Hello! I work on the video platform @ twitch. We’ve been working a lot on that issue. Viewer count numbers should be significantly faster today and will get even more responsive soon!
Having spent a lot of time working on making the backend compute this with very low latency, you wouldn't believe how happy finally seeing this become a reality on the actual site would make me. :)
Thank you! As another small viewer base streamer, that will be quite helpful. Although, if nobody is around, I just natter on like always because there is always someone who will want to have a peek at the VODs.
As a viewer I'm not sure I'd like this happening but for smaller streamers, a notification/message telling you that a viewer has joined or left might be useful.
Please don't. I would avoid certain stream if I knew they were told that I've joined/left because I do that quite frequently without saying anything and don't want to come across as an asshole.
I don't know about other streamers, but I, for one, expect people to hang out for about 5-15 minutes. I do a coding stream, so it's bound to get boring :-) I'm always amazed when people hang out for the whole stream. People are busy and it's wonderful if they just pop by to see what's going on. At least in my stream, I'm always very happy to see someone say, "Hello. Just stopping by. Can't stay!" It's incredibly gratifying.
It's already possible by viewing your Twitch chat via an IRC client with certain IRCv3 capabilities requested. It's not actually that useful, though; sometimes users can be chatting away but there's no record of their presence either via a JOIN message or their name in the user list because these are cached rather than shown in real time.
