Can a Twitch streamer boost their own stream?

Twitch has expanded testing of its “Boost this stream” experimental feature to allow for monetary donations.

While the feature, which is currently a part of the platform’s Community Challenges, is restricted to certain streamers and is only available when Twitch activates it for those streamers, it serves as a powerful way for channels to gain exposure on the platform in exchange for money.

This challenge is not one a streamer can start by themselves. It is started by Twitch sending streamers a notification to their dashboard.

Once a “Boost this stream” event has started, viewers can donate to the challenge, increasing the potential exposure for a stream on the front page of Twitch.

Twitch has not disclosed whether streamers are able to directly contribute to their own “Boost this stream” event. But even if they couldn’t there are easy ways around not being able to contribute to your own account. 

For instance, there are many top streamers, like Asmongold and Sodapoppin, who have notable alternate Twitch accounts they stream from. If a content creator happened to have a second Twitch account, they could hypothetically log into that account from a second computer and participate in boosting their own stream.

So while it may not end up being possible for an account to “boost” itself, it will likely be impossible to prevent creators from having a second account they use to boost themselves with.

That being said, this boost feature by Twitch is currently experimental. Twitch is in complete control of who even gets access to boost events. Assuming that the feature goes live for all streamers, it will likely remain limited to only streams Twitch chooses to start the event for. 

Streamers and viewers will likely never have free access to start a “Boost this stream” campaign, making it significantly less easily exploited.