So, I took the last month off due to crippling sports-induced depression, but something happened yesterday to get me out of my funk: Reddit user SteelxSaint was permanently banned from the /r/nba subreddit for making this post:
While this post seems innocent on the surface, the fact that it was about Jokic and was posted by a user sporting a Sixers flair made a certain /r/nba mod feel the need to intervene, leading to this:
SteelxSaint posted about this on the Sixers subreddit, and the fans there were reasonably outraged, demanding to know who the /r/nba mod was who banned him and what /r/nba planned to do to rectify this and keep this from happening again. Instead of getting either of those things, we got radio silence from /r/nba, and Reddit itself ended up deleting the thread exposing this clear example of mod abuse or at the very best mod negligence on the largest NBA subreddit.
Seeing all of this, I decided to do some digging. r/nba’s sidebar gives you a truncated list of the subreddit’s moderators with their flairs, but those are only the users who have modded the sub longest, most of whom aren’t very active anymore. The full list of moderators doesn’t give you team affiliation, making it harder to know what exactly the makeup of /r/nba’s mod team is. The fact that they have time to scour new posts for users to ban but didn’t even bother to update the standings in the sidebar for the first few weeks of the NBA season is funny to me, and I do feel it’s time we got a more complete look at who the people making these decisions are.
The linked pdf has the names and teams of every r/nba mod, and I also included when they last posted to r/nba to give you an idea of their general activity on the sub. Unsurprisingly, there’s a large contingent of Celtics fans on the mod staff, with 12.5% of the mods repping Celtics flairs. Heat fans grabbed another 12.5%, meaning a quarter of the mod staff comes from the Heat and Celtics communities alone. Lakers fans and Pelicans fans tied for second with 10% each, and no other fanbase had more than 5%. Only 17 of the 40 mods had posted or commented on the subreddit within a week of me gathering the results, and while being a mod doesn’t mean you need to be commenting on the sub every day, I did find it interesting that less than half of their mod staff was involved enough to meet what I consider a pretty fair marker of activity for the third most active subreddit in comments per day.
With Reddit gearing up to go public later this year, I doubt they love this much of a spotlight being shone on the unpaid volunteers managing one of their biggest subs, but what happened yesterday shouldn’t simply be swept under the rug. The closest thing we got to an explanation for SteelxSaint’s banning was that he broke one of the subreddit’s rules and that was the standard response for it (doubt) but if the post actually broke any rules, the same mod who banned him would have taken the post down which, for some reason, the mod did not do. The most likely explanation was that this particular mod was in his feelings, likely the same type of fellow as those who pushed ESPN to retract Kendrick Perkins’ claim that 80% of MVP voters are white. A lot of dumb stuff gets said on First Take, but it must have taken a special kind of backlash for them to dedicate time in their show to walking back some of it. Based on what I’ve gathered, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of r/nba mods had negative opinions of Sixer fans. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if up to 95% of them did, but hopefully they’ll learn from First Take and begin to hold themselves accountable for it, since the Reddit overlords clearly aren’t going to let us do it for them.
