Thousands Watched A Streamer Reading In Silence On Twitch, Because That’s Quality Content

If the past few years on Twitch have proved anything, it’s that the Amazon-owned streaming platform definitely isn’t all about video games anymore. As well as a massive surge in popularity of the Just Chatting category, we’ve also witnessed the rise of the hot-tub meta, which ultimately led to a dedicated category being made, purely for people to hang out in swimwear.

Anyway, in case you’ve been asleep for the past 48 hours, yesterday was, of course, April Fool’s Day - a.k.a. the day that journalists can’t trust a single email they receive or headline they read for fear of accidentally covering a particularly convincing prank. Personal plight aside, it’s also a day for some good fun online, and Twitch joined in with the (temporary) introduction of five new joke streaming categories, which some people flung themselves into with absolutely no hesitation.

Before we get into it, take a look at some of our favourite livestream wins and fails below.

Twitch’s head of community marketing, Mary (Merry) Kish, rocketed to fame in the “Silent Reading” category, which is exactly what it sounds like. As reported by PC Gamer, she did a full hour-long stream reading Lovesickness, with not a single word spoken for the entire duration. Clearly viewers thought that this was high quality content, though, as she had over 2400 people watching. The chat was also in emote-only mode the whole time, so people couldn’t even talk to each other, but that didn’t stop a constant stream of messages flooding in. 

As for the other categories, we were also introduced to “Pizza Time” (for all pizza related activities - eating, delivering, making, etc), “Character Creation” (perfect all those hours spent crafting masterpieces in Elden Ring), and “Chores, Odd Jobs and Errands”. Perhaps best of all was “Literally Just Chatting”, which in theory, was meant to be for streamers to turn off their mics and video, and have the stream basically function as a chat room for all the viewers. A stream without a stream - now that’s innovation. 

These categories sadly seem to have vanished as quickly as they arrived, but they were good while they lasted. I personally vote for Pizza Time to come back as a permanent addition.