Twitch’s new boost feature puts porn on homepage

San Francisco: Several Twitter and Reddit users shared screenshots of pornographic thumbnails that showed up at the front of their "Live channels we think you will like" sections, reports The Verge.

The thumbnails indicate that the streams showed up there due to an experimental feature that Twitch first announced last year.

The feature has changed since it was first introduced, but the basic concept remains the same -- users can spend money to get a stream before the user's eyes. In this case, it just happened to be content not allowed on Twitch, the report said.

Unless the Twitch users promoting the streams were explicitly trying to get the feature shut off, or get the creator in trouble, it would be hard to call it money well spent -- three accounts have been featured in the most popular screenshots of porn showing up on users' homepages, and they have all been suspended for violating Twitch's Community Guidelines, it added.

Twitch has "decided to pause Boost Train due to some safety considerations that came up through the experiment", Twitch's head of communications Sam Faught said in a statement emailed to The Verge.

He added that Twitch will "share additional updates with our community around new features to help improve discoverability, as available".