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.
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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.
Can’t you still connect to twitch chat via an IRC or XMPP client? Or did they axe that feature?
Pretty sure that still works. A few tech streamers like Vedal rely on that for their stuff to work.
Why would you care?
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…
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.
Because people use Twitch on Linux with a VPN? This seems kinda obvious…
They’ve been shadowbanning VPN users for years. It’s not a policy I expect to change.
The corporate world is really clamping down on VPN use. VPNs for me for not for thee is their motto.
logs in while connected to VPN
spends 15 minutes identifying fire hydrants, traffic lights, and stairs
Use ipv6, they should be untraceable/ anonymous for non state actors.
They won’t be able to what is and isn’t a vpn.
We just need to cut grandma off those expensive ipv4 addresses
Only the ‘free’ services. I bet amazon.com won’t ban you from shopping on vpn.
Not just the free services, they’re all doing it.
They make it a whole lot harder, asking for photos of ID and selfies and bank statements directly from your bank, etc.
Amazon specifically. Unsure about other sites.
I recently stumbled across an open-source frontend for Twitch called SafeTwitch, I really like it.
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.
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.)
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.
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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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.
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Just another plank in the floor that is “why I don’t use Twitch” (most of the planks are ‘fuck Amazon’)
Twitch shadowbans public VPNs due to abuse/bots. The most common method for people to get around bans is to use a VPN – now assume millions of viewers, and you’ve got an easy recipe for needing to stop that activity.
You’re not punished for being privacy conscious; you’re being punished for being roughly in the same realm as harassers, etc.
If you don’t want to be banned, rent a VPS and set up your own private VPN for only you. The problem is that using Nord, Windscribe, etc etc is that you’re sharing that VPN tunnel with hundreds, maybe thousands of people at a time.
Using a VPS defeats the purpose. The whole point of a VPN and Tor is to mix your traffic with others. It’s a requirement for privacy in many primitive countries, such as the US.
They are being punished for following best practices.
VPS typically have shared IPs. You’re paying extra for a dedicated IPv4.
Temporarily banning shared IPs from creating new accounts when there are problems would sort of make sense, in a wrong but convenient sort of way. Permanently shadowbanning them only for chat and including existing accounts which have never misbehaved, which is what they’ve done, can not be so easily excused. It’s been like this for years. At some level they must know by now that it was a mistake, but I imagine there’s some kind of stupid office politics type of situation preventing them fixing it.
They’re just desperate to curb botting. They’ve also started to reduce the amount of things you can do as a user who hasn’t verified their phone number for this reason. (Also so they can cross-track you on Amazon but that’s pure bonus.)
It’s trivial for twitch to differentiate between users who are logged in and have verified accounts. Slapping bans by IP is archaic and lazy when you have more precise metrics to go by. And at the very least, they should make you aware that you are banned before accepting your money for their services.
Compromised accounts logging in from VPNs are a thing, and most Twitch users probably can’t be trusted not to be reusing passwords across literally everything.
Maybe I’m missing something but you can tell a compromised account from a secure account by the user behavior, no? If an account is compromised the activity will be spam/harassment, etc at which point a ban on that account would happen. And compromised accounts could be accessed from a non-vpn Ip also.
This. Ban by actual activity. None of this machine learning precog bullshit.
You can just make a new account and blam you’re free from the ban on your account. That’s why IP bans exist.
VPNs exist and then boom IP bans no longer matter. Hell, some ISPs give you a new IP if you just restart your modem. IP bans sweep up clusters of users behind large gateways like college dorms or carrier-grade NAT.
IP bans do not work and I’m sure twitch seldom uses them, the exceptions being VPNs and cheap/free VPS services.
Think of it from the reverse direction. If you have a twitch account in good standing that’s verified with a valid email and has no violations, why all of the sudden would it make sense to apply a ban to this account? Perhaps preventing new accounts from being created on a sketchy IP could be a sensible solution, but shadowbanning an existing account makes no sense and is a lazy approach to security. In addition, fingerprinting makes it so a service can easily differentiate between users using the same IP.
What if the account is compromised? Now the spammer is able to do their spams freely on the IP address.
It’s just a hell of a lot easier to black list the entire IP than to try to manually let in small percentage of people who use a VPN AND want to comment or whatever.
“It’s okay to punish people who have done nothing wrong as long as they’re a minority group.”
It’s a lazy approach to filtering/moderation that breaks the service for legitimate users and is not much easier to implement than a per-account reputation system.
Much like the practice of blacklisting email forwarding domains, I won’t use it in any service I run, except maybe temporarily to mitigate an active DDOS attack.
Ok genius: solve it then. How do you stop compromised accounts from using a VPN without affecting innocent users?
You don’t. The shitbags ruined it for everyone.
When you detect a compromised account you could put a freeze or lock on it. If there are that many compromised logins that constant account swapping is an issue then twitch needs to overhaul their account security.
Of course it is easier, however, the point was that it is lazy…
I suppose it’s possible to build a system that would let you specifically allow a VPN IP to be green-listed on your account, but you’d probably have to allow it by signing in from a known good IP first.
I think it seems like lot of work for something that isn’t really private and is still probably vulnerable to exploit.
It probably is the the best bang for their buck. I doubt they lose significant profit from the simple stopgaps.
I’m curious to hear the opinion of those downvoting this response. It seems off brand for privacy enthusiasts to disagree with my take on IP bans.
It’s because many privacy enthusiasts are or have also been in network infrastructure, and realize the measures that must be taken on a hostile network which literally defines the internet.
I told you what to do. Rent a VPS, and set your own VPN up. Nothing is stopping you from doing this the right way.
Do you have anything more than assumptions to go on for the reasons? If you only assume those are the reasons you shouldn’t announce them as a big headline item.
Your question is a good one. I’m not the one who downvoted you fyi. To answer your question, it is absolutely a personal anecdote based on my own experimentation. I’m sure others will add their own experiences. Based on my experiences there’s no doubt about twitch shadowbanning based on VPN use. I’ll admit I don’t have a basis for Linux and adblockers being a part of the equation, but I made it clear in my original post that those were assumptions.
To further speculate, I have an idea that the shadowban may actually be triggered by somebody using the same VPN server doing something that triggers it, affecting anybody else on that server. I can’t possibly provide evidence for that theory, but it would explain the seemingly random nature of the shadowbans.
You probably got swept up in the Suspicious User heuristics that Twitch uses now. Mods and Broadcasters should still see your chats. Message a moderator of the channel and explain the situation. They can remove your account from the shadowban from that channel.
It probably means lots of users from that VPN’s gateway IP have been reported/banned/manually added to the Suspicious User restriction list.
I doubt it has anything to do with Linux, and I guarantee it’s not a move to flip you off for trying to guard your privacy as an innocent person.
The issue is that a lot of the things you can do to hide your identity online are the same things people doing bots or harassment do, because they work.
So, their system learns that pattern and when you match it you get caught up. There is no good way to tell users apart when doing offensive security like this, other than waiting for accounts to start spamming the n-word in chats and ruining the stream experience, which is the thing this system is mean to prevent.
Don’t get caught up in privacy paranoia - there are much bigger fish they’re trying to fry than someone who just doesn’t want ad networks tracking them.
For what its worth, I have seen the same thing with a VPN. Sometimes changing servers will work. They also flat out block logins if they don’t like your browser settings.
I just gave up on using the site. If they tell you you don’t need protection, YOU NEED PROTECTION.
VPNs seem a fairly common reason. I am mostly curious how you came to the conclusion that Linux use was a factor since that is not a common ban reason.
I’ve only experienced a shadowban while using ubuntu. I switch between all the major operating systems on the same twitch account and with the same vpn service/servers. The bans have only been initiated while on linux, although they did follow over to the other OSes until some type of timer was passed.
This follows what some online shopping services do, which is to assign weights to certain user metrics and if a set threshold is crossed it rejects your payment or otherwise blocks you from a transaction. So VPN+MacOS might work but VPN+Linux matches some type of metric fraud systems associate with criminals.
Not OP but: It may not be assumptions but personal anecdote. I guess it takes concerted effort by significant number of individuals to find out if this is happening.