Spam has been an issue for our community since the early days due to the value of the token encouraging users to do what they could to mint them. That being said I've always taken a pretty hands off approach to managing the community. My goal has been to make this project community focused versus delivering on my own desires. To bring those two ideas in line with one another I created a Referee system last year that was deployed through a couple amazing community devs. This system allowed the stakeholders of the community to elect 9 referees that were tasked with identifying posts that were outside the realm of the community. When a consensus of referees agreed by downvoting content within a timeframe a community account would downvote away any rewards based on an algorithm to manage that downvote power. Additionally referees could mute accounts from the community mute account to remove their access to earning rewards through another consensus process. When Hive forked the program was depreciated and we've never had it updated to make functional on Hive. That's something I think would be interesting to bring back. I will reach out to the dev who worked on it to see if I can get his code so we could adjust for Hive nodes and make any other changes needed.

You are correct about the coming DAO functionality. I've already contacted the ARCHON team and arranged for us to begin implementation as soon as their code deployment for proposals are ready. They just launched the first proposal in this system for their own tribe so it shouldn't be too long before we are able to add to issue our own proposals.

I think the DAO is one of the most important things that any tribe will be able to have. While tribes like LEO have shown that centralized teams are able to deploy features quickly I don't believe that is what's really needed to build a successful decentralized community for a long term. I tend to believe that stakeholder engagement is what's going to drive true success and empowering stakeholders to lead is a very powerful tool towards that end. Additionally by removing centralized development goals the tribe is able to move in multiple directions at the same time led by those who want to see a change the most.

I personally believe that LEO's success has been tied to the revenue they collected through 2019 through ad revenue and operations like LEODex. This sustained their price through 2019 while others dropped off when ads were not followed through by the Hive Engine team. While LEO was regularly buying from those revenue sources we were stuck watching the selling pressure on our token with no way other than investor interest to maintain. This created a negative feedback cycle where downward price led to less interest and less interest led to more downward price.

That's why I believe the most important need is addressing the tokenomics of the token by creating "sinks" to burn off tokens. The most obvious is addressing the lack of advertising funds coming in by either creating a system to sell advertising spots for SPORTS directly or finding an advertising partner that will fund us with at the very least BTC like we've seen LEO's success with Coinzilla. That's just the start though.

When the DAO is ready I will personally be interested in supporting proposals for other credible sinks. In the past we had a voting bot that allowed users to bid for an upvote from a Hive (Steem at the time) account with lots of HP. Additionally we paid a portion of daily inflation to those that delegated HP to the account. This was another great sink for us that allowed tokens to regularly be burnt for an actual use case. The more of these we have the more tokens will be removed from the market not to mention create actual needs for the token.

I personally delegated my SPORTS to a user who was developing a prediction market for SPORTS early on that burnt SPORTS to create submissions. I would love to see someone create a credible proposal that built out a sports gaming option or integrated with an existing site but used and burnt SPORTS for entries in some fashion. I think that would be a great fit and use case for our community and is only one that comes to mind from past experience.

I would also be more than willing to help with a proposal for the DHF though I'm not sure it will go very far. I've floated the idea to see if there was Hive support but it didn't seem to have it when I checked around. There was a largely shared belief at that time to not fund any tribes as that would essentially be draining the Hive fund to support select token holders. That may have changed now since were seeing more and more ridiculous proposals, in my humble opinion, being approved these days.

As for a roadmap I agree and is something I think I've failed at but by design in a way. I shied away from issuing one in the past due to the thought I would be flexing too much influence by founding the tribe and then issuing insights on what direction it would have to go. I've never wanted this idea to be about me but rather about sports and those in Hive that share that interest. That being said I think now that we'll have the ability to issue proposals and petitions it's time to issue a draft petition to gauge where the community at large thinks we need to have a roadmap towards and then issue it as a proposal for approval from the tribe at large. I think that will be a great thing to have accomplished very early in 2021 at the latest.

I can't thank you enough for sparking interest in designing where this goes especially now as were about to enter a time where these discussions are going to be needed. If there's one thing that will cause the DAO idea to fail is for the tribe stakeholders to not have enough interest to maintain enough quorum in voting for measures. Just knowing there's interest out there in seeing it done right helps encourage me this is the right direction to go.