Spikey Bits Controversy

Does Spikey Bits steal content? Are we terrorizing the interwebs? Well, here’s our side of things that have been posted online that may have brought you here.

First off, I would like to apologize that you are even here in the first place wasting your time reading these words when you could be enjoying the hobby on your time.

I’ll be honest with you, it’s unfortunate what the small vocal minority out there tends to think of the site, but not unexpected given our size and reach in tabletop wargaming. The truth is over 40,000 people, on average, read just Spikeybits.com alone each day.

And just like any page on the internet, some folks aren’t going to like what they read (or what they dont read because they only see the title, then comment). Then they take to socials, like Reddit, to voice their opinion.

About less than half a percent of a post’s readers on social media comment negatively about our article. However, their comments are the driving factor behind the various algorithms spreading those posts to more folks on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

It’s our policy, for the most part, unless someone is personally attacking us to leave those comments up to raise engagement and reach, which is shockingly effective.

The downside is that smaller echo chamber-style posts that validate folks’ bias against us pop up from time to time, and I personally jump in to say a few words (to which I generally do not respond further).

If you would like to read more about more specific “accusations” from these echo chambers, please read continue reading below and decide for yourself.

We’d hate to see you go, but all the best either way!

Is Spikey Bits The Worst?

There have been some rumblings from a small group out there that we are the worst thing out there since poop on toast.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the most common Spikey Bits Accusations and give you our side of things.

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a second; the Tabletop Wargaming marketplace for hobbying is extremely crowded! And while we may not be right all the time, we try to be community builders, hobby educators, and promoters that help smaller brands extend their voice and reach.

We love the hobby, so that is why we try to help promote it and keep it growing. But enough tooting that horn, let’s look at some of the biggest issues people have had with Spikey Bits.

Does Spikey Bits Steal Content?

The message that we responded to incorrectly from The Fenpyrian Forge

This has been floating around for a while now, but it all really started when an automated response from our Facebook Page got people all worked up. That was back when we were trying to use autoresponders on Facebook to get to all the messages people sent us.

In this case, some wires got crossed, and this was the response that went out

The automated incorrect response from us

After this debacle, we obviously changed the bot and took that part of the response system away. Basically, if you haven’t heard, we posted an article showcasing some really cool work by The Fenpyrian Forge. Even though we credited them, they didn’t want the article on the site.

No big deal, but when the automated response triggered, it mentioned copyright laws. That created a strange storm of people thinking we were using legal jargon to keep it on the site. But, once we talked with them, we took the post down and off Facebook.

Unfortunately, our response system at the time was not as good as we thought it was, and now we reply to messages on Facebook not so instantaneously…

You Didnt Credit My Painted Miniatures

LVO has been one of the great tournaments asking us to cover the event

One of the other things that gets people upset is tournament coverage. Tournament organizers often invite us to cover the event, and they give us full access to the convention. Sometimes, they will even pay for our travel expenses if we’re lucky. We always credit the tournament as the source and try our best to get pictures of peoples’ names on their display boards to give everyone the credit they deserve.

Everyone works really hard on their minis, and we want people to know who did what! We want to help promote great painters, tournaments, and conversion artists.

Regarding overall content for minis, we only use submissions that were sent to us, posted on our Facebook, or from tournaments we are invited to cover. If you think we have used something of yours without crediting it, please email us at support@spikeybits.com, and we’ll be more than happy to take a look.

If something is news, like new minis, trailers, or rules, we are giving free promotion to those brands covered under Fair Use, but even then, we always try to credit every source.

We still have that Sisters of Battle box army box from 2019 that is waiting for the first creator who can point out a specific article we “stole” from them.

Rumors, News & Misinformation

First off, rumors are one of the things that make this hobby fun! Sometimes a rumor comes out, and it’s super fun but may not be true. We try to put many disclaimers on those articles that it is just a rumor.

There is also a fine line sometimes between what is actual news and what is a rumor. Because we try to get out the hottest news that may be a rumor, sometimes that rumor we sourced in the article will end up being wrong. Rumors have been wrong a bunch, but hey, that’s just part of the fun sometimes!

As humans, we have a natural tendency to want to believe something is true. We do it all the time, and when you read something, then a few months go by, it’s hard to remember if we said it was a rumor or not.

That is totally understandable, but we try to make it obvious whether something is actually happening or we’re diving deep into the possibilities based on what we’ve seen. And like we said above, the rumor may not pan out sometimes, but speculating about the future is something all websites do because, again, it’s fun to think about the next new hot release or minatures!

Perception

We said it earlier, but we try to be community builders, hobby educators, and promoters, helping brands extend their voice and reach. Do we stumble? Of course! Sometimes we’re hard on Games Workshop if we think they aren’t supporting local game stores, but we want to present an opinion on what we think. Conversely, sometimes people think we’re too soft on them!

Not everyone will agree with an opinion, and that’s fine. But if you never put out an opinion and believe in something, then what’s the point?

Legal Action

This one is kind of confusing to us as we’ve never thrown lawyers at anyone over site content. There is an idea out there that we have threatened legal action against folks. If someone wants content they produced taken down, generally, we do just that. But again, we dont use any content that doesn’t fall under Fair Use and isn’t sourced.

Site Ads

We use Google-generated ads, we have no control over what they put up there. It pulls from your own cookies. So whatever you see for ads on the site is what Google thinks you want to see based on your cookies.

Spikey Bits Writes Click Bait

Okay, lemme stop you there. EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS CLICKBAIT. It is designed to get you to click on the post. Here’s the truth about Spikey Bits and Clickbait: we have never published a post that didn’t back up the title. People tend to get so mad at the title of something because they dont read the post; they read the title, and it either confirms or denies their bias.

Publishing “Fake Content”

An article we published on a supposed Balance Datasheet that was spotted featured what eventually proved to be fake with the intro below (see original post here).

Allegedly this new 40k balance dataslate was posted on Warhammer Community and then removed, however, some people claimed to have grabbed some screenshots of most of it.

The most interesting (and potentially NOT good idea to us) part of it is they are just banning people from taking units. Instead of NERFING the datasheets, they are just taking units out of the game. Some completely for match play, and in other terms just restricting the number you can take, thus overwriting the rule of three.

Spotted on Reddit, it looks like these leaked these 4 days early from the looks of it, but they are leaks, so we don’t know everything yet, so take them with some salt as there is a possibility that this is fake.

There were a lot of comments on this post, which did run with a warning that it could be fake from the get-go, which most commenters seemed to have conveniently missed (even though it was in bold).

This post has since become a lightning rod of “the click-baiting that Spikey Bits does” on Reddit, and other platforms. However, the truth is far less exciting, as internet finger pointers never link with URLs when they make accusations that are sometimes borderline libelous.

The irony is that the commenters have literally become the thing they accused us of in the first place to farm “Karma.”

Final Thoughts

Are we perfect? Of course not! But we just love the hobby and want it to keep growing. We appreciate all the support over the years and hope you have got some enjoyment out of Spikey Bits, whether that be love or hate.

We sometimes take stances that rub people the wrong way, and that’s okay. But just remember: If you stand for nothing, you will fall for everything.

That hopefully explains why you came looking for this post in the first place, with a little luck that cleared things up for you!