Popular Twitch streamer Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek was shocked at what he found when scrolling through Twitch’s ‘Just Chatting’ category – but it’s perhaps not what you’d expect.
Shroud is one of the biggest streamers on Twitch, and has surely seen his fair share of weird and wonderful stuff during his time on the livestreaming platform.
Despite his lengthy career on Twitch, which spanned from his early days competing in CS:GO, the platform never fails to surprise, as was seen during his June 1 broadcast.
Shroud had a lengthy career as a professional CS:GO player before committing to streaming on Twitch full-time.
Shroud was scrolling through the “Just Chatting” category on Twitch towards the end of his stream, looking for another streamer with low viewers to host, but abruptly stopped and, looking dumbfounded, simply stated “What the f*ck?”
Clearly confused by what was in front of him, shroud then asked his chat if they were also seeing what he was, “are you seeing this sh*t? Go to the bottom of Just Chatting, what the f*ck is this?”
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Shroud then revealed to everyone what was on his screen by toggling out of fullscreen mode, showing his viewers a full page of Twitch streams, all streaming the same footage of seal pups in the snow, “It’s just a bunch of these, they just keep going and going…”
This is not the first time unusual activity has been seen on Twitch, as the livestreaming site had only recently responded to viewers’ backlash for the content which was being streamed in their abandoned “Artifact” category.
The Just Chatting category has a reputation for being used and abused by streamers who push the limits of Twitch’s community guidelines, often featuring somewhat sexualized content, but the cute seal pups was certainly an unexpected turn for the category.
The channels shroud came across were almost certainly just automated bots, and so will promptly be banned. However, Twitch’s policy of enforcing two-factor authentication before and account can stream doesn’t seem to be doing it’s job fully of preventing these spam broadcasts.