RANDOM THOUGHTS
Farewell Mixer
With Mixer shutting down today I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect back on my time as part of the platform…
Mixer was my streaming home for nearly 3 years. In that time I made lifelong friends, overcame crippling anxiety, became a father, and started an amazing journey as a community developer and occasional moron behind a camera.
Today marks the final day of Mixer’s 4-and-a-bit years as a streaming platform. I, like many others, began my streaming career on Mixer with nothing more than a crappy webcam and an Xbox around 3 years ago.
To me, the idea of streaming had always both intrigued and terrified me. Before I started streaming I suffered with debilitating anxiety, to the point where I’d have multiple attacks a day, and the thought of putting myself out there on-stream filled me with dread.
I started streaming after meeting Godzziilla, one of the first content creators I started watching in earnest on Mixer. My first time in his channel the conversation turned to mental health. I can’t remember how or why, I just remember never having seen a streamer talk about mental health so openly, so I sat typing and deleting and re-typing a message for about 10 minutes before posting it in chat.
I spoke about my situation at the time. I was suffering through a dark spot with depression and anxiety and was struggling to keep myself going. Godzziilla stopped playing the game he was in, muted his party chat, looked into the camera and said these words:
“It’s just you and me here right now, you have my full attention, never mind anything else that’s going on, let’s talk, just me and you.”
And we talked.
We must have spoken for about 20 minutes solid on how I was feeling, how I didn’t know what to do, what to think, why I was thinking that way. During that time I typed, more and more, and Godzziilla did exactly what he said he would do. He sat there, and he listened.
At this point we were just 2 random people on the internet who had met through random chance, and today Godzziilla is a friend I will have in my life forever.
Mixer gave me that opportunity. Without that platform I would never have had that chance interaction, I would never have opened up to someone about how I was feeling, I would never have started streaming, and who knows, I may not still be here today.
For a lot of people, Mixer was just a streaming platform, a way for them to try and make a bit of money on the side or a stepping stone in their streaming careers. For the rest of us, Mixer was one thing and one thing only, it was a home. It was our home.
Above all else, for me at least, Mixer was about community. It was somewhere I could just sit and be my goofy, derpy self, and somewhere I could always find my friends.
And by friends I mean real, solid, dependant friends who have always been there to help and support me no matter what. Even when I took an unscheduled break for months without really saying anything to anyone, they checked up on me, they kept my Discord running, and when I came back there they were, sat waiting for me.
I’ve had some of the best experiences of my gaming life on Mixer, and I’ve had the opportunity to share them with people I truly cherish. I didn’t think today would be such a hard day for me after everything that went on last month, but here I am sat reminiscing about the “good old days” as if they’re gone forever.
That’s something we as the Mixer community need to remember; yes, after today Mixer the platform will be taken offline. But the heart of Mixer was never the software behind the streams. It was never the technology or the features.
It was us.
It was the streamers, the communities, the families that were born from it. That is what we should all take away from Mixer at the end of the day today.
Mixer is dead. Long live Mixer.
