I am not asking for a way to filter or sort by viewer count.
It was pointed out in the Discord that this is intentionally not included, the reasoning given being:
“we believe that not listing a stream’s viewers leads to better and more fair discoverability. Content should reign supreme, and if you’re joining a channel because of the amount of people and not the content, you’re looking for a chat room and not a stream.”
I heavily disagree with the “looking for a chat room and not a stream” comment – growing streamers rely on people coming in and chatting with them to build a community. Viewer count isn’t a measure of quality, but it is a measure of what a community is bound to be like.
A lot of people prefer to become part of small streamer’s communities to build a more genuine connection with the streamer and become part of a smaller community. Those kinds of interactions are what a lot of people are looking for when deciding who to watch. Larger streamers have fanbases, not communities, and I personally avoid large streamers because of this, because it’s like watching TV instead of being an interactive experience, which is the whole point of streaming.
Being able to discern whether I want to “invest” in a streamer by seeing how small (or large) they are before I open their stream is a feature of Twitch that I rely on.
I want to clarify that my response quoted above from the discord is not the official Glimesh reasoning! That’s just my personal opinion, which while is not the deciding factor in the decision being made, nor is my reasoning necessarily the same as the “official” Glimesh response. It wasn’t my intention to speak as the whole of the team and I apologize if I made it seem so.
No matter the opinions or the reasoning from the Glimesh Team, we still want to have this conversation! Who knows, we might change our mind! We always listen closely to these conversations and frequently evaluate things to make sure our goals align with the community’s as closely as possible.
Putting this here as an addition to my initial suggestion, for more context:
I think the disconnect there is that I’m not trying to ascertain stream “quality” by view count. I’m trying to determine whether the community is new or growing, since that’s where I like to dedicate my time when watching a stream. Determining quality comes after seeing whether a streamer is small or new. I intentionally seek out smaller LGBTQIA+ streamers, since we’re underrepresented and very few of us become big, so I like to target those streams when I feel like watching something to show support, and many other people in this community do too (anecdotally). I don’t think your system of seeing the person, game, and tags accounts for these kinds of goals (i.e. supporting smaller marginalised streamers). I can only imagine the nightmare it will be trying to raid a smaller streamer when it’s impossible to tell whether they’re small or not without opening the stream.
See I really agree on this topic because when you’re starting out and new to streaming the content isn’t always there. Learning how to create content comes with time. I prefer to share the love and support smaller communities and I’m just imagining the struggle that raiding would be trying to find them. My normal channel search routine is: LGBTQIA+ > similar game/something my viewers would stick around for > someone with lower numbers than me > click on their channel and see if I like their content and see if they’re safe to raid.
While I don’t think numbers should be plastered all over discovery page or super obvious, it would be nice to be able to find a way to find these people. It could be either a view count on hover or an automated tag for people with average viewers under at least 30. (I say automated because people can come in and say their small and not actually be small just to get raids)
Being able to know who you’re raiding and knowing which channels to watch can help people support minority communities that need help and that you or your community would like to be apart of.
I feel like if view count isn’t there then there needs to be a solid way to compensate to help find these people if that makes sense. New people may not want to put that “small streamer” tag all the time or not even know they can do that so I feel like it would be better off as a site side sorta tag or badge or SOMETHING.
I wonder if your use case could be better served by a “new streamers” section or automatic tag of some sort. LGBTQIA+ streams should be quite easy to find using tags. it seems to me you are not after streamers with a small number of viewers, but streamers who have only streamed for a few hours. This would keep it fair as well since everyone was new once.
While you may use the viewer count to find small streamers, the majority of people would use it to find big streamers, because that is what they are used to on other platforms - we want to break the mould and try something new here
For me its smaller community bases I’m looking for in general. People can stream for years and still be small. There’s also people like me who take a hiatus and come back to streaming and have to start from the ground up basically.
I personally like being able to see viewer counts and to sort/filter by them.
I am typically watching streams at work and thus I cannot be heavily involved in the actual chatting of a stream but I enjoy listening to a streamer interacting with their community. I mostly lurk and I don’t chat because I can’t be actively involved as I am constantly pulled away by work.
But I also don’t want to just listen to game sounds with 0 interaction. This is why I typically will search based on a viewer count because it increases the chance of me finding someone with an established community who interacts with the streamer. It also allows me to occasionally chat and disappear without me feeling that I have left the entire chat empty.
This has nothing to do with feeling that someone that has less of a count has inferior content its just what I look for in a stream requires a small community established.
On the flip side too I sometimes want to watch someone with 0-2 viewers because when I have more time to watch and interact I like to encourage a new growing streamer and be there to be part of their community.
I think though that there are many out there that the kind of content they like and want to explore is based on viewer count and I think that we should at least enable those content seekers to use tools to help them find that content.
I don’t think that we ever need to default to having view counts but I think that if we can give people the option to turn it on I believe we can help more people find content that they enjoy.
I think Glimesh should keep it the way it is right now. Viewers are hidden on the search page but when you join a stream you can choose to see the number or not. For those who are saying they want to see it before entering a stream seems to go against Glimesh’s whole premise. Don’t we want every streamer to have a chance of being discovered? At least click on their stream and if you find it too busy or too quiet you can leave? I don’t see how that extra step is so difficult. I think seeing the streamer before making a decision is the point.
To me, I think there is a simple solution. A good number of users want to see the viewer counts to make their decision on whether to join a chat or not and there are some that don’t for discoverability reasons. So why not make it in essence like the viewer counts when you join streams? I would create a toggle on the discover page where you can toggle on/off those viewer numbers. In terms of helping discoverability, I would check out apps like Hover and TikTok and see if there is a way to eventually down the line, tie in a clips system for discoverability on site.
There’s great arguments for and against displaying viewer count during browsing but I have to in my opinion, regardless of your intent, viewer count skews towards favouritism and inherently compromises the fairness of random display order.
It may not seem like a big ask but it could totally ruin the point of why Glimesh is trying to do it differently in the first place