A RealGM Scandal, and a Conversation about Projects
Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2025 10:43 pm
Hello netizens of RealGM's PC Board,
I'm afraid we've got a scandal on our hands that's going to stop a current project, shed light on a previous project, and I'd say demand a community conversation not just about rules, but what we should try to do next.
The current project that is being halted is:
2025 Peaks Project
The previous project that was part of this same story was:
2024 Retro POY Project Update
So what's going on?
1. From multiple sources, we've received proof of posters who were either Previously Banned or Sock Puppets.
2. The two key (Previously Banned) accounts here that I'll focus on are OhayoKD & AEnigma.
3. In these last two projects, there has been a conspiracy launched on a discord to create new iterations of prior PC Board projects, and skew the results.
4. The leader of the direct conspiracy was OhayoKD, who didn't simply recruit like-minded people from elsewhere to take over the projects, but explicitly scripted many of the voters ballots (the number they reference is 10) - some of whom by their own admission "don't know much about basketball" - in service of specifically trying to lower Michael Jordan's ranking. As part of this process, OhayoKD specifically voted for Bill Russell to make himself look more credible despite being lower on Russell than Jordan, and both in prior projects and elsewhere on RealGM used Sock Puppet accounts to further manipulate perception.
5. AEnigma knew all of this was happening and stated that when he included Jordan on his ballot, it was done - like OhayoKD - to throw off suspicion and make the project seem more credible.
6. As part of the recruitment of posters to take part in these "missions" (OhayoKD's wording), many new RealGM accounts were created which appear to mostly be real people whose awareness of how unethical this all was is poor. At this time we are not banning these accounts - we'd much rather new users simply learn our expectations and be productive members of the community - but do be aware that we will keep an eye on these accounts in the future, and will not cut slack if they cause more problems.
Some background
1. The fact that OhayoKD & AEnigma were likely Previously Banned Posters was clear to us a long time ago, but in the absence of proof, they've merely been going through the same escalation of moderation consequences as anyone else. They've been close to getting banned simply because of their anti-social behavior, and one might say it was only a matter of time before that got them banned, but I'll also say that as both had previously been banned, I would believe that both were shrewd enough to back off and say the right things when they received warnings.
2. Something I'll just say folks: These guys are no dummies, and between their understanding of limitations of the volunteer mod team and other technology, they've basically been outsmarting RealGM's systems for as long as these accounts have been around (after failing to continually outsmart these systems while using earlier accounts.
3. While I've mentioned two specific projects that are corrupt to the core, this doesn't mean all other projects were "clean". We don't know when the scheming - beyond the creation of new accounts - began, but it does seem clear that this is something that became bigger & bolder with time. To the point that the scope of evidence we've now received has frankly left many on the moderation team stunned by the lengths people would go to do something like this - let alone those in my real life who aren't basketball fans, who are confused why anyone would care so much about our little voting projects that they would devote themselves primarily not to understanding basketball, but manipulating the basketball perception of others.
4. As I alluded to, as this scandal began to percolate up in the Peaks project, the incentive to want a group ranking to more closely align with your personal preference is something that I completely understand, and it's something I think tends to happen naturally once you get invested enough in the actual debates inside the project. Hence, the nefarious motives of these guys are not something I see as unexpected at all, but rather represent a temptation that many of us needs to recognize in ourselves, and from there decide whether we want to give into them, or reject them.
For anyone looking to understand the principles of this sort of thing, I'd recommend reading up on Goodhart's Law. In a nutshell, The PC Board's projects got goodharted once some folks started caring so much about the final results that they prioritized that over the actual goal of the projects, which is get people together to talk about basketball, and then learn together.
Before I leave the conversation about these particular posters, I'll speak to them directly:
OhayoKD & AEnigma, whoever you guys are, stop using your intelligence and talents to mess up other people's journeys. I know from what was shared that you have a tremendous disrespect for anyone who you believe is wrong about particular basketball opinions, and I just have to say, you have no idea how small you look to everyone else that you've let this disrespect fester to the point it has.
Because of what you've done, if people outside of RealGM talk about these particular projects you've put so much into, the fact - say - that Jordan ranks lower than elsewhere in basketball consensus is not going to have people talking about a shift in opinion among hard core basketball nerds, but rather that pro-LeBron basketball nerds were so obsessed with being anti-Jordan that they contaminated projects to try to hurt Jordan and his "stans".
The theory that Jordan-heads are the craziest homers around? Well, it just got a lot weaker, because of y'all. Many crazy Jordan-heads exist...but they didn't do this. You did.
As I've said, you don't look "dumb" - I have no doubt you've got plenty high IQs - but you do look incredibly immature. I'm quite sure you guys aren't teenagers, but that's where your development seems to have arrested, and it's a shame. I urge you to take a step back, and think about what you want to accomplish with your life, because THIS, aside from everything else that it did to everyone else, wasted your time and efforts in service of undermining a community that wasn't actually talking about anything truly important anyway.
This is a KID'S GAME. Never forget that.
The fact that we adults spend so much time on it is silly, but so long as it let's us take a breather from the actual serious stuff in our life, and we try to do more good than harm, it's fine. That's what hobbies are for. But when you devote yourself to a hobby of messing with other people's hobbies, it's only going to take your darker places without any real benefit.
Going Forward
While people can comment on what I've communicated above, the important thing is what we do going forward, and so now I'm going to lay out some questions for the community to consider, and while it won't be a formal democracy, the will of the community is important to us mods.
1. We are pausing the Peaks project, and there should be a discussion about what to do with it. It goes without saying that the existing votes that have already taken place are not meaningful, and so what do we do about it?
We could start over at #1 with more explicit rules run by a new project runner.
We could just lump all the existing voted in guys together without an ordering and just say "Yeah we talked about those guys already."
We could just stop this iteration of the project, and at a later date start over.
Most generally, we could move away from projects like this which are so goodhart-able by moving on to more qualitative projects.
2. For the Retro POY Update, well, it's already done and I have no intention of erasing it from existence, but the corruption involved will need to be explicitly added to the project's original post, and I will not be merging the results from the Update with the original.
On this project, I really feel for all the sincere posters who felt like they finally got a chance to participate in what many felt was the greatest project we ever ran on the Board, and put in effort for many months to participate. I'm not sure what else to say there, but others can chime in.
3. Me personally, I'm on the fence about whether I'm going to try to run more projects, or even participate in them. I think I can safely say that I've put at least as much effort into building up community through these type of projects since the first one I ran back in 2006, and back then I think it's accurate to say that in some ways these projects "put RealGM" on the map enticing knowledgeable basketball fans from around the internet to join here and participate even if they were already established elsewhere.
For a number of years, I felt that the PC Board was the single best place on the internet to talk serious basketball analysis & history, and while that didn't come out of nowhere - RealGM first broke out in 2001 after ESPN bought Chad Ford's sportstalk.com and turned it into ESPN's own message board which quickly got overrun by the worst of the internet at the time - but actually being a place that people sought out from APBR & APBRmetrics as well all the more typical rivals was a big deal, at least to me.
But times change, the internet changes, most of the old people move on to bigger and better things, and new folks come in for whom the initial things that excited us, are perhaps now mere abstractions that seem unreal, all while the social internet's troll culture grows in both adherents and methods.
I don't want to say goodbye to RealGM as I know it, but I think we have to be honest about the fact that we're never going to be sure again that each poster is an independent human being with an earnest wish to rabbit hole with other human beings to see what they can learn together - and yes, Generative AI looms very large in my mind here, because while I suspect it was involved in this scandal, there's really no doubt that could be taken to far more extreme levels if only there are smart, talented people with nothing better to do with their time than hurt others in unimportant domains.
The big question for me is:
What's the best way to re-build a social internet culture on a site in the mid-2020s?
I ask for people's sincere thoughts after they spend some time in introspection, and consider what makes the most sense for them personally, and for the larger group that when we are here, we are all apart of.
Sincerely,
Doc
I'm afraid we've got a scandal on our hands that's going to stop a current project, shed light on a previous project, and I'd say demand a community conversation not just about rules, but what we should try to do next.
The current project that is being halted is:
2025 Peaks Project
The previous project that was part of this same story was:
2024 Retro POY Project Update
So what's going on?
1. From multiple sources, we've received proof of posters who were either Previously Banned or Sock Puppets.
2. The two key (Previously Banned) accounts here that I'll focus on are OhayoKD & AEnigma.
3. In these last two projects, there has been a conspiracy launched on a discord to create new iterations of prior PC Board projects, and skew the results.
4. The leader of the direct conspiracy was OhayoKD, who didn't simply recruit like-minded people from elsewhere to take over the projects, but explicitly scripted many of the voters ballots (the number they reference is 10) - some of whom by their own admission "don't know much about basketball" - in service of specifically trying to lower Michael Jordan's ranking. As part of this process, OhayoKD specifically voted for Bill Russell to make himself look more credible despite being lower on Russell than Jordan, and both in prior projects and elsewhere on RealGM used Sock Puppet accounts to further manipulate perception.
5. AEnigma knew all of this was happening and stated that when he included Jordan on his ballot, it was done - like OhayoKD - to throw off suspicion and make the project seem more credible.
6. As part of the recruitment of posters to take part in these "missions" (OhayoKD's wording), many new RealGM accounts were created which appear to mostly be real people whose awareness of how unethical this all was is poor. At this time we are not banning these accounts - we'd much rather new users simply learn our expectations and be productive members of the community - but do be aware that we will keep an eye on these accounts in the future, and will not cut slack if they cause more problems.
Some background
1. The fact that OhayoKD & AEnigma were likely Previously Banned Posters was clear to us a long time ago, but in the absence of proof, they've merely been going through the same escalation of moderation consequences as anyone else. They've been close to getting banned simply because of their anti-social behavior, and one might say it was only a matter of time before that got them banned, but I'll also say that as both had previously been banned, I would believe that both were shrewd enough to back off and say the right things when they received warnings.
2. Something I'll just say folks: These guys are no dummies, and between their understanding of limitations of the volunteer mod team and other technology, they've basically been outsmarting RealGM's systems for as long as these accounts have been around (after failing to continually outsmart these systems while using earlier accounts.
3. While I've mentioned two specific projects that are corrupt to the core, this doesn't mean all other projects were "clean". We don't know when the scheming - beyond the creation of new accounts - began, but it does seem clear that this is something that became bigger & bolder with time. To the point that the scope of evidence we've now received has frankly left many on the moderation team stunned by the lengths people would go to do something like this - let alone those in my real life who aren't basketball fans, who are confused why anyone would care so much about our little voting projects that they would devote themselves primarily not to understanding basketball, but manipulating the basketball perception of others.
4. As I alluded to, as this scandal began to percolate up in the Peaks project, the incentive to want a group ranking to more closely align with your personal preference is something that I completely understand, and it's something I think tends to happen naturally once you get invested enough in the actual debates inside the project. Hence, the nefarious motives of these guys are not something I see as unexpected at all, but rather represent a temptation that many of us needs to recognize in ourselves, and from there decide whether we want to give into them, or reject them.
For anyone looking to understand the principles of this sort of thing, I'd recommend reading up on Goodhart's Law. In a nutshell, The PC Board's projects got goodharted once some folks started caring so much about the final results that they prioritized that over the actual goal of the projects, which is get people together to talk about basketball, and then learn together.
Before I leave the conversation about these particular posters, I'll speak to them directly:
OhayoKD & AEnigma, whoever you guys are, stop using your intelligence and talents to mess up other people's journeys. I know from what was shared that you have a tremendous disrespect for anyone who you believe is wrong about particular basketball opinions, and I just have to say, you have no idea how small you look to everyone else that you've let this disrespect fester to the point it has.
Because of what you've done, if people outside of RealGM talk about these particular projects you've put so much into, the fact - say - that Jordan ranks lower than elsewhere in basketball consensus is not going to have people talking about a shift in opinion among hard core basketball nerds, but rather that pro-LeBron basketball nerds were so obsessed with being anti-Jordan that they contaminated projects to try to hurt Jordan and his "stans".
The theory that Jordan-heads are the craziest homers around? Well, it just got a lot weaker, because of y'all. Many crazy Jordan-heads exist...but they didn't do this. You did.
As I've said, you don't look "dumb" - I have no doubt you've got plenty high IQs - but you do look incredibly immature. I'm quite sure you guys aren't teenagers, but that's where your development seems to have arrested, and it's a shame. I urge you to take a step back, and think about what you want to accomplish with your life, because THIS, aside from everything else that it did to everyone else, wasted your time and efforts in service of undermining a community that wasn't actually talking about anything truly important anyway.
This is a KID'S GAME. Never forget that.
The fact that we adults spend so much time on it is silly, but so long as it let's us take a breather from the actual serious stuff in our life, and we try to do more good than harm, it's fine. That's what hobbies are for. But when you devote yourself to a hobby of messing with other people's hobbies, it's only going to take your darker places without any real benefit.
Going Forward
While people can comment on what I've communicated above, the important thing is what we do going forward, and so now I'm going to lay out some questions for the community to consider, and while it won't be a formal democracy, the will of the community is important to us mods.
1. We are pausing the Peaks project, and there should be a discussion about what to do with it. It goes without saying that the existing votes that have already taken place are not meaningful, and so what do we do about it?
We could start over at #1 with more explicit rules run by a new project runner.
We could just lump all the existing voted in guys together without an ordering and just say "Yeah we talked about those guys already."
We could just stop this iteration of the project, and at a later date start over.
Most generally, we could move away from projects like this which are so goodhart-able by moving on to more qualitative projects.
2. For the Retro POY Update, well, it's already done and I have no intention of erasing it from existence, but the corruption involved will need to be explicitly added to the project's original post, and I will not be merging the results from the Update with the original.
On this project, I really feel for all the sincere posters who felt like they finally got a chance to participate in what many felt was the greatest project we ever ran on the Board, and put in effort for many months to participate. I'm not sure what else to say there, but others can chime in.
3. Me personally, I'm on the fence about whether I'm going to try to run more projects, or even participate in them. I think I can safely say that I've put at least as much effort into building up community through these type of projects since the first one I ran back in 2006, and back then I think it's accurate to say that in some ways these projects "put RealGM" on the map enticing knowledgeable basketball fans from around the internet to join here and participate even if they were already established elsewhere.
For a number of years, I felt that the PC Board was the single best place on the internet to talk serious basketball analysis & history, and while that didn't come out of nowhere - RealGM first broke out in 2001 after ESPN bought Chad Ford's sportstalk.com and turned it into ESPN's own message board which quickly got overrun by the worst of the internet at the time - but actually being a place that people sought out from APBR & APBRmetrics as well all the more typical rivals was a big deal, at least to me.
But times change, the internet changes, most of the old people move on to bigger and better things, and new folks come in for whom the initial things that excited us, are perhaps now mere abstractions that seem unreal, all while the social internet's troll culture grows in both adherents and methods.
I don't want to say goodbye to RealGM as I know it, but I think we have to be honest about the fact that we're never going to be sure again that each poster is an independent human being with an earnest wish to rabbit hole with other human beings to see what they can learn together - and yes, Generative AI looms very large in my mind here, because while I suspect it was involved in this scandal, there's really no doubt that could be taken to far more extreme levels if only there are smart, talented people with nothing better to do with their time than hurt others in unimportant domains.
The big question for me is:
What's the best way to re-build a social internet culture on a site in the mid-2020s?
I ask for people's sincere thoughts after they spend some time in introspection, and consider what makes the most sense for them personally, and for the larger group that when we are here, we are all apart of.
Sincerely,
Doc
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☝️ Now why is that?
). I know it when I see it