I have thoroughly enjoyed my time on Sportstalksocial so far. It's great to see the community growing and interacting with each other about all kinds of different sports.
Although my time on Steemit was worthwhile it felt somewhat forced at times. I guess I never really found my place within the community. As sports are a huge part of my time away from the workplace, however, Sportstalksocial has provided me with a place to discuss all the things I'd chat to friends about in the pub. The added bonus, of course, is that I can also earn some tokens for doing so.
I have been pleasantly surprised so far to see so many great content creators on the platform. Not only are people writing about their favourite teams and competitions, but they're also interacting with supporters of rival clubs, and getting involved in debates about all kinds of sporting issues and opinions.
Over the last year, I have spent a lot of time on another sports platform. I won't name it here because that's not what this post is about but, despite showing early signs of promise, it suffered at the hands of several negatives. The most obvious was a lack of development but the main issue, in my opinion, was the quality of content being created.
The great thing about platforms like Sportstalksocial is that we, as a community, get to shape it to our collective vision. We can decide between ourselves what is and isn't considered acceptable on the platform. Tackling abuse, scammers, and trouble-makers is obvious, but I believe we all have a duty to help maintain a high level of content quality across the platform.
When token earnings are on offer, there can be a temptation to pump-out low-quality content as quickly as possible to self-upvote. The issue with this is that it devalues the platform in a few ways. Firstly, it takes tokens away from the reward pool that could be awarded to people who are creating engaging content. Secondly, it sets a bad precedent that people can sign up and earn for very little effort.
But the worst thing, in my opinion, is that it doesn't help to grow the platform in a positive way. As a community, we should be looking to attract as many good content writers and investors as possible. To do this, we need to behave in a way that shows this to be a great place to talk about sports, not a place to spam your way to whale status.
Now, I'm not going to name and shame anyone here. That's not the point of this post. However, I would like to mention that several users have already noticed that there are people posting multiple blogs per day that earn huge rewards for very little effort or content quality.
We aren't all professional writers but effort is something that will always be applauded. Posting a link to a news update with a single sentence of your own words doesn't, in my opinion, deserve huge rewards. In many ways, I'd consider this to be spam even though it is technically on-topic.
I guess my question is what kind of community do we want to be?
I'd like to see more user opinions and less one-sentence news updates with a link to an external news source. Perhaps I'm kidding myself though.
To end on a positive note, I have certainly enjoyed reading plenty of great blog posts so far on Sportstalksocial and I see a bright future ahead for this community. Let's keep creating content that we'd like to read if we stumbled across Sportstalksocial for the first time. It will not only help to encourage platform growth but token growth, too.
