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.
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.
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.
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.
You can just make a new account and blam you’re free from the ban on your account. That’s why IP bans exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
