Seeker is a project I started recently which should help people find new streams on Twitch.
The Idea
While Twitch does have a page to browse for the streams with currently the most viewers to find new streams, I found that page to be rather inadequate for that purpose. The reason is that for most people (including me) when they’re searching for new stuff to watch, they don’t reall know exactly what they’re looking for. Instead, I know what I’m not looking for. For example, you can see this in the British parlament when they’re talking about Brexit. Jokes aside, I think this is a general problem that doesn’t only apply to finding a new streamer, but for any case where you have a lot of choices without any clear constraints (another example might be window shopping). You could go on and look through the whole page of streams, but why wouldn’t Twitch allow you to remove certain streams that you know you won’t watch?
Twitch does have methods to filter the amount of streams, but instead of removing streams that match a certain criteria, it only shows the streams that match the criteria; the complete opposite of what I think makes sense for this use case. And that’s where the project comes in: it provides an alternative that allows people to filter out streams based on games, tags (including languages) and specific streamers. For example, I know I won’t enjoy streams of people playing slot machines or the game “Clash Royale”. On Twitch, there’s no way for me to remove (or hide) these from the browse page. With Seeker, that’s the main feature.
Status
Seeker is live and can be found here. The main feature works well enough that it’s usable. There are however still a few things that I want to work on, such as better mobile support and improving the usability of adding tags/languages to filter by. But in general I’m satisfied with what it can do so far. If you have any issues, feedback or suggestions, you can file an issue on github as well as checkout the source.