If you notice your chat messages show up in the chat feed but don’t appear on the streamers in-screen chat, you have been shadowbanned.
Twitch will still take your money for donations, subs, etc, but your feedback won’t be seen by anybody but you. This shadowban does not appear in the appeals page and can be applied randomly and intermittently. You are never informed about this by the way. You’ll likely be talking in a chat and assuming you’re being ignored. Hop into a private tab and load up the stream where you’ll be able to notice if your messages are missing in chat.
From my observations, there seems to be some type of algorithm/system that determines who to shadowban. I’m assuming it assigns extra points for factors like VPN usage, Linux, and adblockers. Once you’ve been shadowbanned, switching one of those three will not work to unban you until some arbitrary timer expires.
I’m posting this in case anybody else has experienced this and felt frustrated and isolated. You’re not being ignored (unless you’re a twat and are being ignored). You’re just being punished by Twitch for being privacy conscious.
Don’t use Twitch
Got an alternative that isn’t youtube?
Touch grass /j
If you don’t care about privacy that much, which I assume you don’t because you use Twitch, Kick is the only alternative I can recommend. Everything else either is dead, is in another language, or has no good content, which sucks because some of them had good privacy policies. Monopolies are dogshit.
The shadowban I am pissed about is Reddit. The comments would appear for me just fine, but not visible outside of my account. Given that I have pretty much only commented about very neutral, even childish topics - I blame my email, which is on my own domain.
Weirdly, when I was on an affected VPN and had a Twitch account, I could still stream. Just couldn’t use the chat on my own stream. It makes no sense whatsoever, and the main effect it has is just to make users angry with them when they discover they’ve been shadowbanned for no rational reason.
Can’t you still connect to twitch chat via an IRC or XMPP client? Or did they axe that feature?
They’ve been shadowbanning VPN users for years. It’s not a policy I expect to change.
You can get through the shadow banning by sendubg multiple copies of your send request a number of time equivalent to 1 terabyte. Only works if you do it for each comment.
Out of curiosity, have you tested the shadow ban with a non-web Twitch client, like a phone app or an IRC client?
This happens to me if I have my VPN on from my phone app.
I have not. I try to avoid apps if I can.
Fair enough. Just so you know, though: F-Droid has open-source Twitch apps requiring minimal permissions, and last time I checked, you could use a desktop IRC client to interact with Twitch chat. (The latter requires more effort to set up.)
Might be worth spoofing your user agent! I mostly just make it look exactly like the user agent my windows machine sends, so I’ll still look like a Firefox user. But by default, Firefox will note that it’s the Linux build in the user agent.
Do note though that this does not prevent them from using Javascript to detect your OS. Even Tor Browser does not hide it for some bizarre reason… which IMO makes Linux users blend in a WHOLE lot less.
Actually; with the right plugins and configuration…even JS identification can be obscured in Firefox. I’ve done it before on Windows.
link?
Not offering my techniques to the public right now; I kinda blundered on it by tinkering and it does break a metric shit ton of things.
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Why would you care?
Because interacting with streamers is a big part of Twitch?
I love popping into a nearly-empty Twitch stream and interacting with a streamer. It must be pretty discouraging to stream into the void with no viewers, and it’s cool to hear about why they like a game I’m considering, or getting help with learning a game, or (rarely for me, lol) sharing some of my knowledge about a game.
It’s also the only way I connect with two of my (married) friends from uni. I pop into their stream when I can and we chat a bit while they play.
Twitch with no chat might as well just be a YouTube video that I can speed up, pause, and seek.
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Is it the privacy community in general or Lemmy that’s gotten infiltrated by all of these antagonistic socially inept 15 year olds recently? Never started a thread on Lemmy that’s gotten so many unsupportive and useless responses before. And I’m active on piracy subs…
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