WTF?! There are some certainties in life: death, taxes, and porn on the internet. It seems the last one slipped Twitch's mind. The livestreaming giant has been forced to disable its paid channel-boost feature after explicit content was splattered all over its front page.
Twitch's channel-boosting feature has been around since December 2020. It initially worked using free channel points that were pooled by viewers during Community Challenges. The boost reward promoted streams to highly visible parts of Twitch, allowing more people to discover streamers, their content, and their community.
That all sounds well and good, but few were happy with the announcement of paid boosts. These turned Boost this Stream into a paid feature, allowing people to pay for the boosts and push channels to the front page. Even the streamers themselves could pay for boosts, giving an unfair advantage to those content creators who already have lots of followers/money.
PCGamer notes that while Paid Boosts ended in late 2021, it was replaced by Boost Train in early March, a similar feature that lets viewers boost channels by purchasing subscriptions and bits. But it didn't take long before people started noticing content of an adult nature appearing on Twitch's front page.
Streamer @thenoosh22 highlighted a pornographic image on Twitch's most prominent page that included the "Promoted by the community" tag. The channel in question was livestreaming explicit material. It was banned, but that didn't stop another porn channel, as spotted by streamer Zach Bussey, from also exploiting the feature and landing on Twitch's front page.
Twitch says it has now paused Boost Train because of safety-related issues---or in other words, wanting the service to be less like Pornhub.