Why I Am Stopping My Contributions to Bleacher Report

[READ THIS FIRST: Yes, I understand what "open source" means.  I understand that I should not have such "high expectations" and should not be "complaining" and be "thankful" for a webpage that links to a community of fellow amateur sportswriters.  These are simply the reasons I'm not writing for B/R anymore.]

I have decided to remove all my articles and stop posting to Bleacher Report (with the exception of this one).  Here are my reasons (which I doubt more than 10 people, excluding the first person who edits this, will ever read).

1. Poor article archives

If you want to find an article, use Google.  Don't even THINK of using the search box up on the right corner.  Just preamble every search with "site:bleacherreport.com" .

My guess is that since sports is about what's current, any article that's more than a few days old is irrelevant and no one is searching for anyway.

2.  Poor categories/tags

The categories listed are quite atrocious.  Not everything everyone writes fits into "Preview" or "Recap" or "Opinion" or "Humor."  You can't choose more than a certain number, no matter what your article contains.

Even if you did want to read opinion articles, you're given THREE on the main page.  If you want more, tough luck, or you have to navigate through about five pages just to find the "Opinion" page.

Also, they never let you tag your articles with your own relevant keywords.  This would help the search, by the way.

3.  America-Euro-centric

Yes, it's in English, so most of the articles will regard American/Canadian/British sports.  But some of us have lived in other parts of the world.  I find it highly annoying that there is no way to accurately categorize an article on Japanese baseball.  I have to tag it with "MLB."  There is no "baseball" category.  I'm sure other regions and sports are similar.

4.  My style

My style is very wide ranging and doesn't conform to a typical sports page.  I put a lot of effort and creativity into the articles I've written to be essentially ignored.  Because it doesn't follow the typical conventions of sports writing, most of my articles have been shoved deep into the article abyss, and ignored by the general sports fan.

5. I do better on YouTube

This is simply far too much effort for so little reads, and even less responses.  Get this, the quality of responses I get on YouTube—yes, YOUTUBE—are better than here.

My "most popular article" on this site, by the way, was a hypothetical look at how the 2009 Major League Baseball season would look if it were as unpredictable as 2008.  Sadly, I got a lot of negative comments from people saying how "ridiculous" and "stupid" it was to "predict" the Nationals going to the World Series (based on the last place Rays in 2007 went to the World Series in 2008), instead of actually reading the point of the article.

I know one reaction I might get from the five people who will read this article is that I'm too focused on myself and should be focusing on the sport.  If so, my response would be if the sport were really the case and not the people writing it also, why even have this site where there are plenty of professional sports sites out there with people who can write much better articles?  The answer is of course, so we the users can express these events from our own eyes.

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Bottom line, I have written what I see as unique and at least mildly decent material on a regular basis, but it seems that getting to anywhere near the top is not about quality, but popularity.  And I'm not popular, it's just not my style.

I wish everyone else the best of luck.