A RealGM Scandal, and a Conversation about Projects

[FrodoBaggins]

Many things being said here which there stuff I don't really know about cause I only been in this Website for 4 month but i think OhayoKD thoughts on Bill Russell is genuine or At least it actually put some though on it to make a reasonable Argument for Bill to be Top 1 in Peak/Prime ( Cause we been discussing About how high he thinks Bill Russell is as a player both Peak and Prime. To be totally honest I don't real agree with most stuff for Bill even tho I'm high on him myself in term of Career Value ). this is from 3 years ago that he made argument for bill russell to be the highest Peak ever in term of relative to era.

viewtopic.php?p=107550888#p107550888

( That mean he thinks it Gap all player including Bron MJ Kareem and more ) Even tho that not a PoV I'm agreeing with. I do think it important to say that he didn't Fake his thoughts about having bill as Goat peak.

Can I ask why you capitalize random letters and put spaces in your parentheses? Feels like you're scripting your posts to look as though you have a unique posting style.

[SideshowBob]

This is insane.

Thanks to Doc (and the rest of the mod team) for handling this but I gotta imagine this is real disheartening at this point. For a board like this I feel like the future only has the potential get worse (or see a repeat of this..) as Doc kind of alluded to.

[Doctor MJ]

Okay, having read through the posts since my OP, I'm going to emphasize a few general things before saying anything else.

1. Moderators cannot decide to ban posters. We are a volunteer force working under Admin, who are the actual employees of RealGM, and we have to go and present our evidence on a board that regular posts are not given access to see in order for anything like, well, this, to occur.

This then to say, don't be under the illusion that evidence has not been shown, it just hasn't been shown in the public forums.

2. The expectation that the poster base has a right to see such evidence and make rebuttals as if this were a court of law deciding on whether to imprison a defendant is doesn't make sense. Literally, RealGM has been operating this way through it's whole existence, and so literally anyone posting here now signed up to RealGM with this system.

Perfectly fine for you to decide that you don't want to be on RealGM any more, but just speaking practically, it will never make sense for any social meda site of scale to operate in a way where there's a public vote on whether the evidence the site has is sufficient to say, say, a poster was a previously banned user - and to be clear, identifying previously banned users has been done for forever, and there's literally never been a time when we mods have shared the evidence to the board.

3. With that said, I will start a discussion among the mods about whether we feel it is appropriate sharing some of the evidence in public - I'm not going to simply assert by my lonesome that "we" won't do it, I'll see what others that RealGM Admin has trusted to bring into Moderation think.

4. I saw at least one post saying they didn't care if these guys were previously banned posters. That's fine, you don't have to care, but think through why a site would ALWAYS care whether someone whose previous behavior was so egregious they got banned was coming back and getting into more trouble, which the lead posters in question here had been doing basically their whole time here.

5. I see posts talking about nothing happening to these problematic posters when they Reported previous problematic posts, and part of what's going on there is that posters can't see what's happening behind the scenes. There were consequences for previous behavior, it just didn't result in something that posters could necessarily see every time - and that's how it goes, but it is also a problem because posters who follow our Reporting method and don't feel like they see appropriate action afterward tend to lose faith and go a variety of bad ways - responding in kind, leaving the community, etc.

Here there's an issue with RealGM I just want to be open about: A Moderation system built primarily on volunteers - as RealGM is - is always going to be a bit underpowered relative to serious efforts to mess with the community. Traditionally, there's no real way to "fix" this other than paying people to do this work, and the economics of this old school message board simply can't do that.


Final thing I'll say in this post to really hammer what we're doing here home:

If it were only about the Previous Ban evidence, I wouldn't have written this post as bans happen on RealGM on the regular and we would never start a thread about it asking for input from posters who are not Admin or Moderators.

I wrote this post, because we need to now have a conversation about how we do Projects - including Peaks - going forward.

And here, while people may think I'm looking to use my authority as Moderator because that's what my title says, I'm not. What I am is the member of the community who has been running and participating in these projects here for nearly 20 years, beginning at a time where the community talked about great it would be to have community projects and someone needed to take the lead in actually running them, so I did and it's largely been my focus ever since.

You personally don't have to care that I have this background of course, but if it's not something you've thought about as you participate in these projects that people had to create the culture you were enjoying, well, reflect on it now.

Doc

[PistolPeteJR]

Well this is all very unfortunate.

I was invited to said discord server 2 1/2 years ago, in February of 2023. I joined, being told at the time that it was, "to rant about basketball". I joined, but was never, ever active both in posting or reading the content. It was too much for me to follow, coupled with gossip about some posters which I don't recall in any detail, and it just wasn't for me.

My opinion is probably an unpopular one, particularly given people by nature love to root for their guy, but I think there's just far too many variables to crown one person over another anyway, and believe tiers are a lot more accurate.

This stinks though, as far as the forum goes. I do think it's probably best to take a small break and start again, as that'll give mods time to digest this and consider what steps to take in an effort to ensure a better experience for participants and observers alike.

[Doctor MJ]

Did it affect 2023 Top 100 project?

We can't definitively saying any project is totally clean, but as the guy who ran the 2023 project, I'll say that concerns along these lines are always part of what I'm looking around for when I take on that responsibility.

[Clyde Frazier]

Not gonna lie, is a bit funny to me the first time a different top 1 happens we end the project prematurely with drama involved and whole accusatuons of conspiracy lol

I kinda wonder if anywhere the same drama would have happened if the voting results/ accused new voters were the standard picks for jordan at 1st

It absolutely would have. We as mods get constantly accused of being biased towards Jordan and LeBron. And this is in the most basic of threads, not the projects specifically. This idea that we'd try to skew the results more than just voting in these projects ourselves is absurd.

not sure what the "evidence" is and who provided this evidence, but the peaks project was providing data and thoughts and information better than what other projects in the past have provided. It's an absolute shame that we're going to stop it because for the most part people are just upset that certain posters were posting rankings that they didn't like. There were a few posters were very vocal about this right from the beginning.

This is completely off base. We don't care who got voted in first. It was a concerted effort by OhayoKD to get people to join solely to vote for LeBron first. Some of these were duplicate accounts of their own. And by doing so these new posters had no interest in real discussion. Their votes for other players also weren't genuine, only in an effort to get as much separation between LeBron and Jordan in the results without raising suspicion. What's especially disheartening is AEnigma knew this was going on and ran a project themselves to further pollute the board.

[sp6r=underrated]

This is insane.

Thanks to Doc (and the rest of the mod team) for handling this but I gotta imagine this is real disheartening at this point. For a board like this I feel like the future only has the potential get worse (or see a repeat of this..) as Doc kind of alluded to.

Over the last month, I've really cut down my tweeting and am trying to quit twitter alltogether. And that decision isn't primarily due to the right-wing shift there. It is what Bob discusses above. The negativity on social media is really bad right now and consequently I feel worse when I use it.

[Ron Swanson]

Wait, seriously? This would be incredibly hilarious if it weren't so pathetic (though it's still pretty funny). This goes much beyond the Jordan vs. Lebron thing and speaks to reasons why IMO the PC board in general has alienated a lot of discussion and traffic compared to the other boards on this site. I can't speak for everyone, but it's certainly been the main reason why I've posted less and less here even if I find it to be, overall, more intelligent discourse than the average GB thread.

Flatly put, a few very vocal and condescending posters have felt it their duty to be the gate-keepers of intellectual basketball discussion here, and I'd say it's been going on for years. Which is why I'm honestly surprised that it took this long for the most extreme and obnoxious offender (we all know who) in particular to be called out/reprimanded for this kind of behavior (I'm assuming his account has been banned?).

The "rigging" votes thing itself is more deserving of mockery than it is of any sort of punishment over the "integrity" of polls/votes on an internet message board. It's the proven track record of posters with pretentious, combative, and belittling behavior that are the problem and while I understand that it's difficult for a volunteer moderator community to "police", it certainly does a disservice to every other sane, non-psycho poster here that wants to enjoy discussing (and yes, sometimes arguing) basketball without being talked down to if they didn't "show their work" with mountains of spreadsheet data and a short novella of text. This isn't an MIT grad course in scientific theory and analytics. We're just people talking basketball on the internet.

[sp6r=underrated]

It absolutely would have. We as mods get constantly accused of being biased towards Jordan and LeBron. And this is in the most basic of threads, not the projects specifically.

FWIW, I've gotten suspended before and Mods have always been very clear to me why I got suspended and usually there were warnings beforehand or my behavior was egregious. As example, I spammed "stop following the NBA if you think the lottery is fixed*. stop following the NBA if you think the lottery is fixed. . ." It was totally fair and warranted to suspend without warning as I was being a dick. The idea I've should have been able to appeal hits me as bizarre.

This is a message board not a court of law where you're taking my property or sending me to jail.

* OT you should stop following the NBA if you think the lottery is fixed. It is nutty to care about the outcome of games if you think they are fixed.

[tsherkin]

it certainly does a disservice to every other sane, non-psycho poster here that wants to enjoy discussing (and yes, sometimes arguing) basketball without being talked down to if they didn't "show their work" with mountains of spreadsheet data and a short novella of text. This isn't an MIT grad course in scientific theory and analytics. We're just people talking basketball on the internet.

Obviously, the condescension part makes a great deal of sense. We can't really have that, we need a degree of civility and polite discourse for this all to work. Few people want to participate in a hostile environment, save for those who enjoy being hostile, no doubt.

There is something to be said for showcasing a great deal of evidence, collating all of it and going through it analytically to address what are perceived as long-held inaccuracies. Some posters struggled to avoid adding the condescension and aggression to the valid responses, no doubt, and were routinely problematic.

All that said, we overturn old, long-held myths all the time. That's the nature of deeper examination over a longer period of time. Things we used to think were true frequently weren't, and then some things change as the league environment alters. And some things which were true in a given period stop being so 20, 30, 40, 50 years later as the roll of NBA players changes. There are a whole host of regular logical fallacies and cognitive dissonance associated with any sort of fandom-rooted discourse, after all, so it's important not to associate "mounds of spreadsheet data and a short novella of text" with being inappropriate... so long as the tone involved is respectful, and posters who dissent are still at least treated with basic courtesy.

People will argue, and they will disagree. Some people who are obviously wrong won't choose to change their mind (be they the ones with an entrenched, older opinion or the newer opinion). Some people have very different criteria for what they evaluate, and some further haven't even really thought about this to the same degree of depth which others have, which is also note-worthy.

The trick is to find a happy space where we can all discuss but don't need to press and badger, belittle and bombard. We make our point, and then at some point, we can shake hands and agree to disagree if that's what it comes to. That's important. You cannot force someone to change their mind, even if you think you are objectively correct. And there's been less and less of that over the years, where we just go "well, crap; we aren't going to align on this, so let's just move on."

[LA Bird]

If there is definitive proof of everything stated in the first post, they should both be banned along with every account associated with them.
OTOH, if there isn't sufficient evidence for a ban yet, freezing the project and making this announcement seems premature.

I do find it funny how people playing defense for them aren't disputing many of the allegations. It's just the "no, you are salty LeBron ranked above Jordan" card over and over. As if this board wasn't already the most pro-LeBron place on the entire internet before they arrived. And that some of the posters arguing against them have LeBron over Jordan too. If they had any self-awareness, they would realize that all this manipulation has done is discredit LeBron's placing in past projects and the reputation of this board overall. And that's the biggest irony - in their attempt to artificially boost LeBron, they have done more damage from the inside than any Jordan fan could have ever achieved from the outside.

Re: Minimum post count or age requirements
I don't think there needs to be a set bar. If we mandate a low minimum requirement like 100, it's not exactly difficult for an alt to just spam in a game thread to boost their count. OTOH, if we mandate a higher minimum at say 1000, we might rule out genuinely good posters who just don't post often (eg. Bad Gatorade is at ~700 after a decade). Previous projects have done just fine with letting unknown posters participate for a couple rounds before their vote can count. And honestly, just some common sense will help. Sorry if that means grain farmers without internet access can't participate but it is what it is.

Re: They shouldn't be banned because they are great posters
Kind of understand the perspective here but the problem though is that it implies quality posters can essentially do anything and are still untouchable. There is obviously a line somewhere to be drawn and IMO, scripting accounts to take over the board would certainly be a bannable offense. Now, in an ideal world, they would stop any manipulation after warning, post regularly, and no ban would be necessary. But given the extent they went to or knowingly looked the other way, I don't think that is very likely. They will just learn from their mistakes and be smarter about their next takeover.

Re: What to do with PC board projects going forward?
I don't think projects should be discontinued just because of this one incident. They are a long standing tradition and can be a great introduction for new posters. For example, I only joined this board myself after learning about the 2014 top 100 project. But I do think we need to come to terms with the reality that projects should be less frequent now due to declining activity and insufficient mod monitoring. There hasn't been a mod-run peaks project for a decade and half of the mod team has been largely absent in recent times. As a former 2x project runner myself, I would recommend a project every four years instead of three and to have a team of organizers instead of a single one to lighten the workload. The existing peaks project can restart next year with a clean slate after the mess is cleaned up and all involved accounts banned. I think resetting immediately is a mistake because it brushes off the (alleged) takeover as if it's no big deal.

[Doctor MJ]

Not gonna lie, is a bit funny to me the first time a different top 1 happens we end the project prematurely with drama involved and whole accusatuons of conspiracy lol

I kinda wonder if anywhere the same drama would have happened if the voting results/ accused new voters were the standard picks for jordan at 1st

Also, a different top 1 happened during the general top 100 list in 2020 and the project went on normally.

I appreciate you pointing this out GOATRises.

To clarify for anyone confused:

The BIG project we do here - typically every 3-years - is called the RealGM 100, which is a career GOAT project. In that project, LeBron has been #1 since the 2020 iteration, and when that happened it was kind of a big deal, at least by our humble standards.

Here's a quote from the Reddit thread at the time discussing the RealGM project:

Longevity is super overrated by stat nerds. That's the problem with these RealGM, Ben Taylor type lists.

And worth noting that Ben actually had me on his Thinking Basketball podcast at the time talking about the significance of LeBron finally overtaking Jordan.

ftr, I too voted LeBron over Jordan in that project, and continue to rank LeBron over Jordan in my RealGM 100-type vote to this day.

All this to say that if it were about keeping Jordan above LeBron on major RealGM projects, 2020 was the time when that s**t his the fan, and yet that project carried on without anything like what's caused us to pause the Peak project.

I think I should also note something I say whenever it seems like people might be confused about project pecking order:

The Career GOAT project has just always functioned better than the Peak GOAT project.

I created the first Peaks project in 2012 - after the RealGM 100 had successfully run to 100 in 4 iterations - with the goal of merely getting to 50 Peaks, but had to end it after 33 because participation dropped off.

In 2015, trex tried again and got to 40.

In 2019 & 2012 LA Bird ran it and finally got up to 50.

Folks may note that I maintain a RealGM 100 spreadsheet detailing all the information we have about the lists going back to 2003 - though 2003 itself was before my time, and we only have the small fraction of the results because of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Meanwhile, while I maintain that spreadsheet for a project I didn't start, I don't keep one for Peaks despite the fact that I DID start that. Why? Because people just really struggle to evaluate peak basketball play directly for anything other than the tippy-top guys that grab our attention and love.

None of this is to say I won't want Peaks to succeed, nor that I'd refuse to have such a spreadsheet for these projects, but I can say definitively that the reason I haven't done it has because the projects haven't been as successful, and as a result, honestly, I couldn't tell you who ranked where in Previous Peaks projects until the current scandal hit.

So yeah, 2025 happens to be when someone else other than Jordan became #1 in the Peaks project, but it wasn't even on my radar that that was a thing like it was in 2020 when after LeBron won his last chip many of us anticipated that we'd finally have a #1 in the RealGM 100, and when it happened, we saw it an important moment in the evolution of RealGM opinion.

After that, I saw everything else as an afterthought... right up until we started seeing some really weird posts in these last couple projects, people started alleging conspiracy, and long after I said we need evidence if there's to be any action taken, a group of people eventually decided enough was enough, and sent me evidence. From there, we arrive where we are now.

[Dr Positivity]

Uh... dafuq. I'd understand it more if someone was a JordansBulls type stan and made fake accounts to pump up MJ, but anti MJ people?

Also maybe I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who using this board feels like a shadow of its previous self (probably half because of me being washed), but like, it's a PC board vote for fun... It's not that important.

Anyway... I'm disappointed in AEnigma of these two. OhayoKD was always the type of poster that makes me lose interest in these projects with the circular reasoning maxxing of starting with the player he stans and then cherry picking methods that are obviously flawed like comparing the 1994 Bulls to the 1970 Celtics to judge Russell and Jordan, or overrating tiny injured game samples in general, but it doesn't matter because he made up his mind to begin with that he prefers Russell to Jordan and therefore wasn't acting in good faith by deciding to go all in on that form of analysis.

[rand]

Trying to rig the Peaks rankings by recruiting new people to stuff the ballot box is pathetic and if OhayoKD did that then they deserve to be banned. But given that they can just make a new account, what does banning them really do?

I would like to see the tainted ranking thrown out entirely both because of my disgust at the corrupted process and because I sometimes use the Peaks Project rankings as references in other arguments, so I'd like them to be the authentic inputs of actual community members.

[Cavsfansince84]

Something I'm going to add regarding Ohayo is that I think this poster's mentality might not even stem from being pro LeBron so much as it is a need to just hammer people into submission with data and a sense that much of the MJ myth is built on nostalgia. Which is why I think this poster switched to being very pro Russell in some ways because it wasn't really about LeBron. It's about trying to force people to agree with your opinion and having a big axe to grind with posters who sort of put MJ on a pedestal. I also want to apologize if I came off as overly harsh on mods if things such as bans are out of their hands. It just feels like Ohayo was given way too long of a leash in recent years and turned this board into their personal playground.

[sp6r=underrated]

Something I'm going to add regarding Ohayo is that . . . it is a need to just hammer people into submission with data and a sense that much of the MJ myth is built on nostalgia.

I share that frustration. Michael Jordan is The Wire of basketball players, unquestionably great but also get his flaws forgiven in a way no other all-time great gets.

[jalengreen]

Something I'm going to add regarding Ohayo is that I think this poster's mentality might not even stem from being pro LeBron so much as it is a need to just hammer people into submission with data and a sense that much of the MJ myth is built on nostalgia. Which is why I think this poster switched to being very pro Russell in some ways because it wasn't really about LeBron. It's about trying to force people to agree with your opinion and having a big axe to grind with posters who sort of put MJ on a pedestal. I also want to apologize if I came off as overly harsh on mods if things such as bans are out of their hands. It just feels like Ohayo was given way too long of a leash in recent years and turned this board into their personal playground.

Yeah Ohayo was always openly more of a Jordan hater than a LeBron fan. This usually manifested itself in the case of frequent LeBron vs Jordan debates. But if you calculated the delta of their opinion on a player to the board's opinion, the player with the biggest delta would be Jordan by far. Don't think they were any higher on LeBron than other posters, really.

[Doctor MJ]

Uh... dafuq. I'd understand it more if someone was a JordansBulls type stan and made fake accounts to pump up MJ, but anti MJ people?

Also maybe I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who using this board feels like a shadow of its previous self (probably half because of me being washed), but like, it's a PC board vote for fun... It's not that important.

Anyway... I'm disappointed in AEnigma of these two. OhayoKD was always the type of poster that makes me lose interest in these projects with the circular reasoning maxxing of starting with the player he stans and then cherry picking methods that are obviously flawed like comparing the 1994 Bulls to the 1970 Celtics to judge Russell and Jordan, or overrating tiny injured game samples in general, but it doesn't matter because he made up his mind to begin with that he prefers Russell to Jordan and therefore wasn't acting in good faith by deciding to go all in on that form of analysis.

So, this is the thing about how this stuff works I'm afraid.

You have enough encounters with toxic stans of X, you can start to think that you have to do toxic things in the other direction just to level the playing field, and then you end up blowing right past what the other stans are doing because you think that if you've thought of it, the other side must already be doing it.

OhayoKD knew full well what he was doing was way against any rules, but convinced himself it was the right thing to do anyway for stan reasons.

AEnigma it's less clear to me what he was thinking as this unfolded, but the fact that he had both power, responsibility, and knowledge to stop this but chose not to is surely related to us receiving evidence relating to both of them at the same time. I'd say it's a lesson for all of us to remember about the company we keep, though obviously, with AEnigma also being a previously banned poster, it's not like his hands were ever actually clean from a RealGM policy perspective.

[Doctor MJ]

Something I'm going to add regarding Ohayo is that . . . it is a need to just hammer people into submission with data and a sense that much of the MJ myth is built on nostalgia.

I share that frustration. Michael Jordan is The Wire of basketball players, unquestionably great but also get his flaws forgiven in a way no other all-time great gets.

Funny, when you put it like that, I find myself making the connection between Jordan's Wizard years and the Wire's final season being considerably weaker than what came before.

[Chip]

I was mentioned in here whoa. Was this actually masterminded effort to overthrow things? I feel relatively innocent so I’ll give my POV.

I joined that discord for video game discussions, then chimed in on a basketball conversation happening, and let it be known I think LBJ is the GOAT. I was then asked if I have ever used this website before, (I had an old account that I lurked with but forgot the password to, never partook in discussion) then was asked to partake here (after having mods reset my password).

I’m sure in the evidence somewhere it shows that I was the one who said “I don’t know much about basketball” or “I’m def a casual”; I just said that in comparison to others in the server, cause I had zero clue what “above the break” meant (my basketball playing friends didn’t even know so I’m taking that back)

I can assure y’all my answers were my own however, I assume I was recruited for my already existent opinions. Soldier to their cause I guess?

No goal of messing with the rankings, sucks things went down like this. Sorry if I’m a perpetrator, the project sounded fun so I agreed to partake (despite being absent the last two threads, in the middle of moving to another state right now).