream, so it's bound to get boring :-) I'm always amazed when people hang out for the whole stream. People are busy and it's wonderful if they just pop by to see what's going on. At least in my stream, I'm always very happy to see someone say, "Hello. Just stopping by. Can't stay!" It's incredibly gratifying.

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.

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.

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

It's already possible by viewing your Twitch chat via an IRC client with certain IRCv3 capabilities requested. It's not actually that useful, though; sometimes users can be chatting away but there's no record of their presence either via a JOIN message or their name in the user list because these are cached rather than shown in real time.

As a streamer I would say that a streamer should never act as if no one is watching. Many viewers never feel like chatting and that's fine. And sometimes people will watch vods after the fact. For myself, I purposely disable the metrics so that my mood can't be affected by viewership numbers.

Proper attitude. I run radio based streams. That means I always have to work with 100% concentration on _mixer_ / twitch. Even though I leave the metrics on, the work is always done for a (fictional) audience, otherwise the quality of my recording suffers (I record all my live session with audacity)

I stream for artistic expression, BTW so an audience or not matters little

>I purposely disable the metrics so that my mood can't be affected by viewership numbers.

Thats a great tip, I didn't even know that was possible with Twitch.

If you're using the Creator Dashboard, click on the numbers and they change to -- symbols.

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