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.
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.
unless twitch gives users incentive to go down the streamer list twitch as a growth platform is doomed. streaming is niche, gaming is even more niche. a platform thats solely for streaming gamers is isolated, thats why they've been trying to push just chatting and other endeavors outside of gaming but inevitably the majority of the userbase is made of gamers (in the slur sense) and make it difficult for non-gamers to become invested.
Youtube and Facebook streaming dont have these issues bc theyre built on platforms meant for everyone
On Youtube, everything is about producing enticing videos and if you do a great job, the algo will favor you even if you are a small channel. Youtube search plays an important part in all of this.
On Twitch, the unit of interest is the live stream and that is much more difficult to produce content around. It also makes finding interesting streams challenging because search doesn't work well with this type of content. Heck, you can't even query the directory for basic stuff like [show me streamers living in Sweden who usually stream GTA 5 RP].
There are some caveats. If the audience is growing relative to the number of creators, you (on average) still have a chance. YouTube also has a huge audience and wide variety of content (much more than Twitch, which is heavily focused on video-game streaming), so it's possible that there are some niches that can still be exploited in a way that you couldn't on Twitch, which is heavily focused on a small number of niches.
None of that takes away from the larger point - it's a race to the bottom when trying to be a viable creator, and the probability of building a big-enough audience to make enough money to even partially support yourself is very very low.