15
Data: Twitch API (Get Streams), the top 1,000 live channels by viewers, refreshed every minute. This snapshot is from Oct 17, 20:55 UTC: about 2.29M people watching those 1,000 channels.
Tools: Node.js and node-canvas, with a small isometric renderer I wrote. Tower height is (viewers / viewers of #1)^0.45. With a linear scale everything below the top 5 was flat; with a log scale 177k and 100k looked almost the same. Each category is a neighbourhood, sized by its number of channels, and the biggest towers stand at the front corner of their block.
It runs live: the interactive version is at https://miltorres.com/?ref=lemmy-dib (hover a tower to see who it is, click to open the stream), and the same renderer streams 24/7 on Twitch. Nothing is kept for more than 24 hours.
What would make it easier to read? I'm not sure the category neighbourhoods work for people who don't know Twitch.
He's a former League of Legends pro who now streams and co-streams the big LoL matches, so on match days he jumps way above everyone else. That's kind of why I made this, actually.
Twitch's directory is just a list sorted by viewers, and a list hides the shape of it: how far ahead the top few are, and how huge the long tail of small streams is. I wanted to see all of it at once, as something that feels alive. So I built a channel with no streamer at all: it draws itself every minute from the Twitch API and runs 24/7.
The fun part for me is watching it move: someone goes live and their tower grows out of the ground, a raid lands and a tower shoots up, two streamers in the same game trade places. Most of the names were new to me too.