In an inter-connected social media landscape where Twitter memes go viral on Facebook and Instagram videos routinely blow up on Reddit, it’s not at all surprising that a Twitch channel recently exploded in popularity after it was posted to TikTok last week. The Twitch channel is called Stopsigncam and encompasses the exact type of nonsense and tomfoolery that can quickly attract millions of viewers.
So just what is Stopsigncam, exactly? At a base level, it’s nothing more than a video camera focused in on a stop sign at an intersection in Salem, Massachusetts. But what makes the stop sign so interesting is that the vast majority of people who pass through the intersection ignore the stop sign entirely and keep on driving through. And so with the video stream titled “98.73% of vehicles don’t stop,” it’s no surprise that people are tuning in in droves to watch cars drive as if the stop sign isn’t there.
And as these things tend to go, the intersection has now become a popular destination for people in the area to put on various pieces of performance art for the swarms of people tuned into the live stream. From someone running through the stop sign to a guy getting out of his car to do a backflip to a group of people acting out a lightsaber duel, the intersection has taken on a life of its own.
The original TikTok video that made the intersection somewhat famous can be seen below:
@jhbteam I have found one of the most interesting streams on Twitch… 😎 🛑 #twitch #stream #youtube #fyp
What’s particularly interesting is that the stream itself didn’t become widely known until it went viral on TikTok after being uploaded by jhbTeam. All told, this speaks to how big of a player TikTok has become in the social media space in a relatively short amount of time.
“At first, I thought it’d just be a little fun joke between me and my audience on Twitter for only [one] night, because I deleted my tweet hours later,” JhbTeam said in a statement to Kotaku recently.
“When people actually stayed and watched it throughout the night, it made me want to create the TikTok to see if I could make it bigger,” JhbTeam added. “I went to bed that night when it had 400 viewers, and woke up to 4,000 viewers as well as my TikTok having 800k views in only a few hours. I’m very happy with the result of the TikTok because it was my ultimate goal to make it popular, and it became more popular than I imagined.”
More broadly, and speaking to the juggernaut that is the TikTok platform, it’s estimated that the app has nearly 690 million monthly active users. Equally as impressive is that the app itself has been downloaded more than 2 billion times between iOS and Google Play platforms. Incidentally, the entire saga of former President Trump trying to ban TikTok, even though it was just about six months ago, feels like a lifetime ago.
