Amazon-owned Twitch is usually heavily focused on gaming, but different kinds of content are being streamed there as well. Some streamers just socialize with their followers, while others offer rather different content. The Verge reports that pornography streams received an unexpected “boost” on the website last week.
The “Boost Train” feature was supposed to allow Twitch users to pay for increased visibility of the channels they like. It wasn’t that those who broadcast themselves would pay for the extra visibility, the plan was for fans of a given channel to be able to pay to promote the content.
Pornography and nudity are banned on the service, but Boost Train had Twitch viewers viewing porno in the list of “Live channels we think you’ll like”.
The Boost Train feature has now been turned off by Twitch “due to some safety considerations that came up through the experiment”, Twitch’s head of communications Sam Faught told The Verge, with her avoiding mentioning the porn stream issues.
As to why users would pay to promote porn streams? We suspect, as Zach Bussey mentions on Twitter, that it’s most likely good old-fashioned trolling.
