Slashdot Mirror
Watching People Code Is Becoming an (Even Bigger) Thing
itwbennett writes: Faithful Slashdot readers may recall the story of Adam Wulf, who spent two weeks live-streaming himself writing a mobile app. The phenomenon has quickly become thing, by which we mean a business. Twitch.TV, Watch People Code (which is an offshoot of the subreddit by the same name), Ludum Dare, and, of course, YouTube, are bursting with live or archived streams of lots of people writing lots of code for lots of different things. And just this week, Y Combinator-backed startup Livecoding.TV launched. The site has signed up 40,000 users since its beta went live in February, but unlike the other sites in this space what it doesn't have (and doesn't have plans for) is advertising. As co-founder Jamie Green told ITworld: 'We have some different ideas around monetisation in the pipeline, but for now we are just focussed on building a community around live education.'
This is even worse than a stream watching someone play a game. Who wastes their time with these things?
If you want to improve your coding skill you're better off practicing and reviewing code written by those more experienced than you, not watching someone "in the act" of doing it.
>> We have some different ideas around monetisation in the pipeline, but for now we are just focussed on building a community around live education
Translation: we are going to be ad-free to grab as many users as possible until we finalize the sale of the company to an appropriate advertiser. (That's pretty much how these start-ups work.)