Twitch streamer Ludwig Ahgren has been live since March 14th, and today denoted the fourth continuous day of his broadcast. The reason? Each time somebody subscribes to his channel, it adds 10 seconds to the amount of time he intends to stay live. In other words: Ahgren is running an uncapped subathon in light of the fact that he’ll keep awake as long as watchers continue to subscribe.
Since he’s quite possibly the most well known streamers on Twitch — with 1.8 million followers as of this writing — it implies Ahgren will be live for at least a couple more days. (As of this writing, he has an additional 57 hours to go.) Yesterday, when he rested for the night in his red racecar bed, he even figured out how to become the top streamer on Twitch.
This isn’t really against Twitch’s TOS. A Twitch representative emailed The Verge a statement, explaining that they, as well, have been watching the stream very intently and keeping up that Ahgren isn’t abusing any of their standards. “Our Community Guidelines do not prohibit sleeping on stream, however we expect streamers to take proper precautions to ensure their stream and chat are being monitored and attended to,” composed a representative.
While he’s been alert, Ahgren’s been streaming games with companions; while he’s sleeping, his mods have been running videos picked by the community. As Nathan Grayson wrote in Kotaku: “It’s basically a big, bleary-eyed slumber party where everyone’s just vibing.” (While subathons are a thing in the Twitch community, they seldom go longer than, say, 30-something hours.)
Jerk is a brilliantly prompt place online. You can see and interface with individuals on your screen in real time, which feels like a sort of intimacy. Ahgren’s stream is well on its way to becoming an event in Twitch’s history, much the same as Twitch Plays Pokémon and any of its other site-wide memes. It’s mind-boggling that however large as it very well might be, Twitch actually has its own distinct culture and its own arrangement of stars who appear to do stunts like this since they appear to be cool.
