I was recently indefinitely suspended for having an inappropriate username. The thing is, this is the 3rd time I've been indefinitely suspended for the same username, and twitch has twice reinstated the account (in both cases calling the original suspension a "mistake"). And now it's happened a 3rd time. This seems like something that should not occur. That is, if:

• The user has been suspended for some set of facts, such as a given username, and a policy these facts violate
• Twitch staff reviews the suspension (possibly due to a user appeal)
• Twitch staff determines that the facts do not constitute a policy violation (e.g. the username is not actually inappropriate)

Then the system should record that those facts do not constitute a policy violation, and a second report of those facts for that policy violation should be rejected by the safety system. In this case, the policy is "inappropriate usernames" and the facts are the username itself. Both reports would contain machine-readable records of the facts and the policy. When the original report was reviewed and overturned by Twitch Staff, the pair consisting of (facts, policy) would be marked as not-a-violation, and the second report could be automatically rejected. The same facts cannot both be and not be a violation of a policy*, so it's unnecessary to investigate twice. This should reduce workload on review staff as well as reducing frustration on users.

Note: Not on this username. Unfortunately, one logs into Uservoice via OAuth to Twitch, and Twitch for some reason prevents indefinitely-suspended accounts from logging in at all (as opposed to merely restricting any interactions with the service), which means that it is not possible to log into Uservoice via my actual account since you can't OAuth if you can't log in. Oops. Well, fortunately I have this random joke account kicking around. This is annoying and convoluted, but at least it's easy to work around.

In any case, so long as I'm complaining, I may as well finish: The account in question is called CannibalLollocaust. The cognoscenti will recognize this as a reference to the horror film "Cannibal Holocaust." However, I do at least understand how someone less-sophisticated might mistakenly think this ran afoul of the policy on "mocking, denying, or glorifying the occurrence of well-documented hate crimes or acts of genocide" if they didn't actually think very hard or attempt to check their work. I mean, even LLMs can figure this out these days, so maybe it's not so excusable, but whatever. Also, the term "Holocaust" does not even primarily refer to any historical event (really; check your dictionary!), but I get that not everyone has as good an English vocabulary as me, so it's understandable. The bottom line is: I'm not annoyed that this happened once, I'm annoyed that it happened multiple times.

The first time this happened (over 7 years ago), I was quite new to Twitch. I basically asked Support: "Is this going to be a thing with you guys? Because if this is how you are about usernames, I can go somewhere else. I don't mind if you and I don't agree about what's appropriate, that's fine, we'll agree to disagree." Support responded by reinstating my account and calling the original suspension a mistake. I took this to be Twitch saying that it was not going to be a thing, more fool me.

The second time it happened, I had changed the username from "canniballollocaust" to "CannibalLollocaust", capitalizing both subwords so that the name was now in CamelCase. I did this because I had observed many streamers having difficulty reading the name out ("Cannibal Locust" was common), so in an effort to make myself more user-friendly, I changed the capitalization. Shortly after that, I received a suspension for an inappropriate username.

I decided this wasn't Twitch's fault, or at least not forseeably their fault; I reasoned that the original suspension and reinstatement had left my username whitelisted. However, when I changed my name, even though I only changed the capitalization for readability, this meant the name was no longer whitelisted, since the content whitelisted was just a string and the strings no longer matched. So it would be necessary to appeal this suspension to an actual person.

Unfortunately, when I appealed the 2nd case and explained that this was the same thing that you said "yes" to before, I just changed the capitalization, the appeal was rejected. In retrospect, I don't actually know whether an actual person rejected it. In any case, I was eventually able to get the account unsuspended by reaching out via other channels. Once again, Twitch identified the suspension as a mistake. I presumed at the time that the same name would not then be suspended again.

However, the name was in fact suspended again. Since I didn't make any trivial changes to the name between the 2nd and 3rd suspension, my original thought about how suspension whitelisting must have worked is likely wrong, and the fact that this didn't happen more frequently was just sheer luck. I suppose it's also possible that unrelated backend changes to Twitch caused a pre-existing whitelist system to no longer work, but at this point further haruspicy into the operation of Twitch's systems without access to the source code is probably a waste of time.

Now, I'm not making all these complaints in order to appeal a suspension by other means. I got the account unsuspended the first time it suspended and appeal-denied via other channels, and I presume I'll be able to do so again. It'll probably just be a long and tedious process and make me think that maybe Twitch just isn't worth my time after all. In the business, we call this "Poor User Experience."

On the other hand, if somebody from Twitch reads this and decides to take the initiative to unsuspend the account with no further action on my part, I won't complain or anything.

*Obviously policies can be updated, and it might be necessary to add revision IDs to policies, as a set of facts might not violate an earlier policy but violate a later one. But since Twitch isn't actually paying me to engineer their systems, I'm not going to evaluate the possible options for addressing this consideration.