Twitch has suspended its feature Boost This Streamwhich launched last month and allowed people to pay to promote streams, after the porn ended up on user home pages with the “streamer community promoted” label slapped on NSFW thumbnails (via Kotaku) .
According to reports from Dot Esports and PC Gamer, people on Twitch started seeing lewd content on their front pages around March 30th. The videos, which you would normally find on pages like PornHub, would have appeared in the recommended section “Live channels we think you might like” which appears just below the site’s main carousel.
It was probably not meant to be there at all, as it violates Twitch community guidelines, but it happened due to the Boost This Stream feature. Some possibly previously banned Twitch accounts are paying a ton of money to increase the popularity of this content, perhaps even as a kind of revenge on Twitch.
Boost This Stream, which was in testing last year before receiving some changes and returning in March as Boost Train, allows viewers to pay to help improve a content creator’s channel for greater discoverability. It’s an automatic, supercharged Hype Train that should benefit smaller streamers. Instead, some people are using the tool for porn, despite sites like PornHub being easily accessible.
Twitch and the naughty homepage
Unless Twitch users promoting streams were explicitly trying to disable the feature or get the creator into trouble, it would be hard to call them money well spent, three accounts have been placed in the most popular pornographic screenshots displayed on users’ home pages and have all been suspended for violating Twitch Community Guidelines.
Twitch has “Decided to pause Boost Train due to some safety considerations that emerged during the experiment”Twitch communications chief Sam Faught said in a statement. He added that Twitch “Will share further updates with our community on new features to improve discoverability, if available”.
While Twitch doesn’t come out of the closet and say the experiment has been suspended due to the NSFW content reports, it seems likely they played more than just a role in the decision. Twitch rules prohibit “Nudity and sexually explicit content or activities” and the miniatures contained… well, pretty much all of that.
We also saw it as unwanted attention can harm marginalized streamerswhich could also have been an additional and far more serious concern if the function had survived the half-scandal that broke out.
“Twitch’s bad characters are interesting because not even financial restrictions seem to stop them”Bussey said.
“The Boost Train and Front Page slot that comes from the push in the home, would require an affiliate (monetized) channel that receives financial support from several people to be activated. The feature, which is a slight change from the previous Boost This Stream and Channel Points Boost tests that were activated and functional in the past, is deeply unpopular with the community. Nobody likes it, and while this is perhaps the least offensive way to introduce it … it should never have been released. “
Let’s also say that the platform is not at its first experience on the subject, in fact in August 2019 streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins posted a video on Twitter to address an issue regarding his previous Twitch profile page: the streaming platform had begun promoting other streamers in its place, including a channel pornographic streaming in the early morning of August 10th.
In early August, Blevins announced that he would be leaving Twitch for another streaming platform, Microsoft-owned Mixer, where he quickly gained a million subscribers in five days. In his video, Blevins stated that the transition “It went incredibly smooth, super professional”but noticed that in the last two days “there were some things that happened, you know, we let it go. We felt like annoying little hits, but it didn’t matter, we wanted to stay professional“.
Twitch also removed the Blevins verification tick not long after its Mixer exclusivity announcement. Twitch began promoting other channels on its previous profile page the week before, one of which appears to have been streaming pornography, which was captured in screenshots by Twitter users. Blevins claimed that the streaming porn channel was taken to the top spot and apologized to users who might have seen it.
It is unclear when the Boost This Stream feature will return or if it will receive more changes as the Twitch spokesperson could only reiterate that for now it is “pause”.
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