Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find and chat with streamers who are streaming alone

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. (&quot;Hello Mr. Shirtless Man. How are you doin&#x27; today? Is it hot in there...?&quot;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pigdog.org&#x2F;auto&#x2F;viva_la_musica&#x2F;link&#x2F;3203.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pigdog.org&#x2F;auto&#x2F;viva_la_musica&#x2F;link&#x2F;3203.html</a>

On a related note, there used to be a site, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitch-tools.rootonline.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitch-tools.rootonline.de&#x2F;</a>, where you could find &quot;uncategorized&quot; 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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CommanderRoot&#x2F;status&#x2F;1250486976547106821" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CommanderRoot&#x2F;status&#x2F;1250486976547106821</a>). I haven&#x27;t been able to find any alternative services that offer this. If anyone has such a service, I&#x27;d love to go surfing around the strange part of Twitch again.

I made a similar site as part of a hackathon at Twitch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitchraids.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitchraids.com</a><p>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.

As someone who has periodically streamed, consider dropping a few chat messages when you land. Twitch&#x27;s metrics are slow to update and it is not always clear when someone is watching.

twitch is one of the platforms where I feel like I&#x27;ve struggled the most to get viewers. just playing my main game like Dota wasn&#x27;t too productive since I&#x27;m not a pro or super hot so my value proposition there isn&#x27;t too compelling. Instead I&#x27;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&#x27;m about to stream to seed some viewers. Also I&#x27;ve realized that the more specific your brand is on social media the more effective, I&#x27;ve been looking at branding myself as a strategy game buff&#x2F;developer so will be streaming niche strategy games and Unity game development every weekend. I&#x27;ll re-asses after a month to see if this plan was effective.<p>I really appreciate this project as going from 0-1 viewers on Twitch where the 1 isn&#x27;t your friend is challenging.

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.

Great concept for the winner take all world we live in now. It&#x27;s very difficult to get your name out there in anything these days without having to invest a lot in marketing yourself.

Really cool idea. Thanks for sharing.<p>I could totally see myself using this more if you added 2 options, language and game.<p>Also interesting would be to display not only 0 streams but also streams with &lt;10 viewers.

Great idea. It&#x27;d be great if you could select a game &#x2F; category. Reason is I&#x27;d actually be able to have an actual chat with someone if I knew something about the game.

Quite a nice idea, well done! Very minimalist and clean as well. Few pieces of feedback after playing with it for a few minutes-<p>Not sure if I&#x27;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?

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.<p>That being said, I find it extremely difficult to find streams of people coding. Maybe that exist but I&#x27;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.

Hey folks, thanks for the great feedback. I&#x27;m going to continue going through these threads and iterate on this idea some more this weekend.<p>Feel free to give me a follow on my twitch channel <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitch.tv&#x2F;ellg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitch.tv&#x2F;ellg</a> -- I do a lot of programming on there and would love to have some more people stop by and chat :)

I just listened to a little kid play Fortnite while I did some work in the background.<p>He was very excited to have some unexpected random viewers which made my day.

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.<p>It&#x27;d be neat if there was a button here that would allow a user to subscribe with Prime; I&#x27;m sure these streamers would love that.

Screw it I&#x27;ll give this a try! Streaming right now :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitch.tv&#x2F;redskyforgeradio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitch.tv&#x2F;redskyforgeradio</a>

Hmm there was <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lonelystreams.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lonelystreams.com&#x2F;</a> before but it doesn&#x27;t work for a long time.

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

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&#x27;ve seen a lot of panels at PAX talking about how to &quot;grow&quot; streaming but nothing about how to &quot;bootstrap&quot; an audience. This seems like it could be a cool way to do that, if not even just find people to talk to.

Is the video supposed to be postage stamp sized?

Anyone else using Firefox? It doesn&#x27;t appear to work very well in FF :(

I&#x27;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&#x27;t view for the chat, he views for the stream, the chat&#x27;s a bonus. To swap the expectation is unrealistic. Twitch.tv isn&#x27;t a chatting program.

I found a streamer that was really cool. Followed. Honestly great product. It&#x27;s like StumbleUpon but for streamers.

feature request: language picker. saying hi to someone that doesn&#x27;t speak my language has got me kicked.

Very cool idea. I&#x27;m having problems to access the website. Maybe the high traffic put it down.

Heh...spun the wheel a few times and found someone&#x27;s re-broadcast of the BBC4 stream.

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

It&#x27;s broken now because of API changes but it&#x27;s the same concept as LonelyStreams (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lonelystreams.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lonelystreams.com</a>).<p>It&#x27;s always fun to see some begginner streams.

I think a small improvement may be to use an auto-complete text box instead of dropdown. The items in the dropbox aren&#x27;t ordered so i can&#x27;t jump to the game i&#x27;m interested in by typing.

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.

Would be nice if you could filter those fortnite kiddies

What could go wrong?

I don&#x27;t know how it works, but it would great to check if the streamers are streaming. Clicked on multiple streams that weren&#x27;t live.

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.

I chuckled as it reminded me of the cams roulettes in the old days. Still, I liked it. I got a random &#x27;mature&#x27; stream.

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

Quick suggestion: Sort game name A-Z

Why is the stream area tiny?

Isn’t this already there and called Omegle?

Is the site down? I get a 502 error.

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