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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
I spent a long time trying to think of a short, catchy title and that one made sense once I decided what the focus was going to be. FTR I haven't actually read that book, it's a concept I've seen in many places but I do understand that it's a reference with a more narrow constituency. Oh, and the graphics were actually not needed at all, I basically just used them to visually break up the post a bit and hopefully provide a little humor. | ||
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WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
The long tail is all the cumulative views that come after the initial live stream spike, which could potentially total up to far more viewer-hours than the live stream itself. Which actually would would a legitimate topic as well, about how Streamers and Twitch could do a better job of promoting highlight moments for viewers to dig through, instead of relying on random linking from outside sources. | ||
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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
That may be one usage of the term I've never heard of (though it refers to the same visual effect in a histogram) but if anything my usage is far more mainstream. I'd really love to dive into Twitch data related to viewership patterns but the problem is I don't know what it looks like from their end or from the end of a high-end streamer. They have written the occasional blog post about it but it doesn't reveal a whole lot. That said there are some assumptions one could make that are reasonable to explore. Also your signature is incorrect. | ||
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populis
Brazil88 Posts
Twitch's front page looks like a reminiscent of a 2002 e-commerce website listing "top-X most sold" under irrelevant (to me) sections and the whole navigation/discovery is incredibly awful. Searching is useless. Did you see the search results page? Oh my fucking god. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EWX27Es.png) There's a long column of useless results and awful red icons indicating people are live... floating around a sea of white pixels. That pretty much sets the mood when navigating Twitch: you have to discover islands of land after swimming a sea of nothingness. I intuitively developed a revulsion for Twitch's first page when it auto-played stuff. I was not even aware that I was doing it, but reading you post I remembered that I do a conscious effort to try and remember actual channel URLs so I go directly to the channels, completely avoiding the front page. Now I use a Google Chrome extension that notifies me about streams and I don't even care to open twitch website anymore. The UI is astonishingly bad. There's a complete lack of appeal. There's nothing more innocuous than a showing a 6 columns by infinite rows table of boxes displaying the latest snapshot of a streaming session: ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3aRSUZv.jpg) You get snapshots of people configuring stuff in windows, snapshots of people browsing websites. I'm not going to click any of this shit. Even freaking gosugamers get it a little bit better: ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/AGMIMbk.png) There is at least some visual appeal to check a stream. For me as a spectator Twitch is good at one, and only one thing: that frame where the video plays. Their backend and infrastructure is the only good thing. Everything else seems to be stuff thrown around to fill space. | ||
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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
1) Dodges the autoplay video on the front page 2) Actually shows me who is live among followed channels. How the latter is only on directory pages baffles me. | ||
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WolfintheSheep
Canada14127 Posts
On June 14 2015 16:02 FHDH wrote: ?? That may be one usage of the term I've never heard of (though it refers to the same visual effect in a histogram) but if anything my usage is far more mainstream. I'd really love to dive into Twitch data related to viewership patterns but the problem is I don't know what it looks like from their end or from the end of a high-end streamer. They have written the occasional blog post about it but it doesn't reveal a whole lot. That said there are some assumptions one could make that are reasonable to explore. Also your signature is incorrect. The long tail in market and commerce refers to the "tail" of the inverse exponential graph, meaning the total sales that comes after the peak from initial sales, and how it can stretch out over years and years, making it extremely "long". In fact, that's exactly what the book you linked to is all about: focusing on the long tail for profits instead of counting on the big initial peak from early demand. There are probably several other aspects of Twitch that are relevant to the term long tail, but live viewership and VoD seems the most relevant. | ||
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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
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populis
Brazil88 Posts
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retr0x
12 Posts
On June 14 2015 18:15 populis wrote: Not really. Twitch is, and has always been since it was spun off from justin.tv, about building a recognizable brand in the gaming market to attract both streamers and viewers to their service. They are all over the place with partnerships, sponsoring teams, tournaments, having their own convention... That's what Amazon bought : a gigantic (and growing) audience of gamers that associate "live game streaming" with "twitch". Maybe Twitch can re-pivot to only sell infrastructure, turning into "streaming as a service". Being bought by Amazon reinforces that notion. Because they are falling behind the community and content discovery aspects very, very quickly. Youtube can and probably will outpace them on those fronts very easily. Besides, Amazon never needed Twitch for the streaming technology in the first place. They have been the streaming technology behind Netflix for more than 5 years (here is a blogpost from a Netflix architect explaining why they chose to abandon their own streaming technology in favor of Amazon). | ||
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populis
Brazil88 Posts
On June 14 2015 21:06 retr0x wrote: Not really. Twitch is, and has always been since it was spun off from justin.tv, about building a recognizable brand in the gaming market to attract both streamers and viewers to their service. They are all over the place with partnerships, sponsoring teams, tournaments, having their own convention... That's what Amazon bought : a gigantic (and growing) audience of gamers that associate "live game streaming" with "twitch". Besides, Amazon never needed Twitch for the streaming technology in the first place. They have been the streaming technology behind Netflix for more than 5 years (here is a blogpost from a Netflix architect explaining why they chose to abandon their own streaming technology in favor of Amazon). What Amazon AWS offers is the barebones infrastructure (raw servers and raw bandwidth), they don't offer out of the box streaming. Netflix implements their streaming on top of that infrastructure. Twitch probably does the same, using the very same infrastructure (AWS). Streaming is a very complex technology, specially on the scale of Twitch or Netflix, so Twitch could indeed sell that as a service. Yes, I agree that Twitch went to great lengths to build up their user base. That's generally the first rule of a growing startup that wants to scale. But there's two ways of approaching that problem, given the nature of the Twitch's business: organically grow by being attractive to content creators (single streamers, casting studios, etc), offering the maximum features and polishing the user experience; and "infiltrating" the market by making contracts, partnerships and deals with big content providers. Both approaches are not mutually exclusive, but when scaling, a company simply doesn't have resources to invest heavily on both. They must choose. Twitch adopted the latter. Youtube grew (long before Google) by adopting the former. Both approaches resulted in very distinct products. So Twitch didn't invest in building their product, they invested in building their service (mostly to companies, not individual streamers) and now are ages behind in developing their product to end users. | ||
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eieio
United States14512 Posts
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Slithe
United States985 Posts
On June 13 2015 12:15 FHDH wrote: There's no need to get upset. Every time you write something you have to consider your objectives and who you are writing for. As I said before, I didn't write over 3,000 words on a relatively narrow subject within Twitch.tv with the idea that it was going to have mass appeal. Feedback on that front would be better put to use on a post without so obviously a divergent purpose. Ideally, the intro would be engaging enough that it makes people interested in what you have to say. Currently, even people who are interested in the topic may not read the piece because they can't make sense of it. | ||
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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
On June 15 2015 11:56 Slithe wrote: Ideally, the intro would be engaging enough that it makes people interested in what you have to say. Currently, even people who are interested in the topic may not read the piece because they can't make sense of it. When, on Octover 1999, Shaykh Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani died at the venerable age of 85, virtually everyone int he world of Salafi Islam was in mourning. In the eyes of many, he was the third great contemporary figure of Salafism, after 'Abd al-'Aziz b. Baz, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, deceased a few months earlier, and his second-in-command within the Saudi religious establishment, Muhammad b. 'Uthaymin. Salafi newspapers, magazines, and websites celebrated the memory of this son of an Albanian watchmaker who had become the "traditionist of the era" (muhaddith al-'asr), recognized by all as the greatest hadith scholar of his generation. This is the introduction of a two-chapter book that is really interesting to me, but I rarely recommend to anyone. It explores the ideological foundations of an extremist group that in 1979 seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. To some people I will recommend The Siege of Mecca which is about those events more narrowly and reads like a Tom Clancy novel. But you have to be really interested in the subject to read The Meccan Rebellion which is co-authored by Dr. Thomas Hegghammer, to whom I was introduced when I read his doctoral thesis, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, an even more academic text about something a lot of people think they care about but definitely don't care enough about to read that book. Now I have to ask you: are you interested in reading more based on that introductory paragraph I quoted? You might be someone with a deep enough interest to wade through the rest. I bet most people who read that would go "zzzzz" and walk away. That's probably the appropriate response. My writing isn't here - and is never - beyond reproach. There's a logic to the path to the main body, which doesn't mean it isn't flawed or sub-optimal. But the idea that, flatly, you want an introduction to make readers interested in the subject, is simply untrue. Whether you're writing for 8th grade English or your college Critical Thinking class or Anthropology or for your Master's course, or your military commander, you have a target audience, and those audiences vary by quite a lot. You will write appropriately for them. Sometimes, you have to make the assumption that reading your piece and finding it worthwhile requires a level of interest in the subject that is about yay-high. If you write your introduction for a much broader audience you might draw people in who will completely lose interest in the subject, and you might immediately lose the people who are naturally inclined to be interested in your subject. And there is no way to bridge that gap. Hardcore, Nature-subscribing scientists might read Popular Science but they either skip pieces about their own fields or yell about how bad they are. Such is the nature of things. Good writing typically requires good editing. Good editing takes time. I'd given this piece multiple major passes (including my typical I've written 800 words time to erase it and start over process), but past a point it's just not a reasonable investment. Now, I get that a number of people don't like the flow of the post. No doubt it could use work. But if you come to me and say "the title didn't make sense, the introduction didn't make sense, and I don't understand what the point of the piece is," as one poster did, how seriously can I take that feedback? Even if people didn't like some of the writing nearly everyone seemed to get the point. And there is a logic to how it was honed into, even if the execution needed work or the logic wasn't entirely sound in practice. | ||
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ahswtini
Northern Ireland22212 Posts
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Rebs
Pakistan10726 Posts
I dont care if there is some kind of interesting aneccdote for the hook but I would have like the objective statement to show up earlier so I know what i am in for. There is certainly a TLDR for the article too, but again there is a bit of lacking in organziaton so Im not going to bother to do it incase I miss something. That requires alot of proof and peer reading though and for something casual like this maybe not neccessary. That having been said it will be quite off putting even for people interested in the subject because some of them may not know what you are trying to talk about. If you believe that the vagueness you started off will hook people with knowledge ; well Im sorry but I find that unlikely. I literally gave it another chance because I was on a flight back home and my wifi on the plane ran out with the page loaded. | ||
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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
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Rebs
Pakistan10726 Posts
On June 18 2015 08:55 FHDH wrote: Maybe not. All I'm saying is there is no universal hook. You dont need a universal hook and no one said you should have one. Just be very clear and simple in what you want to talk about. Since you know your target audience, that should be easy. You dont need a 200 word intro either. Just identify what you want to explore and then lay it out. And with that way off starting off you will at the very least get someone to read it, if they arent interested they will stop. Ok fine. But there is no demerit to this whereas what you have now is needlessly risky. | ||
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populis
Brazil88 Posts
Looks like Twitch's got a run for their money. | ||
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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
On June 20 2015 05:16 populis wrote: FHDH, did you read Ars Technica's Hands-on with YouTube Gaming? Looks like Twitch's got a run for their money. I hadn't seen it, thanks. Looks pretty serious. All the branching that goes on from a game's page is so necessary. There's a lot of very useful stuff Twitch can do in that area. I've long thought they should develop and maintain glossaries for their competitive games so if you're trying to watch something you're not an expert in you can easily look up a term broadcasters use without leaving the page. This should definitely light a fire under Twitch's ass. I mean, they have a huge challenge with their core technology that YouTube has far behind them: capacity engineering. They are simultaneously trying to upgrade their video player to HTML5 and ensure that outages such as what happened during E3 just don't happen. But it definitely feels like, while this is a pretty legitimate focus, UX has gotten far shorter shrift than is necessary by any means. | ||
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FHDH
United States7023 Posts
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