[jiggawatts]

While we're on the topic: YouTube, which is inherently a video content viewing service, goes out of its way to obscure the video content. The TV app, the mobile app, and the browser app all insist on overlaying the content with random garbage that no sane human being could possibly be more interested in that the content that they launched with the intention of watching!

Heaven help you if you open a popular live feed. The wall of random teenage stream-of-thought noise streaming down across the video is just unspeakably crass. Why was this added, you ask? Because some overpaid manager at Google saw that Facebook was doing more video, so turning a video streaming service into a social network seemed like a brilliant idea. I mean why not? Why wouldn't people watching NASA feeds want snotty little kids spaming swearwords on their television?

PS: products slowly morphing to become nigh unrecognisable is a pre-Internet issue. The MTV channel used to show just music videos!

[smileybarry]

YouTube added live chat not because of Facebook, but because of Twitch which popularized this live-video-with-synchronized-chat. (except on Twitch it's about 1-10s of delay where on YouTube it's 30+ minimum)

Facebook and YouTube then borrowed that feature when they added livestreaming.

[the_jeremy]

Things[0][1] I've looked at says Twitch's delay is much longer than 1s.

[0]: https://www.fairlyoddstreamers.com/post/twitch-stream-delay [1]: https://onetwostream.com/blog/twitch-delay/

[anonymousab]

The delay depends on a lot of things, from configurable settings for the streamer (both on twitch and on their machine) and for the viewer (low-latency mode, and sometimes, explicitly not! using it), as well as things outside of their control - in Twitch's infra and just general internet latency.

It's not uncommon for streamers to display their chat in a sidebar on the stream, or overlaid on the content itself. From this, I've observed delays as low as (or maybe a bit lower than) a second, and as high as 30s - though I haven't seen anything nearly that high in a long time.

I suspect bigger or more successful streamers are prioritized on Twitch's backend. But I think the threshold for "successful" is actually rather low - someone consistently getting just hundreds of viewers is probably there already, in that top percentile.

[smileybarry]

Like others said, it depends -- if you have low latency streaming on as a streamer + low-latency viewing by the viewer + good enough internet, your "latency to broadcaster" can drop to 1 point something.

What you linked is streamers intentionally increasing their delay to account for stream sniping, but many streamers keep their delay not-extended to allow for better chat interaction. In some games, increasing delay to prevent sniping is just ineffective -- Valorant can regularly have 5+ minute queues in top ranks, and there's few enough players that even if you enter the queue very late, you can still run into them.

[deadmutex]

Understatement

[spideymans]

>While we're on the topic: YouTube, which is inherently a video content viewing service, goes out of its way to obscure the video content. The TV app, the mobile app, and the browser app all insist on overlaying the content with random garbage that no sane human being could possibly be more interested in that the content that they launched with the intention of watching!

Too often I've been unable to decipher what's being shown in the last ~15 seconds of the video because of the end-of-video annotations and recommendations.

[rozab]

I hate those scrolling chat feeds, and I don't understand how anyone's able to read them? I can barely read a 5 word message when it's juddering up the screen at a million miles an hour. Why hasn't twitch et al replaced it with a widget that just draws new messages above the old, scanning top to bottom?

[alisonkisk]

You can turn off chat

[jiggawatts]

What are you talking about? I just clicked through the "Settings" menu, and there's no such option!

Oh, you mean individually, on a per-video basis, using the tiny button that's thoroughly hidden as part of the dark pattern to drive user engagement?