OT: What is the history of RealGM?

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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#41 » by Tim Lehrbach » Wed Nov 24, 2021 2:52 am

Doctor MJ wrote:
Young Stapler wrote:I've been meaning to ask this for a while. Obviously, if you scroll down to the about us link at the bottom you get a very basic description of RealGM but I am looking to go deeper. Mods, admins, OG's etc I want to know: What is the history of RealGM? Who are the people in charge of this site? Did Howard Mass start RealGM? Does any of the leadership post in the GB? I think it would be nice to hear from some people about the beginning of RealGM and what it was like then and how it compares to now. :D


Howard did not start RealGM. From the current About page:

The RealGM Team

Ryan Hoak, President and Chief Executive Officer
Michael Benbow, Chief Information Officer
Todd Essman, Chief Operating Officer
Christopher Reina, Executive Editor and Chief Marketing Officer
Howard Mass, Forums Administrator
Michael Haegele, Senior Developer
Andrew Perna, Quality Control
Derek Johnson, Senior International Basketball Consultant


My understanding is that Hoak & Benbow started the project with Essman coming on soon after.

Howard was someone who, I believe, started off as a poster early on and later got put in charge of the forums themselves.

In my experience as a mod has virtually all been through Howard, with others stepping in very rarely.


I think originally a poster called Winterpeg (don't remember his real name anymore, but he was great at iSketch) was the admin in charge of the forums, and Howard Mass was, as you said, a poster who was selected as the first Global Moderator before becoming a part of the admin team and running the mod team.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#42 » by KyletheDingbat » Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:03 am

KembaWalker wrote:it was really bad, then tsherkin finally left
now its okay

That dude used to give me a hard time. He banned me for disagreeing with him once, though he had some excuse. Why did he finally leave?
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#43 » by bwgood77 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:09 am

I believe to begin realgm wasn't mostly about forums, but had a lot of advanced tools that teams use and the forums were a small part. The Trade Checker was one, but there were other advanced packages teams could buy and IIRC at one point about half of the teams paid for it, that is until they started developing their own tools as well as all the other advanced stats sites/tools out there these days.

There is still a ton of information in the GM laboratory about everything. You can find stats from players in any international league, prospect information, college stats, just rookie stats, then there are draft details, etc.

A lot of the tools, even within the forums have gone away or are not even updated anymore that I doubt it has nearly the traffic even though it has like 6.73 million visits in the past 6 months according to this. https://www.similarweb.com/website/realgm.com/#overview

As stated earlier by Doctor MJ, Howard started out as a regular poster, but got his role in 2001.

As also stated, the age skews way older here than stuff like reddit and twitter because people that have been around a long time are used to forums, so you typically get better and more advanced conversation in places here than those other places even though there is obviously a lot of bad conversation and topics as well.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#44 » by CS707 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:13 am

There’s a quality control position?
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#45 » by Michael Jackson » Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:33 am

Doctor MJ wrote:
Flash Falcon X wrote:prerak


And for those who don't know, there was once a poster named Prerak who dominated these boards. He posted TONS in seemingly every community to the point that there was a running gag where he wasn't a "he" but a team of people paid to take shifts.

Prerak's most significant thing though was probably founding Draft City with Jonathan Givony - which at one point was tied directly to the Draft message board (then called Draft City as well).

Then Draft City got threatened with a lawsuit based on something reported pertaining to a draft prospect. That site shut down, the RealGM draft board got renamed losing all association with the other site, and Prerak - to my knowledge - never did anything ambitious with basketball again (I believe he was about to go to med school when he made this decision).

Givony would then form Draft Express, which originally looked almost exactly like Draft City but with a different name, and continue to grow the site until going to work for ESPN. He made a specific splash in recent years being one of the most vocal proponents of LaMelo Ball at a time where Ball's prospect stock had really taken a tumble.



I know Prerak personally. He went to law school. You can look him up he works for Ted Cruz these days.

Prerak’s posting history at one point was beyond inhuman. It was believed that had to be multiples of him. He was also posting this volume while I think he was 16 years old at Drexel before he went to the University of Chicago for his law degree.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#46 » by Michael Jackson » Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:47 am

JDR720 wrote:Shams got his start reporting for RealGM.



Did he? I must have forgotten about that. Oddly. Mark Deeks who posted here as Sham69 and Sham got his start here too.

Morton Jensen, who was Rerisen here also got his start here.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#47 » by ImSlower » Wed Nov 24, 2021 4:01 am

It honestly would be a fun post to read if Howard or another real OG who also happens to have a bit talent for writing would type out a fun "A Brief Summary of realGM" article for the front page. There's definitely loads of history on the longest tenured online basketball discussion board. I only lurked here for years and years through forum migrations and upgrades and years of epic threads (and drama).

The Bulls board when I finally made this account was incredibly popular. Game threads routinely over 100 pages. Incredibly in depth and insightful posts from contributors that knew more about basketball than anyone I knew in real life.

This is still the best corner of the internet to talk hoops, even if the OGs are often long retired from the world of passionate online arguments about the GOAT. (ps it'll always be MJ sorry millennials :D )
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#48 » by Young Stapler » Wed Nov 24, 2021 4:04 am

We want Howard Mass to speak! Tell us everything you know!
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#49 » by Sothron » Wed Nov 24, 2021 4:07 am

amcoolio wrote:Early 2000s, there was no social media, just forums. ESPN had their own which was the most popular. Fans from different teams were fighting eachother all the time, it was glorious. Then they shut them down for what I presume to be costs because they had quite literally millions of posts. Realgm filled that void quickly and has still remained popular, which is hard to do in the age of Twitter and Reddit.


I only came here because they shut down the espn.com boards. Loved the Hawks and Vancouver Grizz boards back then. Very good communities on both boards. They convinced me to come here and try it out. You can see by my join date just how long I've been here.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#50 » by DaPessimist » Wed Nov 24, 2021 4:14 am

I came from that other basketball forum (not ESPN) whose name shall not be mentioned. Been on forums since the early 2000's. Don't do social media. I'm trying to imagine how an actual sports discussion would even take place on something like Twitter or Facebook. Maybe I'm just a boomer.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#51 » by seanbig » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:05 am

I remember when Chris Bosh addressed realgm during his raptor days and begging for Allstar votes
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#52 » by chyau.00 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:09 am

In the beginning... Vince Carter was drafted and thus brought on a whole generation of Canadians to learn the game of basketball, especially the 1st/2nd gen Canadians who could not give less sh*t about hockey.

Over the years, Canadians used this forum as a way to console each other on their grief and heartache: VC flying to his alma mater for convocation and missing the final shot in game 7, losing tmac, HOFFA, cheering for the player that gave them 00 every game - Eric Montross, thinking we got the final piece to the puzzle in Hakeem, seeing VC (and his mom) give up on Toronto, watching oakley take one step inside the 3pt line on every single one of his shots, watching camby become a dpoy on another team, watching billups become mvp on another team, thinking mo pete/keon clark/jyd/bargnani was going to amount to something, BC/jay triano/dwane casey, losing the lottery "coin flip" over and over again....the list goes on.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#53 » by Blacksheep25 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:22 am

I’ll tell you the true story of RealGM. Most of those in charge now have made a conscious decision to bury the truth about the origins of the site.

None of these people were around when this was a dialup BBS site to discuss the latest news at General Motors. That’s the origin of the realGM brand and name. Real General Motors.

It was the only place you could find the real inside scoop on the inner workings of the General Motors Corporation.

As the sites oldest tenured poster, and a former engineer at General Motors, I was there from the very beginning in the early 80s where we’d discuss our newest designs, new competition from Japanese automakers, general company chatter around the various plants, and sometimes who the new cute girl in HR was over at the Lansing plant.

If you look at where the player comparison section now sits, that used to be strictly for discussion of the Pontiac Fiero during its heyday in the mid 80s.

Given most of the posters on the original RealGM were based in the Detroit area, there would occasionally be discussion about the Bad Boy Pistons teams of the late 80s that captivated the basketball world.

We’d sit down at our desks at lunch, unwrap a bologna sandwich, and discuss that beloved Pistons team on BBS that was true to the blue collar spirit of Motown.

What had been strictly a site about life at a Big 3 automaker, our guilty pleasure of watching Bad Boy Pistons basketball started to creep onto our BBS forum.

We’d giddily discuss a common foul back then from the night before. Just some good-natured chippy play that would now be a flagrant 2 ejection that would be accompanied by a five game suspension, and possibly court-ordered anger management.

It was simpler times. Better times.

It was a hit around the water cooler right from the beginning. We all loved Pistons basketball.

As the Fiero was phased out, that forum soon became Lambier’s Lounge. A little corner to discuss good sportsmanship and our favorite player.

The forum once dedicated to the Chevy Chevette became the Wormhole for all discussion about the young Dennis Rodman.

It was still mostly a site for discussing our newest exciting car designs, we were pretty excited for the Camaro IROC-Z28 those years in the late 80s, but the transition into NBA content had begun.

As the late 80s gave way to the 90s, and the kids went from hair bands to flannels, the United States automakers continued their downward descent, and discussion continued to drift from the troubled General Motors product line and waning sales to more NBA content as Michael Jordan faced the Pistons gauntlet in four consecutive hard fought playoff matchups. The office was buzzing back then. We all needed the distraction.

We started to see an influx of Bulls bandwagon fans from across the country, and the site eventually migrated onto the new AOL system sweeping the country.

Throughout the 90s, every year there seemed to be a little less auto talk, and a little more NBA discussion.

Sure, there would be a thread about about the new and exciting Chevy Tracker, or production problems at the Pontiac Sunfire plant interspersed with basketball content, but as Michael set upon his pursuit of his first three-peat, it was now becoming a heavily NBA site.

Many of us there from the origin of the site were a little sad as our small BBS community about our company had turned into a sprawling site focused mostly on basketball, but most of us contributed to discussions on both topics. We had opened a door back in the late 80s never knowing what it would become.

And so it went.

During the mid-90s, as Jordan tried his hand at baseball, and Hakeem seized his first rings, it wasn’t uncommon for there to be threads on the front page about MJ and the Birmingham Barons, Hakeem and Drexel, the General Motors Saturn, and none of us who were posting on the original site will ever forget the OJ chase during the 1994 NBA Finals. The site crashed that day as everyone in the country ran to fire up their AOL dialup connection to the site. Our little board had become a monster.

As the 90s drew to a close, we continued to see more NBA content as Jordan chased his second three-peat. Lambier’s Lounge had given way to Penny’s Pub, and Shaq’s Shack(I argued against this name at the time as corny). Those were some of the busiest forums on the site. A young Howard Mass, just a contributor back then, was very active on Penny’s Pub. Little did we know he’d be part of the future hostile takeover.

The Wormhole still existed, but had went from a collection of Pistons fans celebrating a hardworking young star, to a tabloid style forum chronicling Rodman’s increasingly eccentric behavior and lifestyle.

As the millennium approached, many of us who were the original group on real General Motors had grown uncomfortable with losing control of our site, but with the company stock cratering, we thought we had a solid plan to save the company and wrest control of our site back all in one fell swoop. We had been pushed into a corner by the basketball kids.

Once our new vehicle hit the market, no one would care about some high school kid from Philly teaming up with Shaq or a young Duncan beating up on Ewing and Spree in a bunch of 85-80 games.

So in those waning months of the twentieth century, those of us there from the start, the true OGs of real General Motors spent long hours designing the world’s greatest vehicle. The best looking vehicle the world would ever see. We’d save the company and our site.

In hindsight, it’s possible all of us in engineering, both in design and in computer engineering, might have been a little past our prime.

We didn’t foresee a few things.

Sure, there was a lot of talk about y2k disrupting computers across the country, but our computer engineering department assured us they had it covered.

In retrospect, its possible we would have been better to have few younger guys in tech who we didn’t hire from IBM in 1970. They assured us that our systems wouldn’t reset to 1900. They weren’t lying. They reset to 1800.

It was a severe blow.

Howard Mass and his hotshot group of lawyers and tech people pounced and wrested control of our entire site. It would be a couple months before our tech guys could reset our systems to where we could even exchange emails within the company. Lot of jokes from the guys over at Ford asking us about life in 1800.

Still, a lot of us thought we still had a shot to get back realGM, now being marketed as real general manager, back from the hostile takeover via litigation.

As soon as our new vehicle hit the market, our stock price would skyrocket, and we’d be well-financed when we launched our counter-strike. They’d rue the day they stole our site!

As we hit the new car show that Fall, all of us were certain we had saved the company. Getting back our site was just the cherry on top.

Sometimes the best laid plans hit a snag.

As I said, in retrospect, it’s possible we had lost a step. It wasn’t received quite as well as we expected.

Image

The reviews were less than kind.

“It was voted the ugliest car in the world and the only debate was if the Fiat Multipla was uglier than the Pontiac Aztek.
But on the U.S. soil, it was the ugliest car ever, hands down!”

Needless to say, our stock portfolios never recovered. Any dreams of getting our site back were abandoned, as were any thoughts about retirement or eating three meals a day.

The company fought on for almost another decade, before succumbing to bankruptcy and a government bailout in 2009.

We had a hell of a run, and I have to say the guys have did a decent job with the site. It’s bittersweet still, but I can’t say they ruined it.

It would have been nice had they acknowledged the origins of the site, and not whitewashed the history of Real General Motors into this realGM.

Be nice if they had acknowledged our contribution, but when I get a break from greeting customers here at Walmart, I still read the site to see who has been exposed today and think about those early years.

So Young Stapler, you asked about the history of RealGM I’m sure this will be written off as some alternative history fable by the sites current ownership. Some creative writing exercise. That’s how it always goes. To the victors go the spoils. It’s like our site never existed.

But now you know the real story.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#54 » by LivingLegend » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:39 am

I would also love to know how many people are in charge of the ownership and maintenance of this site/brand.

In addition, would this be their full time job or just something they all do in their free time.

I know getting Howard Mass to open up about anything and actually respond is a longshot but maybe some high level Mods can give us the scoop of who they 'report' to and what the inner workings of running a forum are.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#55 » by RoyceDa59 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:39 am

NyKnicks1714 wrote:Early on the trade checker was a big attraction, which was novel and cool at the time. It still technically exists for some reason and isn't good. At the time, Realgm was also selling services to a few NBA teams (no idea what: software, consulting?), but I don't know if that's the case anymore.

It was actually a more advanced version of the trade checker that they were licensing to a few NBA front offices because it was extremely accurate and the only one of its kind at the time.

Now you can hire a kid from Stanford and he’ll code you something similar in 24 hours.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#56 » by RoyceDa59 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:39 am

Egg Nog wrote:RealGM.com in 2000
RealGM.com in 2001
RealGM.com in 2002

RealGM forum in 2001
GUYS...the General Board here has 15 topics and 44 TOTAL POSTS

Brings back great memories!!
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#57 » by DirtyDez » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:39 am

About 12 years ago there less hot takes and nothing was political. I also don’t remember Woj much back then it was mostly Chad Ford and Marc Stein reporting stuff. There were a lot of threads just posting articles. I joined on draft night 2009 when the Suns were reportedly getting Curry and Biedrens for Amare and the 14th pick. The Suns board had a few insiders back then.
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#58 » by ceiling raiser » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:42 am

KembaWalker wrote:it was really bad, then tsherkin finally left
now its okay

I understand that he is a controversial figure on the general board, but tsherkin was a brilliant poster on the PC board. It definitely is worse off without his knowledge (especially given a lot of other knowledgeable, legendary posters no longer frequent there).
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#59 » by Flash Falcon X » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:57 am

Egg Nog wrote:
Flash Falcon X wrote:As a side note, I remember back then forums like RealGM were the only place that athletes would really see criticism from fans and not from the media (tv, newspapers, etc.)

Nowadays, athletes can go on Instagram and Twitter and see a bunch of bad comments toward them, but back in the early 2000s a lot of them were blind to the fan criticism. You'd only get rare instances like that one time Juan Dixon found a RealGM thread called "The Amazingly Sucky Juan Dixon Thread" or something like that, and it motivated him to have a big game. :lol:


I did some digging into this...check this out
The original thread

ALSO...I can't believe I was able to find this...a single Archive.org link to this mp3 file exists, from some random who posted it to a long-since-gone comcast site...
Juan Dixon interview after the game


Wow, epic find!

It's funny because these days you hear about how players like KD are sensitive and always respond to fans on Twitter. Back in the day, there was really no way for players to find these type of things from fans unless a friend is on a forum and emails the player the link, which is so much work. And now, as a player you'd probably get thousands of messages, tweets, comments, etc. a day on your phone whereas this was just 1 single RealGM thread. :lol: :lol:
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Re: OT: What is the history of RealGM? 

Post#60 » by Flash Falcon X » Wed Nov 24, 2021 6:01 am

I think there was also a poster from the Orlando Magic board who got close to making a Summer League team or something like that. Either he was a Magic fan, or he almost made the Magic roster? I can't remember.
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