Dear Scorum community,

this is my first post and I start off with a pretty negative view of the current state of Scorum.com, sorry for that ;-). Before I continue, I want to emphasise that I am a big fan of the community and Betscorum (the worlds most advanced blockchain-based betting system) and I truly believe that something big could come out of the Scorum ecosystem. I also appreciate the efforts that many of us are putting into the platform. It’s just that I don’t see how this will work out given the economic model in place.

First flaw: Wrong incentives

If Scorum were a traditional sports blog, authors would get paid based on many different factors that would all have to be taken into account:

- Overall subjective quality of the article

- Number of views generated

- Number of new users acquired through the articles channel

- Amount of ad revenue generated

- Number of backlinks

- Quality of backlinks

- Length of the article

- Number of images in the article

- Number of external links

- Quality of the external links

- Number of comments generated

- Etc

The objective of the site owner would be to pay authors according to how much overall value they generate for the platform.

Unfortunately, this is not what’s happening here. In Scorum and Steem, authors get paid via upvotes from Src/Steem power holders based on one single factor: their subjective view of the content (if at all).

What this means is that there is no incentive for authors to write content that actually creates value for the community. It takes more than just writing an article to really succeed in terms of revenue (see the factors above). But if my effort in creating backlinks, views, etc are not taken into account, why would I bother doing so? As a result, both Scorum and Steem are giving away a lot of coins for content that really isn’t worth it. On the contrary, most articles are so bad that they actually drive users away. Who wants to regularly visit a site which is flooded with bad content?

Second flaw: Misuse by malicious users

Curators don‘t have to spend money for the power they spent. Rather the power is kind of a dividend they get for freezing their coins. Yes, they freeze their coins for a while but they eventually can make them liquid again. This means that they get a say in the distribution of ad revenue without having to pay for that right.

But if there is no money at stake, users have no incentive to power up only that kind of content that truly seems valuable.

It also opens the door to abuse. Given that the voting power comes free in return for freezing my coins, I can easily create multiple accounts, post articles and upvote them using my „power“ accounts. When two or more such malicious users work together, this is nothing less than a „Scorum Nostra“ mafia, trying to get as much a share of the payout as possible.

Conclusion:

In my opinion, Scorum as a community of sports content creators can only succeed if the factors above are taken into account.

Right now, Scorum gives away a lot of money for bad quality content that should rather be put into the development and marketing of all the great features that are in the pipeline.

Well, those are my two cents and I hope to have a nice and productive discussion about it!