As many of you know twitch has little to no discoverability so I considered ideas on how that could change. Engagement is a huge part of a strong community and this system would reward it. The idea came to me from the Pre Roll Ad function. Pre roll ads are the ads you encounter when entering a streamers stream and twitch has a way to temporarily turn them OFF. When you manually run an ad from the dashboard the Pre Roll Ads turn off for a designated amount of time based on the length of the ad you ran. So I thought why can’t the “view” count do something similar through chat engagement? Let’s say you have 5 viewers and 2 of them are actively engaging with your stream, you would get a “phantom” +2 viewers. Your viewer count would remain 5 but you “engagement” number would be 7. The thought is that you would change position in the category you are in based on your "Engagement" number rather than your view count. This way more engaging communities will see quicker growth while being higher in the category of their choosing.

My thoughts were chat engagement would give you 60 seconds per the individual chatter, this timer would have to run down before it could be reset just like the Pre-Roll Ad Off function. Subscriptions would grant you 120 seconds, follows 60 seconds, cheers 90 seconds, etc. All of these counters would count per individual chatter and actions of the same type would not stack, for example if a chatter speaks in chat and says something again 15 seconds later the time will NOT add 60 more seconds until their original chat timer expired. However if that chatter follows, subscribes, cheers, etc THEN time would be added.

Imagine being raided with this system. You could have 100 viewers and 25 active chatters giving you an “engagement” number of 125. Now imagine receiving a raid of 100 viewers in which 50 of them spammed you with emotes and messages adding 50 “phantom” views to your “engagement” count which let’s say spurs an additional 25 of your original viewers to interact in response to the raid adding 25 more “phantom” viewers to your “engagement” count. That would bring your “viewer” count to 200 and your “engagement” count to 300 AND it would last for at least 60 seconds which is longer than a lot of raiders actually stick around and that’s not including follows, cheers and subs that may also occur. Through a raid you would be able to climb higher in the category you are in and hold that position potentially long enough to organically gain additional viewers to your stream.

If you made it this far I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas one this! Ill likely have a YouTube video discussing this topic because I would love to hear what Twitch staff would say on the subject.