playing to an empty room

The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one:

“It’s kind of exhausting playing to an empty room day in and day out with no results,” one Redditor wrote on a now-deleted thread on r/Twitch.

“It’s fucking hard to stay positive when doing this 5 days a week when it feels like nobody drops by,” another Redditor wrote in a different thread, after spending months streaming to nobody. “I’ve come to a realization that streaming just isn’t working for me.”

“Been streaming on and off for 4+ years and everytime I come back I go weeks where the majority of time I’m streaming to no one,” another Redditor wrote. “It’s tough.”

I think about this story in the context of this website and my podcast. I maintain both of them more for myself than to have what I do seen and heard by others. Sure, I’d love to have an audience that grows every day, but I do these things as hobbies and mental exercises more than anything else.

I’ve become a better writer from writing here since 2006, and I’ve become a better speaker from doing a podcast semi-regularly since 2014.

The same goes for my Instagram account. The fact that I have around 1,100 people interested in my photos street cars is great, but I was doing it way before Instagram existed (how about me with a 2.1 MPX Canon PowerShot ELPH S100 on the streets of Manhattan in 2000).

Clearly some Twitch streamers enjoy the sense of community they get from it, but for the streamers who don’t enjoy the actual process of streaming, then maybe it’s not the right hobby for them.