A RealGM Scandal, and a Conversation about Projects

[Top10alltime]

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.

If we're going to go that route, then anyone who comes from the discord could be blamed for all of this. Aenigma shouldn't really be banned is what I'm saying...

[jalengreen]

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.

I understand this though I do think discontinuing an ongoing project (that people put time and effort into) is inherently of public interest. You're making an announcement with regard to the project so calls for evidence on *that* (as opposed to the routine previous banned poster issue) seem reasonable, even if they may ultimately be denied.

I say this as somebody who has already personally concluded long before this that alt accounts were being used (ShaqAttack has always been the most obvious Ohayo alt btw lmao), and so this announcement to me is just confirmation. But I can imagine being somebody who didn't have the prior belief, and in that case I imagine this feeling unsatisfying.

All in all, a public announcement from an authority stating that X occurred will pretty much always have people saying "Well, can you show us that X occurred?" Usually the answer will be no and life moves on but nonetheless.

[Doctor MJ]

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?

So, there's a philosophical conversation here about the value of bans on the internet given the ability to sneak back in, but any site that explicitly refuses to ban users loses all teeth in trying to encourage better behavior.

What if these guys make new accounts? Well I'll tell ya, just honestly:

If they never do anything objectionable with their new account, then it probably never occurs to anyone that they could be previously banned posters (PBPs), and they can keep on posting in practice.

The only reason why PBPs are such a known thing on sites like RealGM is that they tend to keep coming back and causing trouble.

All this then to say that while I'm not offering "amnesty" to PBPs, it's pretty straight forward how to keep from getting in trouble here, and while a brand new poster can be treated with patience as they get accustomed to our customs, anyone who previously got banned knows damn well what they did was not considered acceptable by the site, and only have themselves to blame when they just keep on getting in trouble over and over again.

And both these accounts, we should be clear, got into trouble repeatedly and were close to getting banned simply because they had acted like jerks to other posters.

May both of them learn lessons from this and become positive influences on communities of people in the future, but for RealGM, that ship has now sailed multiple times.

[jjgp111292]

I'm now wondering if Ohayo is the "mind" behind that MythNix account on Twitter that's psychotically anti-Jordan and pro-LeBron. My one interaction with that account was posting the WWII Japanese soldier meme and their response was very...Ohayo-ish

[Fadeaway_J]

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.

Painful but probably accurate comparison.

[tsherkin]

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.

Painful but probably accurate comparison.

Oof, yeah.

[Doctor MJ]

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.

If we're going to go that route, then anyone who comes from the discord could be blamed for all of this. Aenigma shouldn't really be banned is what I'm saying...

Sounds like you're still not getting that anyone who has been previously banned shouldn't be here, and should expect to get banned again when we find out.

Sounds like you're also not getting that a bunch of folks are getting let off the hook not because they are seen as innocent, but because we're trying to cut slack to anyone we can. AEnigma continued leading a project he knew to be corrupted by OhayoKD, and that damns him on a level I wouldn't attribute to anyone else.

But as I say that: If you don't see a difference between AEnigma's behavior and what you think is right, then I would suggest you leave RealGM voluntarily and go somewhere that fits better with how you see things. There are plenty of places on the internet to talk basketball, and you should choose the right place for you.

I'm not looking to chase you away to be clear, but if you think we haven't thought this stuff through long before you came here, you should re-assess any assumptions.

[sp6r=underrated]

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.

Painful but probably accurate comparison.

Oddly I wasn't even thinking of that. For me it was MJ's lack of longevity relative to other ATGs, beating up teammates being forgiven or touted up as strengths and The Wire's poor understanding of bureacracies, depiction of women being forgiven. I won't spend much time on the depiction of women because it is fairly obvious. They're completely under-represented in the story and often written as if they are men.

With regards to bureaucracy, TV critics correctly understood Simon's depiction of the media was absurd and mainly ax grinding. They recognized it because they work in media and understand it. They don't understand much about municipal bureaucracies so they either didn't recognize the same issues existed in the first few seasons or didn't care that those same flaws existed in the depiction of the police force and city hall. After 14 years in municipal bureacracies I can assure you the departments that don't run on stats are almost always far worse than the ones that have flawed metrics.

And I say this despite like The Wire but its flaws get forgiven way too much because Simon's politics align a lot with the politics of the people who write about TV for a living.

[Doctor MJ]

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.

I understand this though I do think discontinuing an ongoing project (that people put time and effort into) is inherently of public interest. You're making an announcement with regard to the project so calls for evidence on *that* (as opposed to the routine previous banned poster issue) seem reasonable, even if they may ultimately be denied.

I say this as somebody who has already personally concluded long before this that alt accounts were being used (ShaqAttack has always been the most obvious Ohayo alt btw lmao), and so this announcement to me is just confirmation. But I can imagine being somebody who didn't have the prior belief, and in that case I imagine this feeling unsatisfying.

All in all, a public announcement from an authority stating that X occurred will pretty much always have people saying "Well, can you show us that X occurred?" Usually the answer will be no and life moves on but nonetheless.

Fair points. It's understandable that people would want to see the evidence - and as I have put the question out to the mods - but some of the initial posts I saw were pretty silly.

"Name 5 of your sources" was one of them, as if that would be considered a reasonable threshold anywhere, let alone in a place where the worst punishment is simply "Please leave us alone and go to any of the other bazillion websites you can access with a click".

[sp6r=underrated]

"Name 5 of your sources" was one of them, as if that would be considered a reasonable threshold anywhere, let alone in a place where the worst punishment is simply "Please leave us alone and go to any of the other bazillion websites you can access with a click".

This. The burden is different in civil court than criminal for precisely this reason: the punishment is different. And here the punishment is almost non-existent.

[Ron Swanson]

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."

Certainly. I've gleaned plenty of good information and data points from threads here stuffed full of RAPM and the like, even from the aforementioned perpetrators of this whole "scandal". But it's a choice to represent your argument in advanced metrics/spreadsheet/lineup data, not a prerequisite to engage in meaningful discussion for something that isn't a math and science discipline with concrete right and wrong answers. The "show your work", "provide all relevant data" mentality manifested itself in some really ugly and obnoxious ways. It was annoying, it was exhausting to deal with, it was borderline de-railing/spamming when we already have a dedicated "Statistical Analysis" thread, etc.

Just providing feedback on why I personally have avoided engagement here even after being pretty active in the previous peaks project, and now by reading through this entire thread, it certainly seems like I was far from the only one who chose the same due to just not wanting to post in what became such a toxic environment. I'm glad this was addressed in a meaningful way, but the main culprits were also wholly unsurprising. That to me perfectly illustrates the lack of enthusiasm/participation by a lot of veteran posters, well before this weird/pathetic scheme even came to light.

[NO-KG-AI]

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? .

These little backhanded comments are hilarious. Using the internet, bots, finding and making new metrics, straight up fabricating numbers and all that other Jazz has never been the older guys. The MJ argument was always simple and palatable, it’s easy to digest for casuals and you don’t need to launch entire conspiracies to get people to be pro MJ.

It’s always been LeBron’s legacy that involves more nuance and what if scenarios and context to make his GOAT case.

And I prefer the nuanced approach, but it is what it is.

Jordansbulls was a homer, but never anything to this level or attempted manipulation.

Pretending the LeBron>MJ crowd was somehow the moee humble and reasonable one is very strange. Most of the pbp’s in this very thread are banned for being so hardcore LeBron that they couldn’t control themselves. And I’m not even talking about the ones involved in this mess.

Not that there aren’t loons on both sides, but I repeatedly keep seeing “wow, not the LeBron guys! Only the MJ folks would do that! And it’s goofy as ****.

[tsherkin]

The "show your work", "provide all relevant data" mentality manifested itself in some really ugly and obnoxious ways. It was annoying, it was exhausting to deal with, it was borderline de-railing/spamming when we already have a dedicated "Statistical Analysis" thread, etc.

Yeah, for sure. And there are very clearly some posters with heartily abrasive attitudes who weren't actively fostering quality conversation. And were being dicks.

Just providing feedback on why I personally have avoided engagement here even after being pretty active in the previous peaks project, and now by reading through this entire thread, it certainly seems like I was far from the only one who chose the same due to just not wanting to post in what became such a toxic environment. I'm glad this was addressed in a meaningful way, but the main culprits were also wholly unsurprising. That to me perfectly illustrates the lack of enthusiasm/participation by a lot of veteran posters, well before this weird/pathetic scheme even came to light.

It's valuable feedback, I didn't mean to sound like I was clapping back at you, for what it's worth.

[IlikeSHAIguys]

Am I the only one whose not feeling sock account from these socks?

[Doctor MJ]

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.

Painful but probably accurate comparison.

Oddly I wasn't even thinking of that. For me it was MJ's lack of longevity relative to other ATGs, beating up teammates being forgiven or touted up as strengths and The Wire's poor understanding of bureacracies, depiction of women being forgiven. I won't spend much time on the depiction of women because it is fairly obvious. They're completely under-represented in the story and often written as if they are men.

With regards to bureaucracy, TV critics correctly understood Simon's depiction of the media was absurd and mainly ax grinding. They recognized it because they work in media and understand it. They don't understand much about municipal bureaucracies so they either didn't recognize the same issues existed in the first few seasons or didn't care that those same flaws existed in the depiction of the police force and city hall. After 14 years in municipal bureacracies I can assure you the departments that don't run on stats are almost always far worse than the ones that have flawed metrics.

And I say this despite like The Wire but its flaws get forgiven way too much because Simon's politics align a lot with the politics of the people who write about TV for a living.

Well funny thing here is that the same problem with “stats” is the same problem with what happened here:

Goodhart’s Law and the misalignment of incentives which gradually leads to a focus away from the actual goal.

I’m not going to say all data science in bureaucracy is bad of course - the answer is not to not use it - but poor incentives can lead to horrible new problems, and this something we’ve seen in police enforcement quite a bit in the 30 years since the NYPD’s CompStat system shifted the paradigm.

The guiding principle, imho, is that you need to keep your actual goals in focus while expecting that your statistical tools who’ll eventually veer off course if you aren’t monitoring them for misalignment.

You can’t, in other words, judge a precinct captain based on stats that he controls without eventually leading him to fudge the data, which then pressures the next guy to fudge it even more.

On the broadest level, it’s no one person’s fault, it’s just a phenomenon to be dealt with like, say, the silting of a river’s delta leading to meandering which then leads to killer floods when the river inevitably changes channels.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Doctor MJ]

Am I the only one whose not feeling sock account from these socks?

It sounds to me like you need to read my original post more carefully.


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[ceoofkobefans]

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.

that was something i forgot to mention. Webby defintely thinks bill is better than mj, he thinks bill is arguably the goat peak

[babyjax13]

.

[babyjax13]

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

I wanted to quote this so it shows up on the current page, too!

[NO-KG-AI]

Am I the only one whose not feeling sock account from these socks?

The skeptics all have things in common

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.

that was something i forgot to mention. Webby defintely thinks bill is better than mj, he thinks bill is arguably the goat peak

Nobody cares. We’re not here to hear statements fron”webby” or his internet defense force.