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.

  • off_brand_@beehaw.org
    4·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • refalo@programming.dev
      4·
      7 months ago

      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.