Joy of sharing a creation replaced by a longing sadness
So I recently put out a custom map for Beat Saber that I had started work on when the internet was cut for 14 days 20 days in Iran to pass the time.
Gameplay video of the map, Odysseus from Epic The Musical
Everyone I sent it to enjoyed it a lot and I got the happiness that I needed.
One of them recommended to send it over to some twitch streamers as well because some of them have a bot that lets you recommend maps.
I've never used twitch, I found a steamer, made an account, sent it in the chat and had my chat at messages tts'd in the stream. It was absolutely lovely seeing their reaction and it had made my night.
Then I noticed that my 'thank you!' messages didn't tts, huh weird. After watching them for a bit longer I thought maybe I'll send some other stuff I've made their way too. Aaand it didn't send, the chat message sent but the bot response didn't come, a bunch of testing later I found i was shadow banned.
A bit more searching and I found that VPNs are the cause. So changed from TOR to Express and tried again, no dice.
Made a new account with Express and tried and success! But only for 4 messages total, then shadow banned again.
I got a friend's dedicated v2ray server and tried with a new account and my messages were sent again. So I went to a bigger streamer who was also doing the map requests and sent my map... Only to see I'm shadow banned again.
At this point the joy I had felt from seeing others enjoy what I made was gone, replaced by a familiar sadness, the same type of sadness I had gotten when the internet was cut and essentially a one way communication not too long ago.
It's a pain. these sites don't load without VPNs, I had already spent a whole hour trying different VPNs to get the 7mb map to upload to the site (and experienced like 30 errors in the process), then had to try out a bunch more to get the file to upload in Discord (with a bunch of VPNs I can only send messages, files don't upload), and then I experienced the happiness that came from seeing a live reaction and wanting to experience it more, only to have it wiped away.
I want to start work on the next project, i have so much in my mind that i want to put out into the world, but it takes time to switch back to the mentality of "I'm making this for myself and others may never see it" that I had to adopt to get back to creating.
Edit: seems a whole week has been removed from my memory, the outage wasn't two weeks
I hate this for you. I remember the joy on my son's face when a major creator simply commented a compliment on a level he made for Geometry Dash.
Unfortunately, the internet disruption is working as intended, but the intentions are poor. Love to you from across the globe. I hope you keep making levels!
Thank you. I'm trying my damn hardest to not let my inner child die, Thank you so much.
Neat seeing this here, as I am a Beat Saber streamer who just played your map last night. Small world. It was a cool experience, always nice to see people pushing the creative limits of the game.
Sorry to hear about the shadow banning thing, I was not aware Twitch did that. It's unfortunate that legitimate VPN users get caught in the crossfire in the battle against spam. It might help if you verify your email and phone number for your account, if you haven't tried that already.
Also if you're not aware, there is a community tool to find Twitch VOD timestamps for when a particular map was played: https://muffnlabs.de/maptts?search=Odysseus
(though many streamers don't publish VODs and some songs get muted)
AAA i've giggled undignifiedly at watching you guys play this map and the others. i didn't know this is a thing! thank you for sharing it! this is awesome.
My maps are me pushing my skills forward. also now i see how little feedback i had on the previous maps, I never heard from anyone about weird JD! also i'm seeing the accidental brokenness of Burning Sands again and it's annoying
And i have a giant smile hearing my name be recognized in the latest maps, you guys are awesome <3
Fuck Amazon and their Twitch, seriously. If I understand correrctly your post, they block Tor and VPNs. Which are the only way people from dictatures and authoritarian regimes may access the Internet and avoid censorship.
Fuck Amazon, again.
Yeah, but this isn't exactly uncommon. Bots, spam, and other malicious traffic absolutely infest public internet services. Blocking VPNs is one way to help cut it down.
I don't think there's that big an overlap between bots and VPNs, honestly, and I have no trouble using VPNs to access plenty of large services that are hardened against bots - occasionally you get the cloudflare captcha and that's about it.
Twitch is just extra bad with VPNs because they run regionalized ads and most VPN users are evading the ads of their home region, often resulting in fewer ads being displayed. Twitch might tell you some nonsense about streamer revenue but it's their own revenue they care about - they want you to buy Twitch Turbo for the same outcome.
I remember vividly how frustrating it was to try to post on some technical advice subreddits, whether asking for advice or contributing in some way. Shadow bans on some words or topics that are not listed anywhere, no warnings, mods don't react to any messages, stuff like that. And that's for a thing that I spend maybe half an hour on, so really not much time lost, but it was still frustrating because it's so stupid, you know that this affects so many people and yet it's been getting worse, not better.
Can't imagine how it feels in a situation where you put hours of genuine effort into the thing.
It's not the same, but maybe try to befriend another map maker or somebody legit from the community who can post stuff on your behalf and forward messages back and forth. Because when it's just one person, you can keep several communication channels with them including those that do not normally get blocked, and they can then post stuff on the channels that tend to fuck you over.
heh that's actually something i need to do for a future project, gotta ask a friend for help in a Discord server for collabing that requires phone number verification, and Discord has all Iran numbers as invalid :)
I already go at things with a cautious mindset and keep my expectations at a minimum. For you it was frustration, for me it's turned from frustration to sadness to annoyance.
I'm sad you've also experienced this, i hope this is extremely rare.
Kind of a noob question here (noob with respect to internet censorship), if someone were to run a server with Hetzner that you could use as a proxy, would that open things to for you? I imagine that isn't a large scale solution, but would it work on an individual/small-scale basis?
As someone who uses a Hurricane Electric tunnel for ipv6 in some places, not necessarily. Some sites provide degraded content, hassles or bans based on whether they think the ip range is residential. Through that tunnel, which is not intended as a normal vpn and isn’t from a vpn provider, I can’t watch YouTube videos without signing in, and any site with recaptcha is a nuisance; cloudflare seems alright, however, and the obnoxious anime fan system is the same.
Do you think this applies if you're using servers from the same company whose services you're attempting to access? Like for example, if you tried to access Youtube through Google's servers by setting up a proxy/vpn on one of their servers, or using AWS when accessing Twitch? Obviously I know that Google's compute engine is likely quite separated from Youtube infrastructure of course, and likewise Twitch isn't necessarily just going to welcome visitor traffic from AWS since part of the reason why those restrictions exist is to mitigate abuse, but I also wonder if they may exempt their own orgs from some of those restrictions.
It would help in a way of having a VPN for a month that i'd know works in all services i want, but in the 1-2 hour that i scoured VPNs i found what works for where (and i'm expecting these ones to work for quite a while) the only place having a dedicated server for myself would be used is for twitch, which i already didn't use and have given up.
Thank you for the offer
How about something like Tailscale on a residential IP?
I suppose having a residential IP is a best case scenario. what's would be difference between using Tailscale compared to running a Wireguard or Shadowsocks server on a residential IP?
Nothing really as Tailscale is "just" a hyper convenient low effort way to make a big wireguard network and easily on-board and manage machines.
And here I was playing Beat Saber yesterday on Twitch and all I got were people soliciting ;)
(But to be fair I'm not a real streamer, just some guy...)
Hey, I’m sorry you have to go through all of that. I know how tough it can be to try to exist in a politically and culturally oppressive society with limited resources. If there’s anything I can do to help, please feel free to reach out. I am in a neighboring country.