My Justin.tv Review & Experience

[who_cares]

About six months ago I found a web site that I enjoyed due to its diversity and channels offered for my viewing at any given time of the day, it was better than TV and best of all it was all free. Soon after, I decided to upgrade my “silent viewer” status to an actual user and chatter so I made an account. Not long after I got the bit of the dark side of being randomly and unfairly banned for no particular reason, not once but a few times so I decided “ok, no problem. I have plenty content on my computer I can broadcast on my own and avoid unnecessary bans” so I began my own movie channel, named Random Movies.

I learned quickly that it wasn’t an easy task; it took me many hours and sleepless nights to get my channel to work just right. I created some graphics to make it nicer, and even had to add rules due to misbehaving users and soon after that I found myself creating a bot to ban such misbehaving users and to make things easier on me and my moderators that helped me keep my chat room free of bad apples. Then I learned the hard way that some stuff couldn’t be streamed so my channel got closed, so I had to create more and those were also closed due to apparent violations of their terms of service (showing unintentional nudity).

During all these shut downs among other things Justin.tv decided to make a database/coding change to Django, something that they are still struggling with today and I’m not sure if they ever will be able to roll out their wanted updates. It took them a month+ to “fix” a chat issue that was never broken to begin with; the chats would either not load or work at all. With very little to no communication on their end to all their users about a month later the chat rooms were back online and their web site updates were rolled back to the previous design (they completely failed to roll out their updates). The little to no communication part was very unprofessional and admins on the forums had little to no response, after all, they were just volunteers compared to actual coders of the site. This made them look very unprofessional and also amateur at all the issues they were having with the site. I still feel sorry for all the users that paid for a “pro” account that was basically useless for the entire month that they were most likely charged for.

But what really drew the last straw was being targeted and banned by administrators running the site. Soon after the chat/site issues were “resolved” my channels were getting closed on a daily basis, something that happened about once every two weeks or less. Other channels in the same and other categories were going through the same too and probably still are. Since using the “contact/report” links on their site results in an automatic “we got your message” email with no response, ever. I decided to contact a head admin (Dylan) about the closures whom he happily replied “stop streaming altogether and just become a viewer” which obviously didn’t address the issue at hand. I decided whatever, I’ll just continue to stream till a few days ago I was there alone with one moderator when out of nowhere my viewers were randomly getting banned for no reason, I asked my moderator if he was doing that and he replied “no”. Looking deeper into the issue I found out it was a user named channel_ghost that was banning my users, who happened to be an administrator on the site. Why would an administrator be randomly banning my users for no reason from my chat? Some of them weren’t even saying anything at all! So I decided to contact a Dylan about the issue. Soon after I stated that I was reporting such activity to an admin, my channel got closed for violation of terms of service (no violations occurred btw).

So I re-opened my channel again and reported the incident to Dylan yet again. He went into my new channel, told me to check my email and closed my new channel himself. The e-mail stated a nice copy and paste from their terms of service saying that once a user is banned for violating terms of service that such user is never allowed to return to the site, ever. How unprofessional, unethical, and unfair is that? I figure perhaps they would base violations on a per-channel basis not a per-user basis, how would they know It’s me to begin with? What if I come back with a new name, if they find out its “me” they’re going to ban my new channel? That’s just down right completely ignorant and unfair.

However, that did NOT answer my question as to why an admin was in my channel banning people for no apparent reason. So I decided to e-mail Dylan yet once more and remind him that he did NOT answer my question as to why an admin was in there banning people for no reason, he never replied to my email/question but instead replied by closing yet another one of my channels, and also taking the liberty to ban my bot (that did nothing and had nothing to do with anything) and ban me entirely from their networks for 24 hours or more.

This is how Justin.tv treats their broadcasters, very unprofessionally, with unnecessary and useless bans, unethical practices and little to no responses to emails and questions about issues/reports/concerns. They have a rogue admin and they fail to respond to the issue at hand. They run page-filled advertisements on every channel created (ads that slow down streams and people’s computers), even if the channel doesn’t stream anything and the person uses it as a chatter account. They make tons of money yet can’t afford to hire true professional coders to fix chat/web site/server issues at hand, they don’t offer any money to broadcasters that bring thousands of viewers to their web site. Broadcasters work hard to be able to stream any type of content on their site for basically nothing. Their “contact” & “report” links are useless because they never respond to any of it, not even if it’s something critical. Justin.TV administrators and staff are basically all immature, amateurs and right down unprofessional.

This is my review and experience with their site, their services and their response to issues. All I feel from them is unwanted, unwelcomed, targeted and most of all, unfairly treated. Hope this helps you get an idea of what Justin.tv is all about and thanks for reading.

[dylanlive]

Hello,

Let me shed some light on our policies and why a channel is suspended for returning to Justin.tv after a previous violation. I will not speak in any specifics, as the forum is not a proper place to discuss channel suspensions.

If a channel is suspended from Justin.tv, an IP ban is put into place. If a broadcaster evades this IP ban, and returns to Justin.tv under a new username, they are in violation of our Terms of Service.

The Terms of Service states:

1. Eligibility.
The Justin.tv Service is not available to persons under the age of 13 or to any users previously suspended or removed from the Justin.tv Service by Justin.tv. BY DOWNLOADING, INSTALLING OR OTHERWISE USING THE JUSTIN.TV SERVICE, YOU REPRESENT THAT YOU ARE AT LEAST 13 YEARS OF AGE AND HAVE NOT BEEN PREVIOUSLY SUSPENDED OR REMOVED FROM THE JUSTIN.TV SERVICE.

Again, in the event that a channel is suspended for violating our Terms of Service, creating a new channel is a violation of our Terms of Service.

In regards to an administrator banning users from a channel, our administrator team does not moderate individual channels unless the user is violating our Community Guidelines. Often the message will be purged and the user will receive a 24 hour global ban from our chat servers.

We want to keep Justin.tv a safe place, whether it be inappropriate sexual comments/requests, nudity, or harassment.

If you have any specific questions that are not outlined in this post, please email me: dylan@justin.tv.