Privacy

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PSA: Twitch Shadowbans Users on VPN + Linux (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by brownmustardminion@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

58 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] 4am@lemm.ee -3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] brownmustardminion@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 months ago

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.