Well, being I am an anonymous foot; I don't expect to be taken too seriously.. BUT..

I can't believe the trending page is the issue here.  It seems more likely the major issue is the so called draining of the reward pool. 

The reward pool is going to be drained every day any way, and if the Steemit population were to double over night.... Or perhaps half of the registered accounts actually made a post... 

What ya gonna do then, ban new accounts ?

It reminds me back in the days of torrenting we use to have server races. We would compete on how much our servers could upload in 24 hours... Then someone discovered uploading porn would get a lot of attention lol..

Same thing is going to happen here very soon. As interesting as what you had for breakfast or how cute your poodle is, it isn't going to get many votes compared to the latest porn upload....

I hope an answer can be found because I do enjoy Steemit, but I honestly haven't taken it very serious for these reasons...

Happy Day!!

I would like to see the actual 'press release' that was mentioned. Does anyone have a link to it? I can't find it anywhere on our official @steemsports, @steemsportsfund blogs.

I'm still opposed to naked vote buying which does not add value. If someone makes a shitpost that says little more than "half the reward on this post will be paid to voters" and adds no more value to the platform, then it is worthy of downvoting.

Steemsports is not that. It is participatory content that has a small element of vote-buying (implemented in a manner as to be focused primarily on stake redistribution), but _also with significant effort/work toward_:  developing the brand and concept, bringing sports writing and coverage to the platform, and finally driving a significant effort/work in building a business and various marketing and promotional plans that bring additional value to the ecosystem.

I'm also not sure where you get the idea of steemsports or its supporters discouraging competition. I've also supported the bacchist's fantasy hockey league and ats-david's sports contest posts. Those are _direct competition_ which also get my votes. I don't see any issue with competition.

[I'm replying to your later post]

We will have to agree to disagree that the early vote buying posts were anything like Steemsports. However:

> Your SP is for manipulating the reward pool. It if abuse to manipulate the users to use their votes in favour of YOUR SUBJECTIVE VIEW. Can you seriously not see how incredibly selfish and hypocritical it is to go from down voting these games one minute and then turn around and up vote the ones that YOU like, to manipulate the votes yourself?

First of all, my SP is not "manipulating" the reward pool, it is expressing my opinion on how the reward pool is to be allocated (in this case to sport-related content and a game/initiative that distributes a small amount of reward and stake to users who decide to participate, which I find to be a use of reward funds that brings more value to the platform as a whole than rigidly demanding that all rewarded posts conform to a narrow view of blogging or content). Is my opinion any less legitimate than yours or anyone else's? I certainly would not make that statement about your SP and your votes.

Second of all, even if there were no differences between the posts, and I think there is, no I do not think it is hypocritical to change one's view on something. Are you claiming you never change your views? 

But again, I don't think any of those earlier posts were as substantive nor well-developed a concept as Steemsports, which came to the platform from the very start having done a significant amount of development of the concept, idea, branding and plans to promote and expand the platform (which are being carried out). I see a hell of lot of more effort having gone into Steemports and value being delivered by it. That's why I vote the way I do.

[replying to your nested comment]

>  Future investors want to know that we ARE paying attention, not just grabbing pennies where we can get it.

Future investors will be interested in what is going on with their investment _in the future_. It may be that different types of content and interaction are more valuable in the future, but for now I firmly believe that the the greatest value-add to this community is expanding the user base by making the platform more accessible with more ways to interact, earn (even small amounts), and distribute stake. 

One comment on something you said earlier:

> Going through steemsports first means losing 50% of that.

This is true, to an extent, with Steemsports specifically, but if someone else were to compete, there is no reason they couldn't offer to power down and return 50% or more of the SP received to players (for example on season-long contests or special events). The question is whether this provides enough incentive for the person running the operation to put in their time and effort. Steemsports' business model is based on distributing most of the liquid rewards to players and writers and keeping the SP as gross margin for the rest of the business. Anyone is free to try something else and if it works for them, great.  There is no hard and fast rule that says the poster needs to keep the SP. 

As I said earlier, I've already upvoted other games and contests if I felt they were based on a significant and credible effort to bring value via an interesting and promising concept and not just empty paid voting that adds nothing more. So I'm happy to see people try other models besides the specific one that Steemsports uses.