Thousands of people are watching this boring livestream from Jackson Hole, Wyoming - and nobody knows why

The live feed was set up about six weeks ago as part of a drive to draw more visitors to the tourist town, but viewer numbers suddenly spiked on Sunday

More than 2,000 people are currently watching a livestream from a webcam located at a traffic intersection in the small town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming – and nobody knows why, least of all the viewers themselves.

The live feed was set up about six weeks ago as part of a drive to draw more visitors to the town, a popular tourist retreat for outdoorsy types, at the base of the Teton Mountains close to Teton National Park.

The town set up several webcams, but while the scenic vista at Spring Creek had just one viewer – me – at the time of writing, thousands have been tuning in to the town square crossroads since Sunday, for no apparent reason.

Reports suggest the surge in viewer traffic began when a user on the web bulletin board 4chan posted a link to the feed and said he would travel to Jackson Hole to do something in front of the camera.

Users on Reddit spread the now-deleted post, which got hundreds watching the video, at which point it ended up on YouTube’s homepage due to its growing popularity. At this point, many people appear to be watching as part of a collective absurdist joke.

The fast-scrolling comments on the video consist mostly of observations as to the vehicles passing through the intersection: bus, coach, truck and so on. Perhaps it’s the first American example of “Slow TV”?