I've been thinking for a long time whether I should make some facts public or not, and I feel this is a good time to share with the community some unfortunate events that have been happening in TASVideos Youtube channel. I believe everyone is aware of the controversies involving the SMB1 TASes last year, and it has always been my position that, while HappyLee has made some exaggerations, some of the attacks he was target of were plainly unfair. One example of such attacks were numerous Youtube comments attacking his run made by some accounts I had never seen before.
What is interesting about these accounts is that none of them has any content, and they were all created in the same day: Jan/24/2017 (you can check this by adding /about after their channel link). This strongly suggests they are sockpuppets controlled by a single user, and the really worrisome detail is that there is an absurd amount of ways to connect these sockpuppets to a staff member of this site.
I earnestly ask you to read each piece of evidence I collected and to draw your own conclusions based on them. I don't want anyone to get banned over this nor to enforce any conclusions, but some abuse has happened on TVC and it should be discussed. I really think we should not allow to freely insult TASers (or even regular members) in TVC comments.
These are the accounts that attacked the SMB TAS:
I have severe pains thanks to Books.
GraceLand
420NoScope
ASAI
Nyaa
MyFirst Name (the only one that was created on a different day)
Print of the attacks
Link to video - Video removed.
The video, also, got many dislikes.
There is also this account, which didn't directly attack the video, but defended the attacks were done by legit accounts instead of sockpuppets. It attacked me as well, after I realized it was also created on January 24th, 2017, which made me decide to further investigate the situation. SpookDook was the only account with a profile picture, but after I pointed that out, 'I have severe pains thanks to Books' added a profile picture as well. More on this later.
SpookDook
Image with SpookDook's comments
The problematic pattern I found after I tracked down the past behavior of these accounts is that they always seem to defend Spikestuff's point of view in diverse situations. This is an obvious example as it's known that Spikestuff disagreed of HappyLee's behavior in this controversy, but there are many others which I'll show later.
Before, see how two of these accounts, together with a 7th account, AspireDesire, have done other attacks before. AspireDesire was also created on January 24th, 2017. Here, they are
very aggressive when attacking EzGames69:
AspireDesire
Image
Link (it's a backup of a text-only google cache of a site that tries to mimic Youtube. It was the only way to recover the comments, as the video was deleted from TVC.)
Note that the video, again, has a lot of dislikes (you can't see them in the cache, but it's mentioned in the comments). This encode was deleted because it was replaced by Spikestuff, together with other EzGames69 encodes. EzGames69 was also attacked a second time, when he commented on a TAS made by Spikestuff:
Image
Link to comments
The activity of these accounts is almost entirely constituted of attacks to other users, but there are exceptions. I found 2 instances of positive comments made by them, and both were compliments towards Spikestuff, either bringing attention to the high quality of his encode or just thanking him for his work:
Link to comment
Image
Link to comment
Image
Here they commented in an encode by Rolanmen1 that Spikestuff's encode is better. This is interesting because it happened outside of TASVideos channel:
Link to video
Image
SpookDook and AspireDesire have participated in a few discussions in Youtube comments. The following is a comment by SpookDook left on a video of a TAS with some controversy surrounding it:
Image
Comments (they are all in response to this comment I linked)
Spikestuff
posted about the same thing in the discussion thread for the movie.
This was not the only time these accounts attacked The8bitbeast. Here is another instance, and it adds one more account, SupeSpee, who hadn't appeared so far and was also created on January 24th, 2017:
SupeSpee
Image
Link to comments
Spikestuff
made a negative comment in the discussion thread of that video.
Additionally, this SpookDook account has agreed with Spikestuff on videos outside of TASVideosChannel:
Image
Comments
This account even has a Crash Warped
TAS on its channel, a game Spikestuff is notably interested in.
Here, yet another instance of one of the accounts, AspireDesire, defending Spikestuff on discussions:
Image
Comment
I also have some to say regarding the pictures presented in the accounts. The book recently added as 'I have severe pains thanks to Books' profile picture is one of the first images that appear when you google 'Book', as well as the library in its cover picture. The fox in SpookDook's cover picture is one of the first images that appear when you google 'Fox'. However, there's something pretty interesing about the fox in SpookDook's avatar. It's very hard to find it with googling, and it turns out it's from a little known cartoon, StupidFox.
StupidFox blog
This cartoon posts on DeviantArt, and if you enter the blog and click in the link it provides, you get linked to EyChanChan's profile on DeviantArt, which is the author of this cartoon. It happens that Spikestuff and Eychanchan are friends on DeviantArt. You can check this on Spikestuff friends list.
Image of Spikestuff friend list
Spikestuff profile on DeviantArt
Spikestuff has also commented on at least 2 of Eychanchan posts, which were about the StupidFox cartoon, so this is yet another way to link Spikestuff to the sockpuppets:
Image of the comments
Link 1
Link 2
Spikestuff very often complains about Youtube channels that steal TASVideos content. He tweets about this issue all the time, and his fixed tweet is an (fair) attack to WebNations. These accounts have complained about such channels as well.
Image
Link to video
They have also mocked a channel, when it uploaded a 30 fps game to 60 fps:
Image
Link to videos 1 2
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
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
He made other tweets mocking 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.
There are more instances of Spikestuff printing on Twitter comments from these Sockpuppets, always endorsing their content.
Image of tweets
Most of what I'm showing here is backup-ed on
https://archive.org, in case anything gets deleted. Some tweets and Youtube comments aren't backuped because I didn't get the site to load, but more people have seen them and can attest they are real.
Regarding the attacks to HappyLee, it should also be mentioned that Spikestuff was responsible for a mass upload of 50+ videos to TVC in less than half an hour, immediately after the SMB video was uploaded. Not only this lost the channel almost a thousand subscribers (from the set of subscribers that actually look their notifications, so it's even worse than it sounds), but it should be considered that it might have been possibly done purposely to hurt SMB's views. Since the interval between each upload was very short (about one minute), they were clearly already uploaded, but unlisted (perhaps for a long time), which suggests they were waiting for SMB to be published.
I believe the community and specially the attacked users deserve, at least, an explanation from Spikestuff on why in the world there are so many connections between him and these sockpuppets - and if was it just a coincidence that he tweeted about using multiple accounts on January 24th, 2017. If the community agrees with my opinion that there is enough evidence to conclude a staff member is involved with attacks by fake accounts on TVC, I'd like to question what standard of behavior we are suppose to expect form the staff.
