Episode 255 Snippets: Bobak Ha'Eri of Reddit College Football (/r/CFB)

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 255 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Bobak Ha’Eri, Moderator, Creator, and Sports
Editor Reddit’s /r/CFB and @RedditCFB on Twitter.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 255: Bobak Ha’Eri

Bobak’s path to RedditCFB
“I, kind of like a lot of people, when you get in something, when it isn't your
direct profession, you kind of stumble into it. So I would say I stumbled into
even being a college football fan because I went to a small Catholic high school in
Bakersfield, California. I was a theater guy, I did debate, but I would occasionally
go to a football game if there were a dance or something after it like
homecoming. But for college, I went to University of Southern California down
in Los Angeles, USC. Again, I'm a good sport, I decided I’d go to the first football
game. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know who the opponent was. I'd
never even heard of the university. It was 1997. It was Florida State. They came
into the Coliseum and it was a close game and I was hooked after that because
the environment, the experience, the pageantry, I loved every second of it.

“So at that point, I'm like, Oh, football is kind of interesting. I have a
decent enough build, you know, 6’1” and 200 [pounds] when I'm slim,
[but] at that point, though, you're not walking on to a football team at USC.
You're just not at that point. You're like, Alright, guess I'm consigned to
being a fan. And over the years and I'm now, gosh, 44, so it's been quite a
few years. I ended up going to grad school here in Minnesota where I now
live and have a family, have kids. And when [we] had our first newborn, I
remember I'd be up really late at night just kind of watching TV with the
kid. My wife and I would sleep in shifts, like I'd have the kid for the first
half of the night and then she'd wake up early and that would work out
because I'm a night owl. And a lot of times it was like my kid was born right
in the middle of college football being on almost every day of the week.

“So, you know, it was in November, so I'm watching mid-week MACtion with
a newborn sleeping on me. I enjoyed it, but I'm like, Oh, it would be fun to
look up some conversations on it. And over the years I participated in some
sports media forums. So I run into what was r/CFB, the college football
section on Reddit. And I decided, you know, let's make funny comments. It
was a smaller community then, about 30,000, maybe a little less, [but] still a
lot of people. And it was fun to be part of that. And over time I think the
people there noticed — you know, I'm a responsible person, I'm an attorney
by training. I ran a fun little nonprofit, not nonprofit at the time, it was just
a, ‘hey, let's gather some money and buy a brick at the stadium they're
building for Baylor.’ So we pooedl our money [and] we bought a brick at
Baylor's Stadium, McLane Stadium, and that was neat. Then somebody just
said, Hey, why don't you just join the team and be one of the moderators?

“I've been a moderator on a website before. I've done it since around 2000, so it
wasn't anything new to me. I knew how much time it took. I knew that I already
have a career, I have kids, I know exactly what my time commitment is for
everything, so I know how to set time apart for things. Because that's always a
fear if you get into something like that, you don't want to overcommit and then
find you can't actually do it. So that's how I got into it. That was 2013 and it's
scary to me. So I've been a part of this, at least in some capacity, moderating,
creating — because when I got to be there for a longer period of time, after a few
years, you get thinking, especially if you're further on in your career, you've seen
how the system works, not just in football but in life. I thought there's more we
could do here, you know? And we've always had a good team of people and
we're lucky because it's easy for a website not to have a good group of people,
especially when it's a group of people volunteering to moderate something.

“But we were fortunate and we had people from various walks of life who are professionals as well,
not just your typical Internet professional, like not just computer people, but we had people who
were working in business, in marketing, and some with former experience in press, like some of
the guys who'd been producers on SiriusXM at one point or another. So we were able to kind of put
together ideas, like, why don't we go into media? I think we could do it. People always want to
come to us and do what's called an AMA — an ask me anything, which is like a Q&A for people in
the sport. So I said, Well, they already come to us like we're a place to talk to people, why don't we
see if we can start covering media?
“So in 2015 we kind of expand from there. I'm getting really into the weeds on this and I apologize.
Then from there, it just kept growing. So we keep adding things here and there. It got I mean, I
don't know if it's a culmination, but last year we were able to form an LLC and it was not because
we wanted to form an LLC. We actually formed a 501c3, a nonprofit organization, and we were
shocked we got it approved in 60 days by the IRS. That is really quick. Usually it's years…We were
like Hi, we’re a group of people on the Internet who run a college football forum. We want to form
a 501c3 nonprofit, and not have to pay taxes to the IRS. Yeah, sure. And I'm like, we must have
found a college football fan who follows us.

“But the going back to the LLC and this is the fact that I'm a lawyer that this comes
up, we had to do two organizations because part of the money that was coming in is
we were being asked to run ads on our Twitter account. And I'm like, cool, but there's
no way I can say that is for the purpose of a nonprofit and that's where the IRS would
care. So we pull in the money, we'll pay taxes on it in the LLC and then donate the
rest of it right into the nonprofit. And therefore, it actually it isn't too much in taxes
because then we're actually writing off literally everything else because we're running
the LLC. So it was what we did and it was just funny to do it because it got to the
point where when we were doing charitable work, it would be like one of us would
just collect the money and then donate it and show our receipts, which is cool. But if
you suddenly start receiving — I can't say like, why am I receiving a $15,000 check
from DraftKings or something like that? Like, I don't know, IRS? Why would I be
receiving that? It's not part of my income. You know, I couldn't do that. So at that
point, like, we got to do this legitimately, this could be problematic [otherwise].”

On what it was like to be onboarded to the RedditCFB mods team
“So when I arrived there, it was a lot more informal at that time. Now we've decided to create
structure. We onboard people in a process that helps them figure out what they're getting
into. We can't do an open application because we would get thousands of applications and,
you know, you deal with work hours. Especially as a volunteer, it's unreasonable. So we kind
of will look at people who are quality members [and] who seem like they would like to be a
policeman, so to speak. So going back to what it was like for me. When I arrived — I know
the moderator who unilaterally decided to make me a moderator, to the chagrin of some of
the others, because at the time the way the team was managed was a lot more loosey goosey.
And I'm not saying it has to feel like work, but it was the summertime, and it was so funny. It
happened on July 4th, 2013, and I know that not only because it's Independence Day, but
because traffic-wise that is the day our traffic just plummets for one day and then goes right
back up. I don't know why, everyone just wants to hang out with family, go to fireworks,
barbecue, I don't blame them. But July 4th is always the worst day.

“So July 4th, I think he's like, no one else is around. It's just me. I think
something had happened in college football, so July 4th suddenly was a hot
day. So he's like, Oh gosh, it's just me. I need help. That guy, I know he's a
steady person, I know somebody handed him — I mean, several people
handed me a couple thousand dollars — and he donated it and it was not a
problem, [so] I'm going to ask him. I'm not even going to ask him, I'm just
going to press the button. So I log in to the website. I'm like, Oh, I'm a
moderator now. Because they used to have like an application process and
it would be like ‘open application’. So they'd say like, Oh my gosh, we got
700 applications and blah blah, blah.

“So I figured it out on the fly. I mean, ideally, originally the way you would
moderate any site is you run it the way you would like to see it. And the
idea is hopefully you have a good sense of what is right and what is wrong
with some easier macro level things that everyone has to worry about on
Reddit. Like you can't allow certain material or certain behavior and some
places are more forgiving of like trollish behavior. And that's a trick with
college sports or any sports — trash talk is a part of it. That line is very
difficult to sometimes draw. I mean, 95% of the stuff is okay, but there's
always that stuff where you're like, oh, you don't call someone [that], you
don't use racial epithets, you don't go that way with somebody or any other
version of that. You know, you don't start calling somebody a sexual
deviant or something like that. There are some things you don't do.

“But then there's the stuff that's kind of like that line. And then for me as a
lawyer, that's what we deal with, right? You know, it's like you stick your
thumb out, kind of eyeball the problem, boom, and you go [like] that. But
for I think for some moderators, that's a little harder to do. They like
certainty. You know, like a programmer, you either write the code that
works or it doesn't work. With us lawyers, we live in the world of
indecision. I'm an adjunct [professor] actually, at the University of
Minnesota, so I've taught people for 13 years now, and you get used to the
idea of [dealing] with uncertainty and how to deal with with novel
situations.

“So as we got bigger, because now we've got 2.1 million subscribers, when I
started there were less than around 30,000. So you have to start creating a
system that can be easy to follow for people who are enforcing it because our
moderator team isn't that much bigger. It's active, and we can get to that in a
later part of this conversation, but we maintain a very active team. But you
have to create more structure to it. You have to come up with ways of like, as
these things are flowing in, what call do you make? So that's always been
part of the struggle of the real meat of being a moderator, which is dealing
with content questions. And frankly, we are actually pretty good about
making sure of that — because if you don't moderate a website at all, you
have total chaos. With a college football section, one of the weird things that
we get, which isn't involving offensive material, is everybody's going to try
and post the same story as soon as it happens.

“Like, Oh, Deion [and Colorado] beat TCU, we're going to get 900 articles just giving recaps
from different websites or maybe the same website, but with a different URL because they got
the mobile site and you know, like, alright, one's enough. We can talk about it here. You know,
it's that kind of thing. Does it add to the conversation? Then maybe we'll allow another one in.
But it's to also manage what I know most users would like. What we learn, because we
sometimes will churn out surveys users want to have, and what they like about r/CFB is a variety
of stories and including kind of the squirrely ones that people hadn't thought of or heard of, like
involving either a wacky thing at a minor school or just some kind of aspect.
“And then you trust — because Reddit, one of the [features] I should have pointed out is that
people can upvote and downvote content. What does that mean? It means that it can push some
conversations down and some up based on the interests of the people reading. Ideally, the things
that are really interesting get upvoted a lot so they just leap to the top, both in the comment
sections, which can be very amusing or in the in the topic selection on the website. So to some
extent you trust the users to vote. You have to trust them to come up — it's like a democracy. It's
not perfect, but you got to kind of trust it.

“[You] kind of trust the system, but at the same time, we have to play a
more parental role. And again, I'm really belaboring this, making it
academic, but from a legal analogy, you know, that's what the judge's role
is. The judge has to say, is this case enough to move forward to a jury? Is
this enough where we've stated something that is a question that the law
provides a remedy, so it isn't quite that mind intensive to be a moderator.
But sometimes you have to say like, is this enough to be worth its own
post? And then if not, you upvote, if not down. And then if people go
completely beyond the rules in terms of attacking each other or doing other
things like spamming, then those are easy ones to just strike out. Iit isn't
too bad, but that's the gist of what core moderating. When I jumped on,
that's the gist of it. You just had to sort through all of that stuff.”

On hierarchy and leadership within the moderators team
“It's funny how it works on Reddit, because they didn't really think it
through entirely and I don't blame them because Reddit originally didn't
have Subreddits. It was just one big feed when it formed around 2005. So
they added sections and then when they added sections, they added
moderators who weren't employees of Reddit. So the only way the system
worked is the first person to claim it became the number one moderator.
And then they're the only person that can remove the moderators below
them on the ranking. Now, a lot of times people get bored, they stop or
they delete their Reddit account, so that isn't always the founder at the top.

“With r/CFB there was, when I got there, a guy who had reclaimed what
had become an abandoned subreddit because someone had claimed it early
on in the gold rush and never used it. [He] deleted his account or I think
just let go of it. So then another gentleman, I know his real name, but he
only likes to use his username BlueboyBob, he had the site, he had the
section, and so we were all beholden to him.Then he eventually his [day job
work] got really serious so he decided to stop being a moderator. And then
later he came back on so then he actually came out below all of us, so
actually any of us could have removed him. And then he had to take
another break for for work related reasons.

“So that is something where there has to be a level of trust because Reddit is not a
homogeneous website. Some of the subreddits are run terribly, some of them are
run really well, some of them are run in this murky space in between. I would say
99.5% are run as whatever, you know and then there's the extremes on that. So a
lot of the times when there is drama and Reddit is so big there's an entire section
called Subreddit Drama, which is like, Oh, here's the latest thing that happened in
some random section you've never heard of. And it's always fun because if it's like
some hobby you don't care about, like people who really like some really specific
thing that you didn't even know was a hobby and they're giving you a fight and
you're like, Alright, this is great. But a lot of times the moderators might get into a
fight, and that's what'll end up being the tie breaker. The guy who's the highest
like man or woman who's on the highest spot can kick off everyone below it. And
if you don't have a good working relationship and you don't have professional
people, that can be a nightmare.

“The other flip side of that is sometimes somebody quits Reddit but doesn't delete their
account, doesn't remove themselves. So you have a account that has no activity,
nothing on the top. And once in a blue moon you'd hear about subreddits where that
person would come back and realize like, Oh, this isn't how I meant this community to
look and start changing a culture that had now maybe [been] established over years
and they start attacking it. So it's silly.
“We're lucky at r/CFB in that when we've had a need to change the top, people have
been like, ‘You know, you're right, I think I've been here too long and I'm not really
active. At this point, everyone in our hierarchy is serious about it.’ So it's me and
SirGippy, that's his username. But at this point we all know each other. We all know
each other in real life. Like we don't hang out necessarily because we're all over, we're
distributed across the country. We're remote. We were work from home before it was
cool. But, you know, at the same time, we know most everybody on the site, especially
the people that do this kind of stuff and that makes it a more significant entity.

“Here's where it's funny. Over time we actually had to create a hierarchy
within ourselves where there's an executive committee. Because I mean, any
one of us who's higher up could easily just decide to be an autocrat; the option
is there, like the top moderator could easily just say, You're all doing whatever
I say, and if you don't [like it], poof, you're all out. New slate. But we've always
had that that level of trying to keep some sort of level of equality between all of
us with some respect for seniority and understanding. So then we created an
executive committee of more senior moderators who always end up making
the bigger decisions like should we move forward and make an LLC? Should
we move forward and make that? So we're not forcing [things] because I
mean, you know, you might have up to 20 or 30 moderators [and] that can be
onerous to try and get everyone on the same page. And also sometimes you
need to move quickly. So that was where some of that went.”

Why fans come to the CFB subreddit and not only their school-specific or conference-specific
communities
“There are fan boards. Specific team fan boards have been around since the Internet began.
They have their own peculiarities oftentimes; you know, it's a very concentrated community and
they sometimes see feedback loops. I mean, I remember when I was very active — because I'm
an an undergrad alumnus of USC, so I'd go on one USC fan board, one of the more popular ones.
And there would always be a joke that people were either like, you know, always raining sadness
and doom on the team. And this is when they were incredible. This is when Pete Carroll was at
his peak or there'd be the so-called — and I love this term they call them Sunshine Pumpers —
that were, like, Everything's great. Coach said things are good, even though half our defensive
line just got injured in the last game. We're going to be awesome next week, you know.
Sometimes you get irrational views and it becomes an echo chamber, and that echo chamber
feedback loop can be an issue. And frankly, sometimes you're like, these people, I'm a fan, but
you all sound crazy. It kind of starts to make me feel better about my college fandom.

“So when r/CFB did something that's hard to do, which is have a college
football website that caters to all fans and can keep the peace. I always joke
we have a little easier time than r/NFL or the Major League Baseball or the
pro ones because there's only X number of NBA teams, so those factions
can get pretty onerous with each other. And to be fair, I think they all have
a good community, at least in their comment sections for sure.

“But so with us we've got over 130 FBS teams and way more if you count the people that come
and they're still interested in college football, but their primary affiliation might be a smaller
school. So you're dealing with the fact that they're all these rival groups and mostly just trying to
keep them from getting too virulent with each other. I think people like that. They like hearing
from other fan bases. They like hearing news. You know, that's how I started this; like at work, I
would wake up and then I get to work, if I had a couple of minutes, I might read what a couple of
these news aggregator sites were putting on. Usually they would be blogs, and they were good,
but most of those started to fall by the wayside or pivoted to video or some nonsense like that. I
used to love Spencer Hall's original site when he was Everyday Should Be Saturday because he
did both commentary and he became part of SB Nation and now he's obviously moved on to
other things. But when it was just his site, that was one of my go-tos; that ESPN and SI just to
see what the latest news was. So for me, and I think for a lot of people, r/CFB offers that kind of
like, here's all the news items that are kind of hot right now. Oh, but the fun thing is, here's a
community of people that love to make, usually jokes or interesting commentary and sometimes
worthless commentary. But that's what the the voting arrows are for.

“So it's that opportunity to be part of it and that kind of builds into what r/
CFB is about because as we were getting bigger, we crafted a mission
statement. We actually took a while on this. We actually went through the
whole shebang of how we want to do it. So our official mission statement is
‘We're a welcoming community that celebrates fun, camaraderie and
creativity in all of college football.’ Because that is what we're really about.
Because we're never going to be ESPN in terms of a news source. That is
impossible, we don't have that. And even they can't quite keep that up
anymore as we hear with the business news there.

“So what we try to do is what we found our strength is a community and the users that
come to us and what makes them useful is that people bond over the sport. Sport is is
beyond politics. It's beyond this. It's joyous, it's fun, and if you hopefully have a healthy
relationship with it, you know, ultimately it's silly and frivolous. You know, your team
loses, alright, but your health is still there, you've still got a roof over your head, things
like that. So it's about kind of pushing that — and some of the creative stuff that the
users do, especially when they're being silly they might make a post which is really
elaborate…
“Like, the one that people love to use is when Ole Miss lost the Egg Bowl because their
player pretended like he was a dog urinating and they ended up getting pushed back,
they missed the [extra point] kick and lose the game. Like they're like, Oh, here's all the
people that got fired because of that one incident. And the funny thing is sometimes
one of our users will come up with a story and then suspiciously the next season, we'll
see like a cute thing on [ESPN show College GameDay] or something like that.

“And I’m like ‘Wow, Somebody went with the ‘surrender cobra’ idea…
People were running with that, [it] got really popular on r/CFB as well as
on our Twitter account because we got really good at screenshotting the
surrender cobra, the person with their hands over their heads during
games, and people were loving it…[The Twitter account] became our
greatest sort of introduction to most of the rest of the sports media,
because Reddit tends to be a little insular, while [Twitter] is a bit bigger
and it really allowed us to plug into the wider college sports community in
a way they understood…It was an opportunity to be kind of a welcome
mat.”

On the direction of the content on r/CFB
“It's interesting because to some extent we don't need to do too much in terms of
shaping conversation. You can usually trust the user base to pick what they're into
because you want them to pick things they like. Sometimes we'll create a weekly
automated post if people demand it, like we used to have ‘let's talk gambling’, you know,
let's talk betting lines. We used to have that for a couple of seasons and then it just sort
of petered out. When we realized no one was really commenting on that post anymore,
we got rid of it. So you're always kind of saying what are people wanting to have? People
love, for example, it's Thursday and I haven't had a chance to look at it, but Thursday
would be Trash Talk Thursday, which we started years ago. It's one of the earliest weekly
posts. People have to type in all caps; in fact, we actually made it so that the if you don't,
after a couple of minutes, the system will make it look like you're in all caps and people
will get mad at each other for whispering. But the idea is you're supposed to make fun of
your opponent and have fun doing it, and people get really creative with that.

“But that said, we have a serious discussion post. We actually created it
because some people were like, Look, I know this is funny, but I'd like to
also talk college football and we want them to. But sometimes you're
dealing with — and that's the trick, you don't want the lowest common
denominator to totally take over. Sometimes it can, especially if it just
becomes every reply is a variation of a meme. Then you're just sort of like,
Well, are we even talking anymore? This is more like, Ha, I recognize this, I
recognize this. It's like, okay, cool…So the trick is, sometimes we'll have to
draw a line on certain lowest common denominator [content] where it's
just becoming impossible to get anything done.

“But fortunately and, again, there's only so much we as people that manage this site can
claim, it's the users that tend to come up with — to keep things I think balanced and
without going too far in one direction. So usually, maybe in a conversation because,
again, if you're unfamiliar with Reddit, if you're listening to this, there's the Post and
then there's the comments underneath. So for a sports section of Reddit, and this is
common across all the major sports, there will be a game thread. What does that mean?
It means there's a post, the top information is just like, here's the basic information
about the game that's going to take place, and then everybody is just commenting in the
post. Sometimes in the in a small game you might get a couple of hundred comments
over a game. In a really big game, you're dealing with tens and tens of thousands of
comments. And quite frankly, we usually have to split them by half time so that there's
another thread. With the national championship, we straight up have to do quarters.
It's impossible because the system starts to — Reddit wasn't designed originally to have
a comment section that's got 40,000 comments in a short period of time. So we
sometimes deal with that and people love to comment in those.

“Now the one that I think gets the best conversation is a postgame thread because once the game
goes final — we have an automated system that will download the score and post Here's a game
that just happened, here's a score and people are ready. Some people, I swear, have been sitting
back as the game is going on and [thinking] like, I know what I'm going to write in the post game.
They'll write something and happily hit F5 over and over again the moment it appears Ctrl-V
paste or whatever they're using to do it and poof, they've got their commentary. Sometimes it's
serious, sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it's a lot of frustration. But it provokes conversation
because the way the comment section works is they're all comment trees based off a top level
comment. So maybe one person made a joke and then the tree that kind of forms off of it is
people reply and people reply to those replies [and] then just keep that humor while something
that's more serious, it might actually then spur off some more serious discussion. Sometimes
you'll hear people complain, and I understand it, like, I can't believe I had to scroll down this far
to read somebody actually making this analysis, which was obvious in the game. The first ones
might be like, Oh, that was just Clemson Clemsoning again, or something like that versus the
ones that are like, I really think they had a good defense, but I'm not sure, they need to do some
tweaks on, you know, whatever the issue was; I didn't watch that that Clemson game…

“That's the other flip side of this, if you get really into moderating a website
like this, you can't watch as many games as you'd like because you're too
busy trying to manage everything. Maybe you'll flip to games a lot,
especially endings, especially if you're paying more attention to the social
media aspect of it where you want to comment quickly on it…”

On how users flock to r/CFB to comment on news even if it breaks first on Twitter or elsewhere
for them
“With a big story, we suddenly get a flood of people will show up and you can tell as people are
finding out about it. You get that initial wave, the people that are really finger on the pulse, they
maybe saw that first tweet that came out and then the people that got the ESPN ping or, you
know, something like that. Then suddenly we're like, ‘Oh, here comes another wave, brace for
impact.’ Then you get everyone trying to submit the same story and you have to figure out who
was the first and pick the one that you think is the best and reasonable. And then you're going to
deal with the nonsense where people are like, ‘Oh, you're only picking your friends, you're only
picking yourself.’ Sometimes we have been the first ones to post it because one of us will see it.
We have a Slack channel, we communicate it and someone's like, Oh, this story is going to be a
mess to deal with, and no one's posted it yet, I'll post it. Then because sometimes we're worried,
like, why don't we post it, we'll make sure it's got the most neutral title possible because some
people are really mad and you'll say like so and so did so and so. You know, it'll sound like a
lawyer writing their side of a fact pattern. It's not in any way objective.

“So we'll literally, like we might say so-and-so got in trouble for blank, and
then let people discuss. Don't worry, the passion will come out in the
comments, but you know...you almost want to say like, you can't get into
the weeds and discuss it with everybody. Sometimes literally the title you
were proposing was the most accusatory, like they would have blamed us
for allowing it as the title for the conversation because there's always going
to be controversy, especially with a hot team with a big fan base, they are
going to be very sensitive to anything written about their team and they're
going to see any biases they can. Half the time you're like, my brother in
Christ, there are 300 teams, 400 teams…There are how [so many teams
and] want to talk all the levels…we don't have the time to have some
illuminati plan to push X team or hate on B team.”

On goals that guide how the r/CFB moderators shape the conversation
“Ideally you want everyone (participating). We definitely go for a more
inclusive and generalist approach to it. We would love to see as much
material posted there as possible. But you're right to an extent, the
democratic nature of it. And it was interesting, you put out actually a very
interesting theory — what happens if all the SEC fans just decide let's only
upvote the SEC content, let's downvote the non-SEC content. Thankfully,
that doesn't happen and at this point there's so many fans of so many
different conferences, the big conferences definitely have a large
representation on there, so it's really impossible to stack the conversation
too much.

“That said, let's say it's a really hot topic involving a team and that fan base
is really sore about it. The comment section might get a little bit biased
towards that group because they're the ones paying attention — because
what might happen, the casual fans are like, Oh, that's a terrible story. I
can't believe they did that, they upvote the topic, maybe make a comment,
maybe not and then move on. The fans of that team that feel like they're
being wronged are going to be in that comment section. They're going to be
the ones clicking through. So sometimes on a micro level in a conversation
you might run into that.

“But on the totality of the site, in terms of bringing in content, we've always tried
to encourage more inclusion and it's been easy to do that. But you're also swayed
by what's popular in the news, the national level news. Like, for example, Deion
Sanders. Wow. You know, I mean, I can tell several times in the last year where it's
been like, whoa, there's a story — when he redid the entire roster to when he first
took the Colorado job to when he was even at Jackson State, but more recently,
watching that game against TCU and of course with Nebraska, like users want to
upvote things on Deion Sanders, especially if it biases… that's where titles get
tricky because we allow people to post columns and columns are all about takes,
you know what I mean? There were takes before there were shows to put them on
or tweets by significant people. Like, we don't allow a tweet by Joe person who's in
your follower group that is putting up a joke. But you got Colin Cowherd or
whoever throwing up opinions and people will latch on to those and upvote those
up because they kind of agree with it. At that point, you do run into a problem.

“Theoretically, the way the Reddit vote [works] is does this add to the quality of the
conversation? That's very academic. It's more like, do you like it or not is how most people
interpret it. So in certain cases we'll see that cluster. But it usually ebbs and flows with the topic
on the national stage. I love when people are like, Oh, this is an agenda being pushed by
someone. Like, no. It's just how people are reacting to it. It's hard not to react to it. I mean, I
remember being in a press box when a big game happened and all the reporters were like, I
cannot believe that just happened. It's not like we're all like, alright, everybody. Hey, all of you,
various newspaper, Internet and TV reporters — as a group, we're going to now say that that
team is the one we're only going to talk about. No. We're, as an objective person, you're like, this
is a crazy story, I want to know more about it. I mean, right now, as we're doing this, the big
tragedy, the really terrible story is what's going on with Michigan State and Mel Tucker. I mean,
yeah, you have a you have a messy situation like that that's going to dominate the news because
it's a big team, so many facts of it are controversial, and so you're going to see more of those
topics start to move up to the top. Then probably in a week it'll get pushed; actually by Saturday
it's almost certainly going to get pushed away because now the new thing is like what happened
this Saturday.”

Growth and participation goals and how it pertains to strategy
“I mean, yeah, you get some users that that might qualify as so-called power
users, who are there all the time and people kind of start to recognize them.
Before I became a moderator, I was one. And then actually started my comments
have started — just because I what time I had to use the Internet for casual
purposes was moderating, not necessarily typing funny comments. So you get
some of that. You know, the classic worry is like, you let them do their thing,
unless…once in a blue moon, you'll get someone who starts to think that that
means they can get away with stuff that no one else can, and then you have to be
the jerk because then you're like, Look, in our minds, if somebody is great,
wonderful, but if you turn into a jerk, there's literally a pool of over 2 million
people that can step up to take your place, you know? And we don't. But there are
certainly users that you recognize all the time.

“But that said, and it's amazing, Reddit will occasionally do these — and I don't know if Reddit
does it or if people who can draw the API data, when you could, from Reddit, they would show
the top ten most commented on subreddits on the website. And there's thousands of active
subreddits on Reddit and r/CFB is one of them,. During our season, even though we were like
ranked in the 300 to 400 range in terms of total subscriber count because some of them are
huge, some are like 30 million, you know, like the default subreddits where it's like r/pics, all it
is is silly pictures, people love that stuff….[If] you want to talk in-depth conversation, [it’s]
probably not there. But the thing is we suddenly jumped into the top three of sheer number of
comments that are taking place day to day. And whenever somebody would share that kind of
active graph, like a time elapse, there would always be people like, what's r/CFB? Usually
Europeans. Like, what's our r/CFB? It's like, it’s college football, it's a sports subreddit. And to
be fair, soccer will come up, especially World Cup, Oh, my goodness, you know, the entire world
wants to comment there, including Americans suddenly. And you know, NHL doesn't quite get
up there but NBA when they're in the finals is off the charts, NFL is off the charts, MLB during
the World Series — but we — I don't know how it's specifically us, we punch above our weight
even compared to the other sports subreddits...

“It's a part of the culture. We're used to ranting at each other or making
funny comments. And to be fair, there's no human way anyone could go
through all of them unless you had a staff like Meta has for looking over
controversial content…So in terms of do we want to welcome people
commenting? We do, and they certainly do. I am amazed when people
want to comment in the game threads because, on the ones that are
moving really fast, if it's a game thread with 40,000 comments every time
you hit refresh, your comments are going to be not even on the screen
anymore because it only uploads the top 200. You could sort it if you need
to, but yeah it can get pretty bananas”.

About launching RedditCFB on other platforms like Twitter
“It's a great question. So originally the guy BlueBoyBob I mentioned very early on, the guy who had
sort of founded the Twitter, probably the subreddit, he thought, well, we should have a Twitter
account. They founded it like 2011 or something like that. So he just did what he thought might
work, which is he made an RSS feed where it was automatically posting topics as they were
appearing on Reddit. No one likes accounts like that, but that was kind of the ideas people had
early on. So then he decided to start making comments and just making funny missives or
whatever, and that seemed to work. Then when I came on, actually, he was desperately looking for
someone to help him run that Twitter account. He's like, I sometimes mess up. I sometimes don't
say the right thing…Don't look for [thos examples], we deleted all of those. We went through all of
the stuff we deleted all the [questionable ones]. At one point he did something, for example, he was
trying experiments that were cute. At one point he tweeted so many times during a national
championship game, I think it was when Alabama destroyed Notre Dame on national television,
that he actually got rate limited by Twitter. Like he somehow — at the time, Twitter didn't have a
high rate limit. Now it has much higher rate limit. But they actually said like, alright, you've
tweeted too much for the last 24 hours. You're done.

“I was looking at what he was tweeting — and this was before I came aboard. So I come aboard
and I'm like, let's try and make this PG, maybe PG13-ish at times. Let's try and highlight things
that the users are making and let's really try and identify what they're doing. So instead of
quoting them, let's take a screenshot and show the context of it. And I got really good at dressing
up screenshots to look better than they do on Reddit. I always joke that people who see our
screenshots go to Reddit expecting Reddit to look the way it does in the Twitter account. No it
doesn't. Also we use what's called the ‘old ‘view, which is how Reddit originally looked, and a lot
of us older people prefer that look. But then we actually, because we have tech people on our
mod team that know how to play with the way the system works, that strips out all of the extra
buttons. All it is is the username, the comment, the username, comment — it looks clean. So I
said let's start doing that. So I started doing that and through trial and error you learn that
people like it. People like these jokes, you know…I got good at editorial kind of saying like, that's
a really good joke. Sometimes you see, like, that's a really good joke, but I can't put it on Twitter,
you know, or, like for any number of reasons, I don't feel comfortable putting that [on there] —
it might be the language, might be a little blue or it might be just not funny if you're not on
Reddit.

“So we got better at that. And then we started going into like, let's put some memes
and some pictures and, you know, funny things and commentary. So nowadays if we
put commentary that's our own, we don't need to put a screenshot or say who's doing
it. Then if we're trying to show what people are doing on our website, we'll make sure
it's very clear who's writing it, and usually through a screenshot, through a link and
over time, you know, we'd have people who said, Hey, can I help with it? And I said
like, Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it wasn't just like, Yeah, no problem, sign right up.
But we found some people were better at it than others and usually they're self-
selective. Not everyone wants to do that kind of stuff. I think it's fun, particularly if
you have the time and you have a certain sense of humor. And over time, the humor
kind of evolved with the group and we all fed off of each other. When someone would
go too far, it wasn't like, You're stupid, you're out. Like, alright, let's talk this through.
We had good faith in everybody. You always assume good faith in your coworkers in
this stuff. Especially [because] we're not paid workers…

“I total control of the Twitter count now in the sense that when we did a
verification, now anyone who wants to log on, I get the 2FA on my phone,
you know, and all that stuff. But at the same time, it's like, alright, let's let's
learn from mistakes. And sometimes…you know, we tweet a couple hundred
times on a game day and many times during the week, sometimes you have
an off tweet that just gets misread by everybody. We've had a few of those
over the years. And I've had other people say like, well, which guy did it?
Which person did it? It's like, we internally know because we use Slack for
communication, right? So we'll have a group of us that communicate quietly
and the person will be like, ‘That was me. I didn't realize it was going to go
over that way. I didn't read it that way.’ And we're like, Hey man, it's no
problem. And there's a certain level of like, time will heal all wounds in that
sense.

“You have to have that. In some areas, [like] air traffic control, okay, you can't make
many errors but in the Twitter account of a college football site, you got some room
there. Then ideas like adding Instagram you know they were like hey, should we add an
Instagram? Sure. Does anyone want to run it? And then it becomes that. Then Discord,
we've actually had a Discord before. We had one Discord, and now we've actually
switched to another. And it's so funny — in my entire life, I'm 44, I got on the Internet
when I went to college in ‘97. For the life of me, I've never been able to get into chat
rooms. I just don't care. My eyes just glaze over. So we have people who are willing to
do that, who are willing to be part of that and help run it and keep that that moving.
Because Discord obviously is really popular, I'm not dissing it. It's just to me, it never
was my thing. I prefer refresh, and if I'm going to chat, I prefer really small like Slack
where it's more like a work communication group. These are the people I know. There's
a bit more, you know, we're actually talking about a variety of topics, not just like,
whatever. And again, I don't like how I'm even describing Discord. It's a good place.
People love it.

“So TikTok, I remember we even brought it up and I feel I'm the old man at
this point. There's actually a couple — there's at least one person much
older than me in our group, which made me feel great when we brought
him on. I'm like, Alright! Because when I first joined, there was me and
this other moderator, and she actually stepped back because she's a full
professor at a university. But she and I were joking because our ages were
like, at the time I was in my late 30s and she was in her mid-30s and we
had a person on the Mod team who was like 19 and we did the math. We
were like, Whoa, spring break, ‘95. Like that could have been our kid. And
at this point, certainly I'm 44. So now that line keeps growing when
somebody who's 20 joins, or even higher than that.

“So all of that said…[it’s like] Hey, should we do TikTok? You know? And
they're like,’Uhh’, and I'm like, Look, I'm an old man saying, Should we do
TikTok? I am very self-aware of how strange that even sounds. And we're
like, I don't know if we could pull it off. Our team is like, we would seem so
cringe if we tried to do that. And it's something I'd come back and, look,
you know, maybe we could do this. Maybe. They're like, No. And actually,
you need to be able to trust people to tell you, like, that's a really bad idea.”

On r/CFB fueling other social media accounts through earned media from
content originating on r/CFB
“We always love, for example, when other Twitter accounts would find our
stuff and share it and like, look what I found on Reddit. Usually they'd say
Reddit, not us, which is /r/CFB. But yeah, that's always a positive. And
again, I think it's because we're not operating under a bottom line. We're
not trying to make money, we're not trying to do any of that. That's never
been our purpose. That gives us the room to say like, Yeah, fine.

“As long as no one's trying to pretend to be us. That gets tricky. Funny
story — Instagram at one point banned our account because they thought
we were faking it. They thought we were pretending and we had to go. It
took two months to sort it out like, no, we really are the account here. Like,
why don't you reach out, before Elon messed it up, to the verified Reddit
Twitter account and ask them or go to the r/CFB account and send them
mod mail and see what they say, you know? But yeah, that was still one of
my favorite when we were banned for impersonating ourselves.”

About revenue /r/CFB earns, how it does, where it goes, and what the future could hold
“That's a great question and it helps actually to kind of talk about how this sort of built out over
time. Originally the idea was Let's have some kind of merchandise come in, let's sell branded
merchandise…We didn't actually have to hire [our designer], there was a guy who was following r/
CFB who worked for Saatchi and Saatchi, which is one of the larger design firms, and he
volunteered. We wanted to redo our logo and we wanted to not use the Reddit alien [mascot], we
wanted it to be unique so that we could market it. Because, as a lawyer, I sent a very polite email
message to the admins saying, Do you own as an intellectual property the ‘r slash’ that's at the
beginning of everything? They said, ‘No, we don't. We own the Reddit alien and we own the word
Reddit.’ Perfect. Then I know exactly where my room is on creating [merch], and Reddit
historically was actually always very okay with subreddits doing fundraisers using their logo or
people just buying things with their logo on it that were made by the subreddits. I think the only
time they got mad was when a — and they were doing it innocently, I don't mean to say there's
anything wrong with the culture — but a gun subreddit made gun equipment that had the Reddit
logo on it and [the Reddit corporate admins] were like ‘No, no, no. If that goes wrong, we're really
going to look bad.’ So I get that there's a PR element potentially there.

“But for us, we got rid of the alien and then we said, Does anyone want to
design it? This guy's like, I'm a professional designer. I actually would love
the opportunity to come up with a logo system where it could be switched to
any team. So now the top logo at r/CFB is always the number one team in
the AP polls. Right now it's the Georgia logo. If you go to old.Reddit.com.
We have every team in the FBS now has their own logo. So we were like,
Well, we also have these and so we sell them as stickers. So any money that
was coming in for all those years, we would just have a friendly pick'em
contest, you know, pick the winner and if you win the championship, the
top finishers would get money and the money would simply be divided from
what came in from the merch. It would never be much, like 3 or $400. So
one guy would just handle it. It was never a big deal, you know?

“Meanwhile, I would always handle the stuff that was being donated to
charity. Like we do a thing where we identify five schools that have brick
drives where they're trying to charitably raise money. So we at this point
have bricks at like 40 schools across the country, and the Rose Bowl and
the College Football Hall of Fame. We actually have four at the Rose Bowl
and four at the College Football Hall of Fame…

“Eventually when a new revenue stream [came up] because we always knew it
would be lovely to form a 501c3, that would be awesome. But I'm an attorney
and I always want to do things the right way. I take a conservative approach to
my legal practice. I'm not a trial attorney, actually, I'm a more corporate
attorney. Like, reduce risk, CYA, you know? So what happened was I'm like, I
know attorneys who could do this for me. Because — also that's the other thing
— I know when I need an attorney and I know it's going to cost me X
thousands of dollars. I'm not going to fundraise, like Hi everybody. Would you
donate? Because we need to use it for legal fees.’ Like no one's going to do that.
So then by chance, the Twitter account got so big because also we will never
advertise on Reddit itself because that's Reddit's world. That's Reddit ads. Like
if you want to add advertise on Reddit — any ad you see on Reddit, you go
through Reddit, you pay them. Not our problem. We don't collect any of that.

“But our Twitter got so big, we got people reaching out to us. So it's funny as a lawyer, as
a contract was like, Alright, I'll look at the contract. We actually didn't want to do it.
We're like, people are going to be like, This is nonsense. What you guys are doing? You
guys sold out. So we actually told them like, We won't do this, we won't do that, we won't
do this. You go back — because there's a middleman — you go back to your client and tell
them like if they're okay with all of that then sure.’ A month passes. We're like, they said,
No, no problem. And then next thing you know,m they’re like you got it, here's x sum of
money. And we're like, it's as a company, not that much and for them, nothing. But for
us, we're like, Oh wow, this is no longer — like I can't just pocket this and that. Then
they're in. We're like, okay, now let's take everything we've been doing before and
organize it in a way where now we can collect money that comes in through merch, that
goes directly into an LLC, money that gets donated, part of the money that gets given for
an ad on Twitter, goes directly to the LLC, and then things can go into the nonprofit and
get distributed. And when we raise money for the nonprofit, we just raise it directly in the
nonprofit. It goes right into the 501c3, the LLC doesn't even have to touch it at that point.

“And it's been wonderful because we didn't realize this — when you have a
501c3 for nonprofit purposes only, you get so many great opportunities
with some of these websites that will waive their fees altogether. That used
to be the old thing; like, I know you're donating to us, but I just want to let
you all know PayPal is going to take X dollars of this [and] now when we're
donating it's wonderful because 100% of the donations go into the bank
account without any transaction fee, and then I can send it out without any
transaction fee to the recipient.”

On not trying to scale and chase bigger revenue opportunities
“It's kind of interesting. We've never had to worry too much about it for a
couple of reasons. Number one, we grow no matter what. I'm always
shocked at how we grow in terms of size, in terms of numbers, particularly
on Reddit itself. [On] Twitter, we always feel like we earn our followers.
We're very proud of our follower count because we know we've done it
organically. Sometimes some other subreddits would come up to us and
say like, ‘Oh, we'd like to do a Twitter account too, how did you get to this?’
I'm like, We're grinding, man. You got to grind, grind, grind, it took years.
And no one wants to hear that. There's no trick, you know, to it.

“I remember one — I'm not going to name them — one subreddit clearly
started paying for followers, and then one day it plummeted and yeah, I
guarantee you they didn't do it organized. I guarantee you the the person who
agreed to run the Twitter account thought that would be the smart thing to do.
That's a house not only on straw, that's a house on just embarrassment.
“One thing that has kept us also in check are the restrictions of being a
subreddit. No moderator can make money doing moderator work, so none of
us can ever accept money. None. That's why I said like, Hey, want to advertise
on Reddit? Use Reddit Ads, that's the official way you do it. Then also, I mean,
dealing with us — a lot of people can't look at us as like a separate group They
know Reddit is a big company. In a way. I don't mind it because it keeps us
from having to ever worry about being dragged into something.

“Now, one time, I was a guest on a podcast that was run by a newspaper group because they
wanted to integrate the Reddit College Football section into it. So they reached out to Reddit,
Reddit reached out to us, and then I was the one who was willing to do…it was a fun podcast. I
liked it. But anyway, that was one way to go about it. But then also to an extent that, yeah,
that's a concern. So we know that is in some way keeping us back. So for example, I was
fascinated when, and I understood why, Sickos Committee, they're run very differently than we
are, but people have heard of them — they rose pretty fast. My knowledge of this has been a few
years — they had like 30 or 40 people that just kind of ran this thing, so it was easy to write
about them and talk about them because they're their own entity. It's not like Reddit Sickos
Committee or anything like that. So I always thought of it like that is both a plus and a minus.
And I'm never going to say I don't want to be separate from Reddit, that sometimes comes up.
Sometimes when Reddit does something really dumb and certainly it's done a couple of dumb
things not recently, but in the past, there have been some of the team that would be like, Oh,
we should just be ready to leave Reddit and start our own thing. I said, First of all, we're
married to this thing if we want to be or not. You got to just accept it. You have to accept it.

“Number two, when we do media events, I mean, part of it is like, yeah, we're r/CFB, we've got
2.1 million subscribers and 330,000 followers. But then sometimes they'll see Reddit and that
works in our favor because like, oh, I heard about that website — part of me, is also like, What
did you hear? Like, which part? Because that's not us. I guarantee you we're not the part you
probably heard about in The New York Times. But at the same time, there's something to that,
too, that we're a part of — that we're a community of it. And Reddit, the way they talk about their
subreddits is so comical because you can tell they're afraid. We're not asking to be employees or
paid or anything like that. But some of the quarters of Reddit get really angry about that. It's
almost like listening to colleges talk about players. You know, it's like, Oh, no, we want them to
be happy. We'll even figure out some way to compensate them. But you're not employees, you
know? So obviously, if they ever got to it, like they're all independent contractors, you know,
we're suddenly going to be a gig economy here in Reddit land. The way they talk about us is kind
of funny. We have all these wonderful independent communities and I don't think they quite use
the word ‘independent’, but they're basically implying that we're all separate islands. And it's
true, but yeah, it's the fact that we are tied to Reddit in the way that we are has in a ways limited
us in a good way, to be honest with you.

“And I don't think this is controversial at all, having worked with many
people at Reddit over the years, and it's a very high turnover there, because
I’ve been doing this as a mod for ten years. I've talked to quite a few people
there and usually when I look up their LinkedIn, they just got out of college
or something like that. They'll have no idea what college football's about.
They have no idea. They — I hate to use the meme for this, but they are
absolutely ‘sportsball’ when they think of sports. I'm going to be honest, it's
endemic with tech. Like Twitter, when Elon took over, Twitter was like, you
know, if he's smart, he's going to realize that live sports and live events like
the Oscars and things like that that is where Twitter is at its best. Honestly, I
guarantee you it's an afterthought. The guy was at the damn World Cup final
in Qatar. He knows sports exist but you know — and again I'm not just going
to point a finger at him.

“Right before we went on the air, I'm like the one opportunity that Meta had to
take out Twitter was with Threads. Threads is useless for sports fans because
they only let you go and look at your feed through whatever their algorithm
thinks. And I've noticed, by the way, over the last few months, it doesn't work the
way they thought they were. It's going to be friendly and uncontroversial. Now,
any time I turn up the Threads, I get someone I don't follow and something
about politics. And I'm like, this is exactly what you guys said you weren't going
to do, except I can't change it. I can't change the people I'm following at all. It's
the biggest own goal in the history of sports media…And then meanwhile I'm
trying to think of the Reddit is just like that. They honestly don't appreciate the
fact that the strongest parts of Reddit that don't have issues with anything that
Facebook, they all have issues with quarters that get into to hateful or they get
into controversial topics [and] really warped perceptions of their fellow person.

You know the college the sports subreddits don't, and we don’t necesarily
speak for r/NFL, we don't speak for r/NBA but those groups they run their
own ships the way they do; we are one of the best parts, the least
controversial parts of these websites, not just Reddit, but Twitter and all the
others. And the tech industry just takes it for granted and just knows, Oh,
they're great, they'll do their thing, haha, sportsball. And it's like, you know,
some of us went to real universities too, and we're all smart…you can see I'm
smiling as I'm saying it is this like you kind of just raise your hands and
shrug. You're like, God, imagine if they ever appreciated what sports does for
the Internet. Really what it does for the Internet, what it does for
conversations. Yes, it can be it can certainly passionate, some amount of
vitriol, but with those of us who can can control it and corral it, it's a delight.
It's what makes it fun and what keeps us coming back.”

The loudest or craziest college football fan base on r/CFB and also the most
intelligent fan base
“The most crazy fans tend to be SEC. And I'm going to say it changes year
to year depending on who is doing the worst unexpectedly. So one year, it
might be Texas A&M; one year, it might be Tennessee, one year it might be
Alabama. Literally you could replace any of them. The only team that gets a
pass is Vanderbilt because they have no expectations.
“Now, intelligence…that's going to be a hard to one to say because you have
to go by the individual there.

The most memorable day during Bobak’s time with r/CFB
“I would say the day that I still remember was when the article came out
[about the Lennay Kekua-Manti Te'o catfishing story]. Remember when that
came out? Because I was still early on when I was there and when that story
came out, I'm like, how are we going to deal with this, because there were so
many angles of it. People were legitimately speculating things that were wild
but made sense when you drew the dots. Is he really just in the closet and he
doesn't want to say it because he's very religious? Like there were so many
angles to it that we're like, these are conversations we would never allow
people to have about players, but we have to here because that's the entire
essence of it. It's one of the earlier ones and it was one of the sillier stories —
that I will never forget.

The most polarizing team in college football and also the most polarizing
coach
“The team that I would say and one that is the most controversial is
actually doing really well, and it's Texas. The reason is people think they're
always overrated and they're always looking for an opportunity to either
boo them or jokingly say Texas is back. But after what we just just saw with
Alabama, no, I actually do think they're back now. But I think because by
the time the Internet was taking hold, at least in r/CFB, it was already a
number of years past the 2005 championship. So that's part of it, I would
say.

“Now, Coach, at this point it's Deion Sanders by leaps and bounds. Nothing
has been like this. Nobody has been like this. Maybe a long time ago I might
have even said Nick Saban, but even then people had to respect the man
because he wins. Deion Sanders has been swinging in every direction
because of all the stories that go around him. I just look at Prime Time as a
coach. I actually have no controversy of him personally whatsoever. I think
he's really interesting and I get what he's trying to do. But in terms of driving
conversations that swing in extremes, because there were times where I'm
like, you guys are just being crazy. Like, he's doing his thing. Stop making it
sound like he's a total moron. He's an educated man and he knows what he's
doing. Now it’s like, I don't think he's the second coming, guys, I think you're
maybe going a little too far here. Let's not necessarily reserve your tickets for
NRG Stadium to watch him take on the national championship.”

Bobak is in charge of Reddit and then also in charge of Twitter. What is one
change or addition he would make to Reddit and one change tradition he’d
make to Twitter?
“With Reddit, it would be pretty much I would go and create a department
that only handles sports, like promoting sports on the website because
that's a strength snd there's streamlining all the little things that we have to
deal with that go along with that . It would be a multitude of things would
have to go through, and it's not that any of them are that big of a deal on
their own. Mostly it just has to do with structuring the website to not
necessarily just be a sports website, but to understand the benefit of sports.

“Now with Twitter, first of all, I would change the name back. Second of all, oh
my gosh, where would we even go? I would return ‘verified’ to how it worked.
This is so stupid what he did. It's absolutely stupid. And I'm going to be honest
with you, the way they've structured it now, it ended up being more beneficial
to us in the last month and a half because they made it so verified accounts that
if you pay — because [we hadn’t been paying], and then suddenly they said if
you were verified, you would get a cut of the revenue you generate. Then we did
the math because they tossed some math out there…It ws like, you pay $6 a
month and we collect a couple hundred dollars a month. So that's not a bad
deal. It's stupid that this happened. We don't need that money. But it goes into
the LLC, which therefore will go on to the nonprofit. But I mean, I get mad
because now when a big story, usually not involving college football, like a real
life story comes out I can't find anything; I don't know who's real or who's not.”

The most viral posts from his time at r/CFB whether it was on Twitter or
Reddit
“With Reddit, there's a couple, and they were original stuff that were
created because those are the things that tend to go beyond commenting
on a story. I did one a long time ago that I'm not going to even talk about.
It was interesting, but I found the predecessor of Bishop Sycamore, back
before Bishop Sycamore became the news — I found a college team that
was fake. I wrote all about it. And then suddenly everyone in college
football paid attention to that little thing. The reason it didn't get that big is
they were playing only D2 and D3 schools and NAIA schools, so they were
kind of on the periphery of it all.

“But another guy wrote an article that Florida State might not be bowl
eligible. That was the title of it, and it was because they had played an FCS
school. They had six wins [and] one win was against an FCS team that
actually did not have the correct level. They needed to be countable [and]
they were too low because over X number of years they hadn't hit it. So the
NCAA said that should not be accountable for bowl purposes. It was
Delaware State University in Delaware. The problem is it came down to —
like we had to do a Freedom of Information Act request — and they denied
it because they were hiding that data, which should be public data in a
private entity associated with the athletic department. I believe they would
have lost a challenge, but we don't have a budget for that. I can't go hire
some lawyers to go force that through. So I'm convinced that that was it.

“Then there was a year later echo. Florida State had only five wins the
following year. So the same people posted Florida State might not be bowl
eligible this year because that previous year you can imagine the Florida
State fans had some serious problems with that statement because we were
just saying like, your bowl streak should have ended right now. This should
be the year your bowl streak ends. And the thing was, a few real reporters,
like not real reporters, but I mean, legitimate people, went with it because
we explained the data. We were actually privately asking some of them, like,
does this make sense to you? Because we know them well enough now that
we could ask them. They're like, Yeah, this all makes sense. So we ran with it
and I told the guy, I'm like, You know, you're going to be the front page of
this if this goes wrong. So then a year later they ended up not being bowl
eligible anyway. But that was probably the most viral moment on Reddit.

“Now on Twitter, that's a tricky one. We've had a few. Sometimes they have
nothing to do with college football. One of our guys made a joke about
Urban Meyer, when he got caught in a bar. We made a tweet that ended up
being an international sensation and it was from us. We're like,
whoops..You don't expect that…sometimes you might make some
comments about the NFL or other sports. I mean, we had a comment —
about Qatar getting mowed down in the first round of the World Cup, and
that ended up as an international viral sensation. And we were just kind of
like, What? But it's a bigger audience. College football is still big, but
there's things that are bigger than it.”

Bobak’s dream guest for an r/CFB AMA and also what's been the best AMA
so far in his time there?
“Oh, we've had over 150, maybe even 200 AMAs over the years. So that's
going to be a toughie. But in terms of who I would love to get, there's some
people I've reached out to and they for reasons either they can't do it or we
haven't been able to, they just never answer. Like, I would love to have a
coach like Nick Saban. But also I should clarify I don't know how we would
be as a guest. Deion Sanders would be amazing right now, not because he’d
drive traffic, I agree he would. I remember when we had Kliff Kingsbury
when he was just starting out and he was really hot at Texas Tech, and
literally [attractive], but also as a commodity.

“I remember that AMA because we had sent him a DM just on a whim and said, Would you like to do
one? And he said, Sure. We never heard back from him. So we figured, okay, he forgot. No problem.
We didn't take it personally. So then one day I'm driving in the Twin Cities here in Minnesota and I got
a call, and it's this sweet lady from Texas. She has a drawl and everything. ‘I'm trying to put this AMA
up and it says I have been banned.’ And I realized, first of all, she didn't know anything about it. She
had found r/AMA, which is just for AMA's, just for people doing AMAs. So they didn't know who this
was and they were like, Whoa, this random person is trying, like sportsball…So they banned [her]. So
then we're like, No, no, come to this section. Then I have to park my car and I had to warn everybody,
like, we're about to have an AMA with Kliff Kingsbury. I'm just warning you right now. I had no idea
this was coming. I literally sent out a tweet [saying] Kliff Kingsbury is about to do an AMA in ten
minutes. This is real, like literally, because usually we would announce it, go through a process of
promoting it. A huge number of people showed up for that one. That was before — because Reddit over
the years has tweaked how people use it. So it's harder to get people to necessarily go to an AMA like it
used to be because they're usually on mobile phone or whatever. But in those days that was still at the
height of when people use desktop. I still couldn't believe how crazy that got. That got so crazy so fast.
Even though no warning and ten minutes on Twitter warning, it was thousands of comments almost
immediately. I never have had one like that before or since and it's because it was him. So Deion would
probably be the only other coach, I think, at this point that could generate that kind of hype.”

Bobak’s favorite character in college football, past or present
“That's a great one. I'm going to be a homer here, I always liked Pete Carroll. I
liked his attitude, I liked his motivation. I still remember when he was asked in an
ESPN interview, they clearly tacked it on at the end just to see what he would say
— ‘If you weren't a college football coach, what would you do?’ [He said] I'd be an
archaeologist.’ Like he didn't even think. And everyone was like, what?...And
there was a really good article when he was at USC that was titled ‘30 Reasons
Why a Profile of Pete Carroll won't appear in this magazine.’ Because the sense of
that title was [the writer] got too close to his subject. He immediately, like, got
disarmed by this guy and he was like, this is actually my buddy now. I feel weird
writing this, but if you read the story, you see what he's actually apparently like all
the time. And he was exactly what he was like, like what people were saying on
TV. So it was a very entertaining article.”

The best meal Bobak has had in any college football town
“Should I cheat and say New Orleans because the food is so good
there? But I think if we're talking about just a basic tailgate food, I
think the thing that I fell in love with moving out to the Midwest
was a brat. But actually I'm going to take that and go — not with a
homer pick, a Southern California, pick a bacon-wrapped hotdog,
Tijuana style. It has to be from a cart on the sidewalk where you
don't know how it got there, and they're probably handling money
while they're handling your food. But then you had the grilled
onions and peppers on it. You put mustard and ketchup on there
and it is like a piece of heaven. I remember when I was in
undergrad, we walked by these things on the way to the Coliseum
every every time. And I'd be like, oh, that's like daring each other,
you know, and edit it. And we'd see people eating. You're like, Oh,
they're going to they're going to get sick. Then one day one of us
would give in and get it. And you're like, The world changes and
you're like, I will never not get another one. I will never skip this
again. I'm getting one of these on the way in and on the way out…”

The number one piece of advice Bobak would give someone that manages or leads a sports fan
community on social
“Build a team of people who you like and who you can work with and trust and don't pick people
who are afraid to to argue with you. Don't pick people just because they're fun, they have to be
competent. But don't be afraid to get help and to build a team to help you and build some
structure into it. Because as you scale up, you're going to need to rely on these people. There's
going to be stressful moments and you want people who you can trust to do the right thing and
you want to enable them to do the right thing. I think that’s really important.
“And be willing to accept criticism. And sometimes you have to (realize) you’re not going to
make everyone happy…just in terms of content management and dealing with the audience.
You’ren ever going to make everybody happy. You’re always, for a chunk of them, seem like a
mysterious villain that they can dislike. That’s always the nature of it…You have to know that
you just can’t please everybody, so just be your best self and as long as you feel okay with it,
that’s good.”

Which CFB conference lasts longer, The ACC or the Big 12? And his pick for the 2023
CFP National Champion
“I think the Big 12. At this point a year and a half ago, [I] would have not said that at all
or even a year ago wouldn't have said that at all. But we knew when the Pac-12 lost USC
and UCLA to and obviously the Big 12 is losing and bringing in new teams that it was
going to be a a knife fight between the two conferences on who is going to survive and
the Big 12 won. And [Big 12 Commissioner] Brett Yormark is one of the brilliant minds;
like, I would love to interview him. He would never — I don't think he would do an
AMA, but I would love to interview him on like a Twitter Space. I am an absolute
fanboy of his. I was a fan of his when they hired him and I listened to some of his
interviews when he was with the [Brooklyn] Nets like that are online. I'm like, this guy
sounds different. He sounds interesting. The steps that he started to do were
interesting. But then the way he did that end run around the media deal was just chef's
kiss. I could not believe that.

“So Big 12 right now because the ACC no matter what they do, Florida
State and Clemson want out and they're debating about it. They did the
math and it ended up being too expensive even for them and their alumni
base. But it's going to break apart and it's going to be a feeding frenzy. I
think Florida State and Clemson might be attractive, obviously to the SEC.
I think the Big Ten would be very interested in North Carolina, Virginia,
Miami possibly because they are AAU universities and they would bring in
markets. So that's my thought on that one.

“Now the champion at this point I can't vote against Georgia, as crazy as it
sounds, for a three peat. I mean, they look good. Now, there are challengers
right now. If I were to pick a final four, I'd have some toughness because
Michigan certainly deserves to be up there. Florida State looks strong, but
then Texas and USC both look like they could be in that final four because
sometimes that's the [question], you know, who's going to be in your college
football playoff is a classic question. Next year it'll be hard [with] 12 teams
but this year we've still got four. Those five seem to be the leading ones. And
the only thing I would even say about Georgia right now is we haven't really
seen them play a team with much of a pulse. We're going to see a better
example when they play South Carolina this week. But their first games were
not against the strongest level of opponents, like UT Martin and Ball State…”

Bobak’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“So the ones I would [suggest] — I love Brett McMurphy
(@Brett_McMurphy on Twitter). He's a writer, He's been at various sites.
He was at ESPN; before that, he actually was, I think, at the Tampa Bay
Times. But he's always one of those guys that gets real scoops in college
sports. Nicole Auerbach from The Athletic (@NicoleAuerbach) I like.
Really just about anyone from The Athletic at this point. They've
hemorrhaged so many people that the ones that are left are still excellent
though. I mean, they're really top flight writers across the board. Bruce
Feldman (@BruceFeldmanCFB), of course, one of the peerless reporters
out there…

“Also, if you like a more nuanced sense of what's actually going on in the
legal things that come up in college football — because there's lots of things
that involve the law — Michael McCann @McCannSportsLaw), who is a
professor at the University of New Hampshire's law school, but he's also
writes for Sportico. Sportico is a great journal for those who are into the
business. But [McCann’s] legal writing is peerless. As a lawyer, I say that.
Like, if I want to know what's really happening and, because I may not
have the time to do all the legal research, I'll read what McCann is writing
because Professor McCann knows what he's talking about.”

Where to find r/CFB on social
Of course on Reddit! At https://www.reddit.com/r/CFB/
Also follow them on Twitter @RedditCFB

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Bobak for being so generous with his time to share
his knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

Episode 255 Snippets: Bobak Ha'Eri of Reddit College Football (/r/CFB)

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