Je Suis @SteemSports

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I have written over 40 events for @Steemsports. I began – like everyone else – by playing. I tried to run a binary card game early on – which introduced me to the concept of “whale support”. I had a hundred people play my game and I think I paid out .001 Steem at a loss. I discovered chat rooms – shortly after I spoke to the owner of Steemsports– and then had my very own editor. I covered baseball – and agreed to cover the NBA when the season started. Everything was great for a while – we had some epic moments like Game 7 of the World Series.

As a group we are real people from all around the world. Suburban Dad’s like me – we even have a Mom.
There was a recent post about a “bait and switch” occurring with SteemSports. The article more than insinuated that they were somehow coercing people into gambling. This is the furthest thing from the truth.

It was never my intention to be involved in “gambling”. Writing posts for the free pool was innocent fun. It was a hobby for me – kept me up to date on my home teams. The pay games were forced by the community – “people” wanted Steemsports to stop getting paid from the reward pool.

There is a little rewriting of history going on. The history of SteemSports is – a game was created where content was provided –two teams or fighters were pitted against each other. Vote on the comment and if your team wins – you win. It was such a simple concept. We didn’t post odds – I would never have had a spread on a game I did. I never gave out any type of gambling tips or advice because that’s not what it was about – it was more of a “what team do you like better” contest. I always would tell people to pick Toronto (because its my team).

The content changed because Dan the CTO of the company started down voting our posts (down voting my posts). What this means – is because his vote is super powerful (thousands of times more powerful than your vote or mine) he can manipulate the payout – even if other “whales” support it.

SteemSports is a well-oiled machine when it works. Steem makes the engine move – to get Steem we need “whales” to support us. This is not like when you make a blog post and a “whale” comes by and makes your post worth $10 – this is a deliberate vote – that often times went “down to the wire”. The whales who voted are real people that would come in our chatrooms and chat – votes are essentially brokered in a project like this – without their support the post is worth little money – we also run the risk of Dan or someone else equally annoying down voting the post.

Nobody wanted to change the way things worked – only the people attacking us. Some people feel that we are pussies for not continuing to run the games. I agree with that statement in theory- in practice nobody is going to try to put up a post that is going to be supressed. I know this sounds like something crazy out of nineteen eighty-four but go take a look at who votes and who down votes our post. Look for any clear guidance on what we are and aren’t allowed to do on this platform. Every stupid change has been at the prompting of someone else’s input. If all votes were equal – we would obviously continue to be the biggest account.

Steemsports is the biggest success story on this platform and is quickly becoming its greatest tragedy. With pressure to “innovate“ – we found ourselves faced with ideas like “food wars” or the stupider “steemy games”. Putting the brand on other events was terrible idea – I hated steemysports from the beginning but tolerated it only in protest to my previous posts being down voted (fight stupid with stupid). It was a bad response but some genuinely felt diverse content would sway the downvotes. We wanted nothing more but to keep doing what we were doing as long as we could.

Some people feel the new SteemSports rules are a cash grab of some sort – which is ludicrous. Nobody at SteemSports is really in charge at the end of the day – it’s the whim of the whale that supports the project. We were always on “borrowed time” – we had chats where we wondered about this very scenario months ago.

Nobody wants to mess with a good thing. That’s the problem on this platform. A month is like a year in normal development time. This has been an incredibly short project – I believe it has been the most consistent “journalism” on the site. It covers sports which is broad appeal – and provided a game that anyone can enjoy. It is a reason for people to come back to the site.
I think the new rules are lame too – but that’s the way it is. Someone gets too big – they get knocked down. If we weren’t playing with a locked in virtual currency I would say we were a victim of our own success.

We became inconvenient – they downvote us so it doesn’t make financial sense to press the post button. I think we got the hint. You win. Soon people will stop mentioning SteemSports and SteemSports will eventually go away. Doesn’t sound like the way a “chief executive” would conduct business – but none of the lion tigers and whales on this site make much sense to me either.