There needs to be a biannual event where the entire Twitch community can celebrate and help uplift the hard work us small streamers put in when planning something special for our communities only to end up with little to no payoff.

For this, it could be setup a set of benefits that are active to any streamer who has been streaming actively for six months atleast and is currently streaming below an average of 20 viewers:

Outside of any contractual agreements with companies, (i.e, Nintendo Directs, major game reveal streams, etc) the entire Front Page is taken over by small streamers, so the recommendations give you streamers based on what your interested in, while being below that threshold, the carousel rotates out streamers either every two hours per streamer per day, or after five minutes if the streamer goes offline before their two hours are up.

A 2x multiplier is applied to all viewers, on top of the subscriber multiplier.

Ad free viewing, regardless of subscription status or the ad free viewing setting being disabled.

All bits dropped being worth an extra 50%.

50% off new subs, gift subs and resubs at any tier for the month.

A weekly instant $25 injection for any Partners who raids any streamer they've found on the front page.

A set of emotes that can be earned through supporting small streamers in any of these ways, similar to the Hindsight 2020 event.

Including a second set that any streamers, regardless of Partnership status and their viewers can earn by raiding multiple small streamers over the course of the month.

And a third set only granted to people who hit the top 3 spots of the individual gift sub and bit leaderboards by the end of Small Streamer Appreciation Month.

Twitch automatically generates thumbnail images that are shown in the grid view when scrolling through a category at random times from the stream output .

With most categories on Twitch the automatic thumbnail feature is just fine, as the content on stream matches up with what you want to show for discovery.
However, with the "Software and Game Development" category that is not necessarily the case.

The best way for people to discover me is to be interested in the game I make. Optimally the thumbnail would show me showing off the current state of the game and people that are interested into the artstyle / gameplay type / setting / etc. would click on it.
As it currently stands however, us programmers spend most of the time in our code editor which is not representative of the work we create. Viewers trying to decide on a stream have to base their selection of the appearance of the wall of text on your screen (dark / light theme, camera, layout, ...) instead of the game / application you are creating, which is probably the interesting thing about the work.

This puts me in a very difficult conflict of interest as a content creator:
- for discovery it would be optimal for me to have the game on screen as often as possible to increase the chance of the thumbnail showing off the game
- for content the work in progress game is not the interesting thing but the actual work in the code editor which is what people watch me for

That way I have to decide if I want good content or good discoverability which is really bad.

My proposed solution is to add a button to the stream manager that takes a screenshot of the current stream output and uses that moment as a thumbnail until manually refreshed.

That way I could just show off my game, show a nicely framed image of the game, press the button and continue my work, without having to worry about the discoverability of my thumbnail anymore.

Furthermore for viewers searching for streamers this would improve the experience, as they suddenly have the choice between different games and art styles instead of a huge list of walls of code (selection of 1000 bowls of oat meals).

On September 24th I posted an idea for a new app for Twitch that would be like TikTok or YouTube for Twitch clips, this is because short form content is much more consumable.

Upon discussion and feedback from streamers this should not be an app, since it would be much harder to get people to download and use the app. Instead this should be built right into the site already.

On the front page where you see the 4 purple buttons that say Games, IRL, Music and ESports, there should be a 5th tab called Discover or maybe better yet just labelled Clips.

Twitch would not need to do anything besides add the tab and leave the rest to the creators. Right now on Twitch the clips you see are only from the people you already follow at least on the home page, if you click on a clip to watch in a new tab it shows 4 other clips related to the category of the clip you are watching, then 4 of the top popular clips.

This clip system is terrible since the popular ones are not even catered towards you, and while the first 4 might be because they are the same category you only get 1 new clip revealed if you click on one of them. This barely gets anybody exposure or helps them grow.

This is what I propose, make the tab and leave it in the hands of the creators to share their clips in this tab, all Twitch needs to do is have the tab catered to show clips from the categories people are wanting to see. This gives users a much wider range of clips to see to discover new people.

In one section people can now see Pokémon, Fortnite, Minecraft etc, a very wide range of clips and allows for discoverability to all people on a level playing field. Additionally, if the streamer is live, have it show they are live around their profile picture by the clip so that people can come check out their streams right away and follow if they like the clip.

This keeps people on the platform which is very beneficial to not only Twitch but the streamers as well since it will bring increased traffic to their channels, and bring new growth to not only the big streamers but most importantly, the small streamers.