Years ago, I wrote in-depth about Twitch being a complete trash fire. As a response to it, I made a bot which I shared with about 40 different streamers that addressed Twitch’s shortcomings.

For about a year and a half, this bot ran largely uninterrupted and had all sorts of features such as predictive bans, exemptions, algorithmic bans, and so forth. It was far more advanced than whatever Twitch had out there and I believe it probably prevented a few hate raids against marginalised streamers.

In February, Twitch removed the ability to perform bans via its chat interface and instead shifted everything to requiring a user access token in conjunction with its HTTP API.

On the surface, this is fine in the grand scheme of things, but it required me to completely rejig the entire authentication model from just simply using a /mod command on the bot and then me joining the channel to asking for everyone to sign in and pass me a token. This is a piss-poor design because it would be just easier to assign the permissions via legacy means, but nope, you have to re-authenticate that bot.

I might be overthinking or misunderstanding this, but the bot also has become more onerous to update and is also costing me CA$40/month of which I largely pay out of pocket–not complaining, but it is a personal expense that would have not occurred if Twitch had made good tools years ago. Combine with increasing living expenses, I have decided that it’s not fun to pay for this anymore.

In any event, because of the cost and Twitch finally has tooling that makes it easier to deal with bullshit after much, much yelling in their direction from all sorts of groups, I feel it is time to officially state that I have sunsetted the bot. I hope that it did benefit those who needed it most and I am always willing to provide a hand should anything come up in the future. ❤️

In case you’re wondering: all data is being deleted from the database and backups are going with!