Bad Stimmer

When I started streaming I really tried hard to have the best possible title and category and to always stay on topic. I would stop and start streams to make sure the titles were correct. But, being me, I would be easily distracted and want to respond to people in my chat—a cardinal sin of streaming, responding to people in chat.

I even created an entire system for managing the title only to realize no matter what I did the final title would always be wrong unless I stopped and restarted the stream every time I randomly changed what I was talking about. It was exhausting, but worse than that, I still got hate.

All it takes is once to have the wrong title on a VOD and people think that I’m the lazy one for not laboriously editing the video into different segments or even changing the title of the VOD or adding a full description of everything in the video. People always seem to have all the solutions figured out and feel strongly that they need to tell me what to do even though they have never produced any content at all. Obviously, I owe then the best possible content I can make, and they deserve it for free (yes, they still complain about ads).

Even when people recommend my VOD to someone in Discord because it covers something interesting that someone else in the forum might want to look into I still get hate and "recommendations" about how to be a better strimmer. These people have no idea how much effort it takes to stream at all and frankly they don’t care.

So what’s the solution?

Make absolutely sure that the titles and categories have absolutely, positively nothing to do with the content of the stream whatsoever.

People get justifiably angry when they open up a VOD that says "Come learn to code with us" but contains no coding whatsoever. But if the title is "

Their titles. Look at the biggest streamers in history. Here’s an actual title fro Kai Cenat on Thanksgiving day that made sense, sort of:

🦃 MAFIATHON 2 🦃 KAI X KEVIN HART X DRUSKI 🦃DAY 27🦃20% OF REVENUE GOING TO SCHOOL IN NIGERIA 🦃 ALL MONTH 🦃 CLICK HERE 🦃 !Subathon

That’s all there is. Most of the time there isn’t even that much information, just some random thing that has nothing to do with what is in the stream, at all.

My old gen x mind has a hard time with all this idiocracy but that’s where we are. If you want to keep down the hate and keep attracting anyone and everyone long enough to maybe stick around and learn something, make absolutely sure that everyone has no fucking idea what you are doing from the title and category, the worse the better. I mean, we are talking about a generation that thinks setting the reason for a Venmo to "Doink Reattachment Surgery" is actually funny (that’s an actual thing that the absolutely unfunny Andy Samburg sent to the dude from A Closer Look).

Or should I say 🟥 NOT 🟥 ENOUGH 🟥 RED 🟥 (okay, I could not stand that in my table of contents, the forced caps is bad enough). Silly me. I didn’t have enough annoying red emojis in my title. How could I possibly hope to succeed? All the best and biggest strimmers suddenly had an ungodly amount of red emojis. It’s as if all these people didn’t live through the <blink> tag era, and let’s face it, they didn’t. Hell, they would probably think it was amazing.

It took me four years of streaming to finally realize that I was working way too hard. Why go though all the mental stress of making sure something as trivial as the title and category are accurate when you can just make it the same thing and never change it, or just change it on Thanksgiving to have a bunch of turkeys in it instead.

Pinning a message that I would already have to write is definitely the easiest way to set the topic of the current moment. Both Twitch and YouTube support it and I don’t care to livestream to anything else. Pinning might not add a chapter, but it also doesn’t leave you with a title that doesn’t make any sense in the end. So I leave the title something generic and even click-baity.

Occasionally, someone will say that they found me from one or my long-form, live stream VODs because of the title. That leads me to believe that having a good title can actually help if you make sure you get right. But the only way to make sure it is right is to wait until it is completely over and then decide what to name it. To be safe and lazy just have it make no sense at all, then, after the fact, go change the title and description on YouTube so that people will find it (Twitch VODs don’t matter).

I ended up arriving at a few different content modes as the title so that people know what to expect. That way any of the videos on YouTube don’t show up in searches because there is nothing wrong about the title and all the videos in a particular mode get joined together. Here are some mode titles I have used successfully:

Reading comments and responding build engagement, a fancy word that good strimmers don’t actually care about explicitly, or at least they don’t want people to know they do.

I’m been accused of having too much empathy and that allows trolls to have their way with me. Probably true. If I was a good strimmer I’d make sure to just ignore or delete the bad ones and focus on the positive without letting the haters get to me. But I can’t. I’m me. I care about what the random trolls say. I’m a bad strimmer.

"Eyes connect, face builds."

I’ve learned to avoid the uncanny appearance that I am looking at the person’s forehead or ear by putting the chat too close the camera. When I look into the camera it is like I am actually talking to the person watching, in a good way. It’s better to have the chat far away so there is an intentional break in "gaze" signalling that I’m reading what people are saying off screen.

It also follows that looking at coding screen by dropping my gaze away from the line of site with the camera signals to people that I am working on the code and not paying attention to the chat at the moment so they don’t immediately expect a response and think I am just ignoring them.

This is actually something I got right from the beginning. I always said, that I just wanted a radio show that happened to have a video element. I’ve even read that YouTube is actually primarily an audio service with video as an extra.

Big strimmers don’t use a green screen. In fact, on some of their streams you can see a dead green screen crumpled up in the background. I’ve learned that people want to see something about my surroundings more than they want to zoom in on just me and whatever I’m wearing. The comments from people were hilarious once I dropped the green screen about what everyone imagined my studio space actually looked like. Some imagined a corporate office, a school classroom, but few expected me to be in my crappy apartment room. The impression came because I used to dress up for streaming (instead of just wearing pajamas) and took it way too seriously. I was such a bad strimmer. The best strimmers are just themselves and everything that makes them human makes them worth watching. Some will pretend and do fine for a while, but the biggest strimmers are themselves.

Sounds like relationship advice, right? Because it is. It’s building a relationship with my community.

I hate free music. I’m a music snob. Free music is generally really horrible. But to play the good stuff you really cannot stream to YouTube. I learned that lesson really quickly with a strike and several times that they shut my stream down in the middle of the stream. Only YouTube does that. Twitch never does. In fact, Twitch altered their DJ category to automatically disable VODs. They support good, live music. YouTube does not. But if you dual stream, as you would for most everything except DJ/Music streams, then you simple cannot.

Here’s how I learned about this lesson the hard way. I was coding in the foreground with my chat completely invisible to the stream and myself. This fostered a backseat driving troll atmosphere where a bunch of assholes started slamming everything I was doing thinking I might not ever read it. Well I did, and banned them all. I ain’t got no tolerance for that kind of shit in my own house. Good natured ribbing is one thing, that kind of trolling, back seating, is just a waste of everyone’s energy. How did I fix it?

First of all, put anything anyone says on the screen. All those back-seaters now have to own up to the fact that their words will be there for everyone to see—including me. Sure I paid for the peace of mind by silencing adhoc conversations in the chat and a few lines of precious screen real-estate, but it is worth it. I never have to worry about it again.

There is one problem though: YouTube. If I want to dual stream to YouTube and Twitch at the same time I cannot monitor the YouTube chat at all. I have to check it on occasion but it does not appear on the screen. This is horrible because YouTuber viewers—in my experience—are the absolute worst community members I could ever have. They overwhelmingly are more clueless, willing to troll, and just all-around horrible people. Strangely, I don’t get that in Twitch/IRC.

The fix for YouTube is simple: don’t enable chat. The chat interface is horrible anyway and lags behind the video by a lot. I can still stream and they will see the Twitch comments and figure it out, or not. Either way I don’t have to worry about them. Are there some who cannot chat to Twitch? Yep. But when I am streaming with full voice and camera I can enable the chat from both. It’s only those long co-working streams when I’m working on something that need to have the back-seaters outed so I can see who is misbehaving. If my community were to ever grow large enough to make chat unreadable, I’d change to filtering only those people I want to hear from on screen, which is totally doable with weechat all by itself.