And that's it?
The lack of explanation or rebuttal combined with the amount of evidence gives bad impression, either because it's really your acts or because (if you are innocent) the staff position is not worth the defense or some decorum.
It looks pretty clear that you, or some friend, is behind those attacks.
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6435
Location: The land down under.
This is a bump.
It's something that people have brought up long after, or the other thread.
I want to keep it short, and I won't explain far about it.
I do admit to the alt accounts, I do admit to this low point.
I know not many have accepted forgiveness, and I know many hate me for this.
I apologize for the actions I did throughout that time.
I don't know why I chose to do those things anymore, but it is something that is out of line.
As for another part of the reasonings, I want to be the only one dragged for it.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Something better for yourself and also others.
I've already forgiven you long ago, but I deeply appreciate your apology.
I hope that you, and everyone else affected by those events, may leave everything that happened behind, and keep moving forward positively.
Thank you deeply for coming forward and properly apologizing for this. To me this was always a dark chapter in the history of the site, one during which I struggled to justify my continued presence on the site at all. I am glad to finally have proper closure on this.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2822
Location: Northern California
Spikestuff wrote:
I want to be the only one dragged for it.
I'm not gonna let that happen, since I was also involved in these incidents. While I only had one alternate account and my involvement stopped in early 2017, I can't deny that I was heavily involved in these incidents starting and continuing for as long as they did, and like Spike, I apologize for both my actions and for enabling Spike's continued actions after I left the site. There's one important thing that's been missing from this conversation over the years, though, and that's how this all started in the first place. This all started with a user named Unknown394. He has many other names, as you will soon see, but I will be calling him Unknown throughout this explanation.
Unknown's run on TASvideos was fairly brief, but... "notable", shall we say. He submitted a couple SMB1 runs and moved into an NSMBWii hack. What he also moved into was alt accounts.Several of them.Noxxa sums up Unknown's alt activity in this post, banning the three known alts Unknown was using to manipulate the voting on his submissions. Past this moment, Unknown basically disappeared from the site altogether.
Why is this significant? Let me quote part of the OP:
BrunoVisnadi wrote:
Finally, Spikestuff made a rather interesting series of tweets on January 24th, 2017, the day when the accounts were created:
In this tweet, Spikestuff refers to an attack on a video with multiple accounts. He was mocking the author of the video in previous tweets.
Image
tghi 1-10 is Unknown, using an alt account.
Here, he refers to his other accounts: ''*Going through the other accounts.*''. The double * makes it obvious was saying he used other accounts to massively dislike that video.
Image
Super Mario CHANNEL is also Unknown. That statement about "going through the other accounts" was referring to Unknown.
Hemadeothertweetsmocking the author of the video he was mass disliking. In the last one I linked, he shows a print of one of the sockpuppets, AspireDesire, helping him in the discussion.
I Love SMB is Unknown's main account, I believe. SNES Donkey Kong 1, 2, 3 is Unknown. Mario Comedy Topic is Unknown. For transparency, that Japanese account mentioned in a few of those tweets was my alt, and not Spike's.
Unknown had about 20 alt accounts on YouTube altogether. Most of them have been removed, though some of them still remain. Unknown was using these accounts on YouTube for more than just gaming the system in the same way he did on TASvideos. Unknown was using them for harassment, directed heavily towards Spike. Spike's videos were mass downvoted and mass reported by these alts. One of these alts, now removed, was directly impersonating Spike. Several of these alts were re-uploading our published runs (you'll notice that this is once again a different alt), and these re-uploads would occasionally be low quality encodes with all attributions removed.
This was happening back before TASvideos had any effective moderation, so this behavior was not dealt with whatsoever. Unknown, to this day, is not banned from TASvideos, as you may have noticed from my linking of his profile. Spike and I hated that, and we felt like the only way of fighting back was, effectively, to fight fire with fire. I had already stepped down from staff and effectively left the site by January 2017, I was not in a good place mentally at the time, and so, to be blunt, I didn't give a damn about doing it. I didn't try to stop it. I kinda wanted that sort of vigilante chaos, honestly, as an expression of my frustrations with how the site used to operate. In doing so, I helped enable a years long period of darkness for the site, and I don't think I can apologize enough for it. I can only say this was started in better intentions than initially reported, but that is absolutely not an excuse for what happened. Nothing I just said is an excuse. I'm not trying to justify our actions at all, I just want to explain why they happened.
Mostly, I don't want Spike to take the burden of this alone, not just because I was there, but because I understand why it happened, and I genuinely don't think it was even done with malicious intent. I see it the same way I saw myself doing it: Intense, growing frustration over the TASvideos of the past not taking care of things in the right way, not moderating effectively, ignoring problems especially if they were happening outside of the site itself. In a way, I see it as passion for the site at heart, though horribly twisted into active malicious behavior. This behavior is long gone, now. Not just in Spike, not just in me, but also in TASvideos itself. TASvideos has moved forward with much more effective moderation and a much closer staff than before. The site has progressed to the point where situations like these will never happen again, and I can promise that, and you can hold me to that promise.
If you don't want to forgive Spike, then you shouldn't be forgiving me either, and we will accept that. The two of us have been working on actively improving ourselves for the past several years, and we will continue to do so going forward. As hard as it is to prove, I don't want anyone thinking that there's no guilt or regret for what we did. There is a lot of guilt, guilt that prevented either of us from wanting to face the truth until now, guilt we just wanted to forget about and hope that everyone else did too, but people don't forget easily, and running away only made the problem worse.
So, again, I'm sorry. We're sorry. Responsibility has been taken, healing can begin. If anyone wants to know more, I intend to be as open as I can about this with what I remember.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3571)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Wow, I had no idea spike was being harassed like that. And I am sorry for how you were treated by the TASVideos administration over it. So I would like to apologize for my lack of proper handling of this situation. I'm guilty of negligence here. Not just for this, but also for not stepping in when I saw whole situation was being handled so poorly.
I expect more from myself, and us as staff, for situations like this going forward
(hopefully there are NOT situations like this, with harassment, vote manipulation, and alt account battles, sheeeesh)
There is one more point I would like touched on. When Bruno and I went to tasvideos administration with proof that spike was behind the continued usage of alts, we were to put things bluntly, blown off by Nach. He gaslit us, telling us that he had some text speech pattern recognition program that told us it wasn't spike. Now clearly either his program was garbage, or it was a lie. He blew us off in other ways too, obstructing TASVideos from being accountable for the behavior of its staff members. This is completely unacceptable behavior from tasvideos administration, and I was deeply disappointed by them.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3571)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Well, I can't tell you whether or not it was a lie by Nach. But just happened to have a program(?), and taking the time to run it against said YT posts (?), and said program actually showing a definitive result (?), sound tenuous at best.
Lie or not, it isn't acceptable behavior from a site admin for a situation like this. I'm sorry you were treated that way. Two members of the community should have been taken more seriously, and the situation should have been mediated back then.
Better late than never that this is coming out and everyone is trying to remedy the situation with honest intentions. But again, apologies for my neglect on the matter.
Thank you for the informations, Sam. It gives a much bigger picture.
Samsara wrote:
The two of us have been working on actively improving ourselves for the past several years, and we will continue to do so going forward.
I confirm this. I personally had very bitter fights with Spike during my service in the staff, and I could see huge changes following those events. There were various reason why I did quit the staff, and Spike wasn't among these, surprisingly.
Though, I'm not implying that starting this thread was the best solution. This is a matter that should have been handled much better by the administration.
Memory wrote:
There is one more point I would like touched on. When Bruno and I went to tasvideos administration with proof that spike was behind the continued usage of alts, we were to put things bluntly, blown off by Nach. He gaslit us, telling us that he had some text speech pattern recognition program that told us it wasn't spike. Now clearly either his program was garbage, or it was a lie. He blew us off in other ways too, obstructing TASVideos from being accountable for the behavior of its staff members. This is completely unacceptable behavior from tasvideos administration, and I was deeply disappointed by them.
I had a similar experience with Nach, about the same matters discussed here, as well as some other matters. While I felt that there has been an actual attempt to help me, at the same time I also felt treated like a fool. I understand that from the little evidences I have, I can't tell for sure that if I've been gaslit, yet I'm inclined to see it that way. Call me a "mindreader" all you like, Nach, I'm ok with being a paranoid person. It's not like we can expect everything we think to be objectively proven, and in my opinion guessing is often necessary and can be more or less honed with experience.
If you wondered what were those complaints I had about Nach, well, now you know. And the reason why I think he lacked faith towards the staff, it's because during those incidents he acted all on his own, without discussing or consulting with the rest of the staff. You can see what I'm talking about by looking at how he leaded the thread that was split from this. During that, he didn't explain the meaning of his actions at all, which is something that I think should be expected if you work in a team, especially in such a delicate situation.
Joined: 12/28/2013
Posts: 396
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Spikestuff wrote:
This is a bump.
It's something that people have brought up long after, or the other thread.
I want to keep it short, and I won't explain far about it.
I do admit to the alt accounts, I do admit to this low point.
I know not many have accepted forgiveness, and I know many hate me for this.
I apologize for the actions I did throughout that time.
I don't know why I chose to do those things anymore, but it is something that is out of line.
As for another part of the reasonings, I want to be the only one dragged for it.
Thank you for being open about it. It's relieving that this topic has reached closure.
