[Warning: the following post contains autism]
Hey guys, first time posting here. I've found this entire ooblets debacle fascinating, in particular the controversy surrounding this gas chamber comment.
Is it real? Is it fake?
To be quite honest I'd probably hedge my bets on fake. The devs post a lot of shit but this seems a little outlandish even for them.
With that said, after reviewing that video carefully I've yet to find anything in it that shows it to be faked.
I'm familiar enough with browser dev tools and the old inspect element tricks, and judging by some of the tweets about this subject so are some other people:
The second video is basically nothing, they're not even editing the right website.
The first video is a bit more interesting, demonstrating realtime edits of a discord post. However this is an edit made after the post was posted, you can see him scrolling up and down a chat history, he isn't witnessing posts being created anew.
So okay, we've seen it's easy enough to edit the webapp version of discord, but that doesn't guarantee the video is fake. Instead we should be looking for flaws in the video itself which prove without a doubt that someone crafted it.
The first point of interest is the timeline here.
There was originally the following screenshot of discord posted, and then maybe half a day or so later the video (
https://files.catbox.moe/hatoh5.mkv) followed:
View attachment 876100
If you compare the timestamps you see one is 12 hour clock format and the other is 24 hour format.
I'm not familiar enough with discord to know how this might come about, but looking through the app settings menu I can't see any indication of being able to freely change it.
So does this mean that these two posts were indeed posted by two different people?
Is it just one person, taking the care to edit the timestamps one of the times to be a different format?
And then the timelapse between posting - if you were able to fake the video, why not start with that instead of a screenshot?
Let's move on and talk about something that I've not seen mentioned anywhere else yet:
If you enter the discord server now and look back at this section of post history it turns out the dev's gas chamber post isn't the only one that's shown in the video that is missing from what you can see right now.
Just before his comment is a post made by LyndonHolland:
View attachment 876101
If you search for posts by that user you can't find any, but considering how frequently the moderators there have been deleting posts that's not too surprising.
Now, this server has posts a message for every user that first joins it. Scroll back far enough in the introduce-yourself channel and you see this:
View attachment 876103
Clicking on those names brings up their profile, and clicking on the mutual servers tab indicates that they're no longer present in this server.
The mass of posts by the same user (a bot) means we can't see the exact timestamp they arrived, but we can see that it was after 11:29 (easy for me, I share the same timezone as the vid does).
Scroll down a ways and you find the first post by a different user to have a timestamp of 13:11:
View attachment 876105
So we can establish from what discord shows us right now that these two users were present in this server prior to the alleged gas chamber post made at 13:46
So what does this mean?
I'm honestly not sure what the significance of the LyndonHolland post is.
I can think of no reason for someone to fake its existence, but equally if it was deleted it was presumably deleted pretty quickly since it was posted whilst the dev was active in the same channel.
If it was posted pretty quickly, then the person faking this footage was presumably recording at the time events unfolded?
But if they created their fake video at the time, why did it take that much longer for the video to be posted after the screenshot?
Conversely, if the video was faked some time after the posts had been made, why would the faker have put that post in? How would they have known they should do so?
Let's move on and take a look at the history pane on the right of the video:
View attachment 876107
The timestamps on it have timestamps from before the posts shown to be made in the video, so no contradiction there.
Discord searches don't update automatically so this can be achieved by searching for the dev's posts some time in the past and not being updated since, and of course the entire lot can be faked by editing the HTML too.
Suppose you were to go about faking it: you'd probably do the search, then navigate through the results until you found an entry before the supposed time the posts in the video are being made.
Having the scrollbar halfway down would be a bit suspicious, so you'd delete any entries that were too recent until your desired result is at the top.
Then maybe add some padding to the bottom to get that search bar to be a plausible length again.
But would you think to edit the result count?
At the time of writing this if I do a search for posts by perplamps it reports 8246 results.
I have to navigate to page 5 of the results, and on that page there are 12 results that come before the one shown at the top of the history in the video.
The pages each have 25 results, so if we do some math we can deduce that there are right now ((4 * 25) + 12)=112 results before you reach the result shown in the video.
If you subtract 112 from 8246 you get 8134 - which happens to be the results count displayed in the video.
From this was can deduce that whoever faked this video is at least as autistic as me right now or they used a completely legitimate search result when faking it.
It being a legitimate search result once again clashes somewhat with the fact this video was posted so much later on though.
A few more offhand observations:
The server now has a rules channel. The dev announced its creation at 18:46 on the same day the gas chamber post is supposedly made, and the video does not display this channel. Easy to fake mind you.
The video contains the new discord account tutorial tips animating throughout (the flashing yellow circle things) and the "several people are typing..." animated dots too.
It's not impossible somebody spliced together fragments of footage but it does mean it's more technically demanding than simply making a bunch of edited screenshots and making a slideshow.
There's a faint semi-transparent black line that sits at the top of the chat pane and overlays the posts as they scroll out of sight at the top.
As far as I can tell the video doesn't show any sign of this faint overlay looking wrong at any point.
This makes it unlikely that whoever made the video recorded some natural footage and then simply edited a small segment by moving some posts up and inserting the gas chamber one briefly, as this would fuck with the narrow overlay.
Okay, let's step this up a notch:
Here's a rough compilation of some of the posts surrounding the gas chamber one showing their timestamp in the video, and some caps of chrome dev tools indicating where to look for the exact timestamp discord has recorded for them:
View attachment 876108
This image is just to give you a rough idea of what you're looking for if you want to verify the following claims I make:
The video displays the posts being made at:
00:05 - "but I recognize that-"
01:25 - "Am I allowed to post-"
01:49 - "I think it shows the-"
01:59 - "Dude... Some of those-"
02:23 - "@perplamps a few people-"
The time intervals between these are as follows:
80 seconds
24 seconds
10 seconds
24 seconds
The timestamps associated with these posts, derived from the page HTML, are as follows:
1564836260246
1564836339918
1564836364708
1564836373934
1564836398273
The difference between each of these, which is the time interval between these posts in milliseconds, are as follows:
79672 ms
24790 ms
9226 ms
24339 ms
Divide those by 1000 to bring them back to seconds...
79.6 seconds
24.7 seconds
9.2 seconds
24.3 seconds
We can see that the post time intervals in the video line up with what is observable to anyone who enters the discord right now.
So what does this all mean?
Throughout the above analysis we find the following inferences:
1. Even when examining the video in minute detail there are no apparent flaws
2. The video would be much easier to fake if it was recorded whilst the posts shown in it were actually made for real, with some trick somehow used to insert the gas chamber post
3. The video requires significantly more attention to detail and chronology if it was to be faked some time after the events shown in it transpired
If we return to one of the tweets at the start I linked where someone is claiming it is simple to insert a fake post HTML in realtime, let's consider the ins and outs of this:
- you get your fake post HTML ready
- you get the dev tools to navigated to the right elements where you need to insert your fake post
- you've got the cam rolling, HTML on the clipboard
- your moment comes, you edit the HTML and insert your fake post, causing it to appear on screen
- bingo!
Only, not quite:
- the video is of discord running in a variant of chrome
- the bar along the top of the chrome window changes colour when it loses focus, vice versa when it regains focus (if you alt tab it looks different)
- if you're not focused on discord then when a new message is posted it inserts that red line indicating which messages are new
- if you're not focused on discord then the "users are typing" animation doesn't animate
So much for that theory then.
In conclusion:
I'm still not sure the video is real.
I've yet to find anything that proves it is fake.
That guy on twitter hasn't thought this through.
If this video is fake it is most likely meticulously spliced together footage, which would also explain why it was posted much later than the screenshot.
(...but if it was made later then what about that LyndonHolland post..?)
What do you guys make of it?
