It's time to get into Twitch, you cowards

If you're millennial or older, Twitch is probably the most popular website that you've decided is outside your ken, for whatever reason. It is an understandable reaction; there are so many websites, after all, and most of the communities that populate them are bad.

Twitch, however, is good. I know it is good because I spend a lot of time writing about it and thinking about it and even streaming on it. Admittedly: I did not understand its appeal until I got somewhat personally invested. Which is okay! Because I am here to tell you how you can get personally invested too.

You may be wondering: Hey, what is Twitch, anyway? And I'm here to tell you that's a great question, questioner, because Twitch is a lot of things to a lot of different people.

Basically, it's a website where people broadcast themselves doing stuff, and where the people watching them can talk to them while they do that stuff.

A lot of the site is video games, but there's also cooking, knitting, vlogging, IRL walking around places, and whatever else people can show themselves doing with a webcam and a stable internet connection. The other thing that's important to note: Twitch is not a monolith. There are an infinite number of smaller communities on the site that are just doing their own things; they coalesce around a streamer who's interesting, or doing cool stuff in a game, or who's just personable. I don't know why communities form online, only that they do.

Anyway, now you understand Twitch. Congratulations! That's step one.

Step two is slightly more difficult, because now you have to go on the website itself in order to find a streamer to watch. Once you've loaded up Twitch.tv in your browser, you'll see a home screen that shows you some of the most popular broadcasts on the site happening right now. (That's important, because Twitch is live. While you can watch previously streamed broadcasts, most of the fun is in interacting with a streamer as they stream.) This is where I want you to go wild. Just look up a topic or game you're interested in the search bar, and see what the site spits back at you. You'll see a little preview of what the stream looks like, and a live viewer count there too. Once you click on a preview you'll be in the stream itself. Wow! You did it. Wasn't that easy?

Anyway, yeah. Twitch is a lot. There are specific emotes (:pogchamp:) that mean certain things, and the people who watch streamers regularly tend to be more online than most, which means local, artisanal memes pile up pretty quickly. But there's a scene for everyone! Lately I've been having a lot of fun watching people speedrun games, because it tickles the same part of my brain as sports — I love watching people who are really good at very specific things do the things they've very good at.

Now's a good time to get into Twitch because, for most people, it's like listening to podcasts: you kinda just put it on in the background while you're doing something else, and check into chat every so often. It's a nice thing to do when you've got a little time to kill and can't figure out anything else you want to be doing. It helps that watching streams is low-impact: it doesn't take a lot of brainpower / mental energy to consume. Which is very good, I think, in a time when all of your extra energy might otherwise go into panicking.

Log on, baby. It's time to Twitch.