As far as I can ascertain, this is the question people keep coming back to.
Nevermind that a lot of people want his head on a platter anyway. Nevermind that there are other accusations laid at his feet.
He - from a position of relative power - deliberately targeted a user for mistreatment. A common complaint about him in general is that he's bad for community outreach; he targeted that user on one of the main points of outreach (in addition to targeting them in the first place).
If anyone else had successfully done the same thing that wasn't staff (in whatever hypothetical way), would they have gotten the apparent punishment as he's receiving?
Joined: 4/7/2015
Posts: 331
Location: Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
A publisher using its power for a personal motivation like this is unacceptable. Such an attitude tarnishes the credibility of the staff on this site, and may result in a drastic reduction in the interest of existent and new users to submit and participate in this community (at least under this domain).
Memory wrote:
he essentially bragged about intentionally flooding TASVideos Channel with re-encodes after Super Mario Bros. was published: https://imgur.com/a/fHTf4XM
This is really serious and disgusting, Spikestuff has to give a good explanation.
Games are basically math with a visual representation of this math, that's why I make the scripts, to re-see games as math.
My things:
YouTube, GitHub, Pastebin, Twitter
I would really appreciate it if a statement was made IN LIGHT of the new information, not old threads prior to this new information.
The new light, regarding the "TVC incident" doesn't' really change much, I think. It looked pretty obvious what the intent was back then. It was handled in a way Nach and I feel was appropriate.
What's left unclear at least to me is how it was handled. The only information I get from this thread regarding that is the following:
Nach wrote:
This topic was discussed in Thread #20271, which was till today a staff-only topic. It was dealt with at the time, and as can be seen there, we've since enacted rules to not flood. Everyone involved said they will no longer flood in the future. See additional details there.
What I get from this is that it just caused some rules changes, and that "everybody said they won't do it again".
That leaves me the impression that the person who was guilty of this, and it appears that it was an intentional act, got no repercussions for his actions. (Of course I can't know what if any repercussions there were, because this is everything I get from this thread.)
I kind of have to agree with this:
Mothrayas wrote:
I have no words for how disgraceful this behavior is for a staff member.
That being said, I am all for giving people second chances, don't get me wrong.
I have two observations here.
First, @spikestuff, assuming you aren't otherwise removed from staff (which seems it won't be the case) maybe it's time to take a brake? To me these are the actions of someone way too invested in something that isn't all that important. Maybe setting it aside for a few months can let you get a fresh perspective on things and give you a fresh sense of balance. I've had to do this at times in the past and it really helped me realize how far out of whack I had gotten.
Second, I have to say, I am almost stunned at the staff response here. I can only describe it as half interested and tired. But even that isn't really the right words. It just strikes me as strange. Did morale fall off a cliff lately?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warp wrote:
What I get from this is that it just caused some rules changes, and that "everybody said they won't do it again".
That leaves me the impression that the person who was guilty of this, and it appears that it was an intentional act, got no repercussions for his actions. (Of course I can't know what if any repercussions there were, because this is everything I get from this thread.)
I don't know why you're speaking in the singular when I clearly stated it was in the plural. So far we only know the motivations of one of the people involved, and only just recently. I have no way of knowing if it was intentional for the others, or just a group mentality of hey, let's go release a lot of new encodes.
The rule change we made for the encoders disallows them from doing anything that even looks like burying in the future, regardless of motivation. Prior to the rule change, releasing many encodes was not something we disallowed, regardless of the motivation for each individual behind doing so.
Warp wrote:
That being said, I am all for giving people second chances, don't get me wrong.
That is something I agree with, and was part of the discussion I had with all those involved. My understanding is also that the total impact of what occurred was not the intended goal. As much as I dislike what occurred, I'm not going to treat it like felony murder, especially when at the time under the previous rules, there was no felonious activity.
Alyosha wrote:
I have to say, I am almost stunned at the staff response here. I can only describe it as half interested and tired. But even that isn't really the right words. It just strikes me as strange. Did morale fall off a cliff lately?
You don't have all the information regarding what has been going on behind the scenes. I've been dealing with some of this attitude from various staff over the summer:
It doesn't help that I was hospitalized with my own set of problems over the summer (which you can read in the staff thread) nor that we've had a large increase in the amount of hostility and infighting among users for various videos, based primarily on imagined motivations of others. We're a community, and trying to undermine each other and hating each other based on your own imagination or misconception isn't helping anything. For many of the issues we've had of late, too many people want to exact their pound of flesh. If that were to occur, we would have no site left. I've been talking to many individuals privately trying to ease tensions for many of the issues we're having, but everyone wants to stay entrenched in their positions, and every few weeks, someone else wants to go add fuel to the fire. With what's going on, yes, morale has fallen off a cliff. Asking staff to stop doing the good things they are doing does not help with this. What we need is for everyone here, staff and regular users alike, to cool it with the hateful emotions, and stop performing whatever spiteful activity they have planned next. We need to work with each other again and stop finding every pretext imaginable to attacks others or twist the knife.
We cannot change, the past, but we can certainly redouble our efforts to be better behaved and accepting of others in the future. I would really love to see everyone at least trying to get along with each other. It'd be amazing if we can even go a month without a massive fight breaking out causing threads to splinter into hateful chains of sewage. We need to stop feeding threaded gruefood. Thank you.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
First, @spikestuff, assuming you aren't otherwise removed from staff (which seems it won't be the case) maybe it's time to take a break? To me these are the actions of someone way too invested in something that isn't all that important. Maybe setting it aside for a few months can let you get a fresh perspective on things and give you a fresh sense of balance. I've had to do this at times in the past and it really helped me realize how far out of whack I had gotten.
I just want to say, I absolutely agree with this. For over the 5 years I've been browsing through these forums, I've personally been too invested on things and I've been affected for them, even though it really should've not been that way.
I've changed quite a bit since then, and probably for the better by doing this.
As much as I don't want to throw a comparison here, on this instance I feel like it's a must, following this recent chain of events.
Spikestuff, I don't personally know what personal issues you have, or as to why your attitude is like this most of the time, but come on... you can do better than this.
Look at me for example. Remember how I used to be back in 2014-2015? I admit, I wasn't the best at posting things, and I was WAY too sensitive, and made a lot of stupid mistakes, and I didn't do a good job at editing or at TASing, but I did improve my attitude and matured over time and my experience here got better because of it.
You on the other hand... I'll be honest, I haven't seen that much improvement from your end since... well since you got that last warning all those years ago, as a matter of fact, I never expected for you to get THIS far, and it genuinely makes me sad.
As adelikat would say, you make some excellent work, and it's time for your behavior to be the same. This is simply not acceptable for a staff member, specially one that's been on the job for this long.
I know we've had beefs in the past, and for those instances I want to apologize. There's no hard feelings anymore about those times, or this one in particular, but one thing I want to see for sure it's an improvement in your attitude. No matter how small it is, at least I want to see that you'll try and get better over time.
If there's any sort of consequence for this, or if this is genuinely the last warning and everyone will move on with their lives (despite me not being a fan of the latter, in my opinion), then I sure hope I don't have to be writing stuff like this here anymore.
I hope you have a nice rest of your week, regardless.
As much as I dislike what occurred, I'm not going to treat it like felony murder, especially when at the time under the previous rules, there was no felonious activity.
I don't know if any sort of punishment should be applied in this particular case, but I have to slightly object to that principle that you seem to be expressing, that people shouldn't be punished for things that weren't explicitly forbidden in the rules of the website at the time of the incident.
I think a degree of common sense can be applied. The rules of the website are not, and practically speaking cannot be, a 50-volume 10-thousand page legal document explicitly listing every single minuscule infraction under the sun that could perhaps possibly be done by someone.
The principle of "people shouldn't be punished for actions that were not criminalized by law at the time of the incident" may be applicable to law, but that's because the law is supposed to be a comprehensive detailed list of crimes, explicitly listing every single thing that's illegal. The rules of a website like tasvideos.org can't be expected to be such a thing, and I think common sense should apply, especially in egregious cases of abuse, even if those cases could not have been predicted when the rules were first written.
My personal opinions and views I wanted to share:
- Totally agree with Alyosha even after Nach's microsoft knife post: "I am almost stunned at the staff response here. I can only describe it as half interested and tired. "
- After reading the public thread of private staff conversation, I still understand that what is the staff response now?
- I hope we don't lose Spikestuff, an avid encoder who frequently takes time and effort to point out might be obvious mistakes with concrete examples as well as fixed movie inputs.
- I see there are some witchhunting surrounding this drama which I don't understand why it's needed to brought up... Also why they are not gruefooded already?
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
- Totally agree with Alyosha even after Nach's microsoft knife post: "I am almost stunned at the staff response here. I can only describe it as half interested and tired. "
It’s not half interested and tired, it’s the fact they only care about the work Spikestuff puts in. He’s untouchable because of all the work he does, and I seriously doubt anything will happen to him even if his behaviour doesn’t change in the future.
Edit: @feos below: not sure what you took issue with to spark that reply but I’d rather not derail the topic. I only said what I said because it seems pretty obvious to me and I basically do the same thing as the manager of another website’s staff so I know how it goes.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warp wrote:
Nach wrote:
As much as I dislike what occurred, I'm not going to treat it like felony murder, especially when at the time under the previous rules, there was no felonious activity.
I don't know if any sort of punishment should be applied in this particular case, but I have to slightly object to that principle that you seem to be expressing, that people shouldn't be punished for things that weren't explicitly forbidden in the rules of the website at the time of the incident.
You're missing the point of felony murder.
The rule of felony murder is a legal doctrine in some common law jurisdictions that broadens the crime of murder: when an offender kills (regardless of intent to kill) in the commission of a dangerous or enumerated crime (called a felony in some jurisdictions), the offender, and also the offender's accomplices or co-conspirators, may be found guilty of murder.
The concept of felony murder originates in the rule of transferred intent, which is older than the limit of legal memory. In its original form, the malicious intent inherent in the commission of any crime, however trivial, was considered to apply to any consequences of that crime, however unintended.
Warp wrote:
The rules of a website like tasvideos.org can't be expected to be such a thing, and I think common sense should apply, especially in egregious cases of abuse, even if those cases could not have been predicted when the rules were first written.
I wouldn't call releasing a lot of encodes in a single day by several encoders/publishers an "egregious cases of abuse" . Common sense would tell me there's no problem at all. Encoders/publishers are doing what they should be doing. The outcome as described in the staff thread was probably a surprise to all involved, and possibly even unintended by those among them who had malicious intent.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 4/17/2010
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ALAKTORN wrote:
It’s not half interested and tired, it’s the fact they only care about the work Spikestuff puts in. He’s untouchable because of all the work he does, and I seriously doubt anything will happen to him even if his behaviour doesn’t change in the future.
Said the guy whose permaban was lifted out of pity?
EDIT:
ALAKTORN wrote:
Edit: @feos below: not sure what you took issue with to spark that reply but I’d rather not derail the topic. I only said what I said because it seems pretty obvious to me and I basically do the same thing as the manager of another website’s staff so I know how it goes.
You missed the point that the ban was eventually lifted. Now I'll quote myself from IRC:
so to add to Nach's point and to make it more obvious: this witchhunt should make us pay more attention to our attitudes, both involved and uninvolved. acting poorly should be stopped in light of all this. no one wants it to repeat. not just because of bans and demotions. but because IMPROVING upon ourselves would be much better.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I wouldn't call releasing a lot of encodes in a single day by several encoders/publishers an "egregious cases of abuse" . Common sense would tell me there's no problem at all. Encoders/publishers are doing what they should be doing. The outcome as described in the staff thread was probably a surprise to all involved, and possibly even unintended by those among them who had malicious intent.
You are consistently missing the point and, given how much you do this, I cannot imagine that this is not intentional on your part.
The assertion that the release of a lot of encodes in a single day was abuse is not even an inference from the evidence. The person in question admitted to it. Every property has its social purpose. If the rules of your site do not say publishers should not do this, the problem is with the rules, not with the people who find this behavior disturbing.
Certainly, there might have been occasions where publishers uploaded too much and annoyed users. Very nice that you curbed that, but the suggestion that accidentally uploading too much is somehow similar to flooding the channel with the admitted intention of reducing a particular movie's popularity is not only silly, but offensive to your publishers who had never done such thing before.
And, also, doubling down on something is never a reasonable solution. If you double down on things that are doomed to failure, all that achieves is giving the illusion of gains for a short while with catastrophic losses occurring eventually. Doubling down when things go wrong only increases the problems.
If you don't understand this, and by the history of these forums, I actually think that you don't understand, it's starting to look reasonable to doubt whether you are in a position to decide what is "threaded gruefood" at all!
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
p4wn3r wrote:
The assertion that the release of a lot of encodes in a single day was abuse is not even an inference from the evidence. The person in question admitted to it.
I don't know why you're using the singular when it is plural.
p4wn3r wrote:
If the rules of your site do not say publishers should not do this, the problem is with the rules, not with the people who find this behavior disturbing.
Which is why we changed the rules!
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
The assertion that the release of a lot of encodes in a single day was abuse is not even an inference from the evidence. The person in question admitted to it.
I don't know why you're using the singular when it is plural.
If you really don't know, you can ask people why they're using the singular. To understand them.
As is, I'm sorry to say that the sentence sounds a little condescending, and that doesn't help the mood in the community.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Grincevent wrote:
Nach wrote:
p4wn3r wrote:
The assertion that the release of a lot of encodes in a single day was abuse is not even an inference from the evidence. The person in question admitted to it.
I don't know why you're using the singular when it is plural.
If you really don't know, you can ask people why they're using the singular. To understand them.
I haven't gotten a coherent response yet.
Grincevent wrote:
As is, I'm sorry to say that the sentence sounds a little condescending, and that doesn't help the mood in the community.
Trying to keep piling on without even having a full view of what's going on also doesn't help.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
For a rather direct response to those who don't understand the usage of plural, multiple publishers were involved in the flooding of encodes on that day. This is information that can be accessed by anyone, all such changes to publications can be found in the TASVideos discord at any time.
[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
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
As you can see, I pushed 10 of Spikestuff's re-encodes. This is because Spikestuff asked me to push these out, the rest were done by Spikestuff himself. I, myself, fully and sincerely regret pushing them out on Spikestuff's behalf (though the end result is invisible on YouTube, so you have to dig through the movie maintenance log).
After the incident, the limit of re-encodes to push out in 24 hours was set to 10. This doesn't only count for Spikestuff, this goes for anyone in the publishing and encoding team, myself and feos included. Any changes to this rule will be duly announced, and exceeding the limit will lead to punishment.
Just as an aside: The most recent SMB1 warpless TAS finally got the proper YouTube treatment.
I'm glad that at the very least those involved were willing to come clean about it, thank you.
[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
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I believe Nach's main goal with his posts is to chill people down to eventually get everyone to at least try to get along with each other, and I can't disagree with it. I think he's committing, however, a methodological mistake at the very least. He's trying to discourage discussions that lead to accusations by referring to them as the major concern (instead of to the discussed events themselves) and by wording his posts in a way to soften the actions and the intents of the people involved.
It's been a while I've noticed this behavior. He once told me on IRC I have 'zero evidence' Spikestuff is behind the sockpuppet accounts, which honestly is not a sane statement. One could think that avoiding too much attention to be drawn to the site's problems can ultimately ease tensions and disperse the conflicts, but I believe it's the exactly opposite.
This is why adelikat's post was way better than yours and received a good feedback. He was honest. He even said "It looked pretty obvious what the intent was back then" - had I said this exact same sentence on IRC, you would straight up have called me a 'mind reader'. When you insist on calling intentions 'allegations' and negative outcomes 'surprises', people will get angry and they will ask you for a better explanation. Counterproductively, this results in more of what you are trying to fight. This could have been avoided so easily by picking words that made it clearer that at least one person had deplorable intentions.
As I said to you yesterday, I respect you a lot and I believe your overall work as an administrator is excellent. But I have to make this remark about the way you handled this specific situation.
While I was writing this post, fsvgm777 apologized. Thanks for your honest and mature attitude.
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Not to be this guy, but as I was probably the first one to admit, we as a community have been unfair when all we're talking about here happened. It all started in the SMB warpless submission, and we all overreacted, which led to a huge confrontation and confusion. TVC flood was just a result of it, and we, the community, are sorry about this result as well as what led to it. As I also said above, this whole situation showed us that we're very imperfect, and we will be using this understanding in future to be more fair and more united.
To everyone: We are sorry about all the confusion, and we'll be looking after each other so nothing like this ever happens again.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I wouldn't call releasing a lot of encodes in a single day by several encoders/publishers an "egregious cases of abuse" . Common sense would tell me there's no problem at all. Encoders/publishers are doing what they should be doing. The outcome as described in the staff thread was probably a surprise to all involved, and possibly even unintended by those among them who had malicious intent.
I'm really confused about this. There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding here.
That thread you are referring to seems to be talking about sudden loss of subscribers and views on the YouTube channel, and if I'm understanding correctly, that is what you are talking about ("the outcome as described in the staff thread was probably a surprise to all involved", with which I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, you are referring to the "outcome" meaning the loss of subscribers and views).
But this is not at all what I'm talking about (nor, I think, others commenting on this subject). I'm talking about the alleged actions of one staff member, who has been accused (and who seemingly admitted to it) of deliberately trying to sabotage the TAS of one particular author, by abusing his status as a publisher.
What you are talking about is confusing to me because of the lack of detail and specifics (which I might have missed). But the impression I'm getting, or at least that seems to be what you are hinting at, is that this one staff member somehow tricked the other publishers via deception, to upload-flood the YouTube channel, and the other publishers fell for it, and now you are considering this a form of shared guilt, and that no single individual can be held responsible. I may well be completely off track here and wrong, but this is the impression I'm getting from what I'm reading. However, if this is even remotely the case, I don't understand it at all: Just because he convinced other publishers to inadvertently join in his "let's bury this one TAS under a flood of re-encodes" campaign (if that's indeed what happened), that doesn't absolve him of egregiously abusive behavior. Tricking others to do the work for him doesn't somehow transfer guilt to them.
If I'm completely mistaken about the whole situation, by all means elaborate. I'd absolutely hate to have the wrong impression about the situation.
Also, this confuses me to no end as well:
feos wrote:
Not to be this guy, but as I was probably the first one to admit, we as a community have been unfair when all we're talking about here happened. It all started in the SMB warpless submission, and we all overreacted, which led to a huge confrontation and confusion. TVC flood was just a result of it, and we, the community, are sorry about this result as well as what led to it. As I also said above, this whole situation showed us that we're very imperfect, and we will be using this understanding in future to be more fair and more united.
This almost makes it sound like you all were in cahoots to deliberately and knowingly sabotage that one SMB TAS. Which would make literally zero sense, and I couldn't believe it for a second. I must be completely misunderstanding this whole thing. This is extremely confusing. I really need some clarification.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warp wrote:
Nach wrote:
I wouldn't call releasing a lot of encodes in a single day by several encoders/publishers an "egregious cases of abuse" . Common sense would tell me there's no problem at all. Encoders/publishers are doing what they should be doing. The outcome as described in the staff thread was probably a surprise to all involved, and possibly even unintended by those among them who had malicious intent.
I'm really confused about this. There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding here.
That thread you are referring to seems to be talking about sudden loss of subscribers and views on the YouTube channel, and if I'm understanding correctly, that is what you are talking about ("the outcome as described in the staff thread was probably a surprise to all involved", with which I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, you are referring to the "outcome" meaning the loss of subscribers and views).
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I haven't said anything different.
Warp wrote:
What you are talking about is confusing to me because of the lack of detail and specifics (which I might have missed). But the impression I'm getting, or at least that seems to be what you are hinting at, is that this one staff member somehow tricked the other publishers via deception, to upload-flood the YouTube channel, and the other publishers fell for it
I don't know the exact story between the different publishers. Whether it was "hey, let's bury someone", or "hey, can you help me with this", or "hey, let's break some records and release a bunch of encodes" or something else. I'm not going to try to divine what happened. All we can go on is what they tell us. I'm not going to assume it was maliciously intended by all involved unless they say so.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
It doesn't help that I was hospitalized with my own set of problems over the summer (which you can read in the staff thread) nor that we've had a large increase in the amount of hostility and infighting among users for various videos, based primarily on imagined motivations of others. We're a community, and trying to undermine each other and hating each other based on your own imagination or misconception isn't helping anything. For many of the issues we've had of late, too many people want to exact their pound of flesh. If that were to occur, we would have no site left. I've been talking to many individuals privately trying to ease tensions for many of the issues we're having, but everyone wants to stay entrenched in their positions, and every few weeks, someone else wants to go add fuel to the fire. With what's going on, yes, morale has fallen off a cliff. Asking staff to stop doing the good things they are doing does not help with this. What we need is for everyone here, staff and regular users alike, to cool it with the hateful emotions, and stop performing whatever spiteful activity they have planned next. We need to work with each other again and stop finding every pretext imaginable to attacks others or twist the knife.
We cannot change, the past, but we can certainly redouble our efforts to be better behaved and accepting of others in the future. I would really love to see everyone at least trying to get along with each other. It'd be amazing if we can even go a month without a massive fight breaking out causing threads to splinter into hateful chains of sewage. We need to stop feeding threaded gruefood. Thank you.
