You’re blaming “trolling” for not developing a website/interface that you had somewhat operational for a month or so? Are you serious?
Was it the “trolls’” fault that the site was clunky or that nobody knew about it? Were the “trolls” responsible for development and marketing? Do you realize how ridiculous that excuse sounds?
And if you can be so easily derailed, why should the users of this platform continue sending you their money? What does that say about you and your team as “businessmen” and “developers?” If some “trolls” can kill your business plans, perhaps the plans weren’t very good in the first place? Or maybe there was never any intent to follow through?
I’m just asking questions. A lot of money was given to SteemSports. And now even more money is being given to Steemvoter, Minnowbooster, and Buildteam. And what is there to show for all of it? Vote-selling and some automated voting scripts?
The website was fully operational, and you are correct there is more to it than trolling, I was in a rush and gave an "off the cuff" answer.
Yes to start with the then development team and our past CTO were quite demoralised from all the trolling and lack of participation on our platform, we realised Steem is a limited market for sportsbetting with the current community size and users prefer paying with votes instead of SBD or Steem, which is understandable given the nature of Steem and why Streemian probably is no longer properly maintained.
Then the HF happened to increase payouts to 7 days instead of 24 hours, our then CTO didn't have the drive to recode the whole system to suit the new blockchain, the Steem price was low then too and he decided to move on to other things and we parted ways.
I haven't given up on Steemsports but believe it should take the publishing angle rather than betting which can bring legal issues with it. We are working on something that we should be able to release next month, it should be pretty cool.
Our current team is really good, the Minnowbooster code is really complex and is likely the most advanced upvote bot on Steem, especially with the ability to allow anyone to become a bot and the delegation leasing market is unique concept as well.
The BUILDTEAM coin is cool as well, we are working on a POS model that will simulate the vesting features of SMT's.
Steemvoter is being overhauled from the ground up in a better coding language and will be available soon as well with Streemian features and more.
We have a great mix of devs, designers and writers, all are really nice people and we build only on Steem because we believe in it. Almost everything I ever earned on Steem is in my personal account and is not all that much, you have done well for yourself as well, your account is quite sizable too. There are plenty of users out there with massive accounts from ninja-mining and sockpuppetry and other such carry on.
Anyways we have a few other projects in the pipeline as well, lots of interesting and engaging things coming.
I don't have anything against you, we were on the same team once and I'm glad you have succeeded, there is nothing wrong with that.
I continue to wish you well and hope you will reconsider your view of me in time.