Gaming has become the most popular form of entertainment, and in today’s time, there are so many different and unique ways to experience it. There are many different gaming consoles to play on, and many different platforms to broadcast your experience, one of them being Twitch, the most commonly known and popular live streaming service.
Twitch streamers can broadcast their games to viewers in real time to entertain, much like watching television or a movie. Viewers can even chat with the streamer, as well as donate money to show their support for the stream. Additionally, viewers can follow streamers to not only show support, but to be notified when they go live, similar to how people subscribe to YouTube channels.
The growth of a Twitch streamer can be shown to follow Power Laws, which state that in a network, majority of common nodes have very little connections, and few important nodes have a lot of connections. This is exactly how a twitch streamer grows in popularity, as the average viewer may follow a streamer, which increases the connections the streamer has, but the connection between that average viewer to anyone else has not changed.
In this picture, suppose node A is a twitch streamer, and nodes B – F are viewers that follow streamer A. Even though B – F are following streamer A, they can interact with each other through the community that has been built, and in this picture, B and C are connected. This is also seen through viewer X, where X is connected to A and became a part of this community, and ended up connected to B.
Overall, Twitch is more than just a website to watch a person broadcast themselves playing a video game. It is a community of people who share the same passion, and the larger the streamer is, the larger their built up community is as well.
References:
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/social-media/0/steps/16046
I agree, this is definitely a cool trend, but probably more indicative of normal social networks than just being localized to Twitch.
What I find particularly interesting is that there’s probably a much easier way to ‘introduce’ new people into a network on Twitch, because of the Host and Raid functionality, where big streamers donate their viewers to other streamers. Think of this as inserting an edge from every neighbor of one of the nodes with the highest degree to a disjoint node (or some node that has incredibly low degree). All of a sudden, the new node gains immense increases in popularity and influence. I think that’s part of the reason we see so many new and fresh content creators on the platform.
Thanks for sharing!