Why I’m Building Crowd Card
Why I’m building crowd card
Let me set a familiar scene. It’s Saturday night and you’re watching a UFC card. The final seconds of a close round tick away. As the round finishes, you open twitter to post your scores for the round, adding a hashtag for the UFC event. You quickly scroll to see how others scored the round.
As the next round starts, tweets showing scores from several regular members of MMA media flash in the bottom-left corner of the screen. You agree with some and disagree with others. As the fight comes to an end, you post your final scores, scroll to see how others scored it, and wait to see the official result.
While it’s great to see individual scores posted on twitter, wouldn’t it be better to see all of these scores aggregated? You could quickly compare fan-aggregated scores to those of the official judges. Among other things, this would be one way to bring attention to bad judging.
We’ve all seen bad judging. If you watched UFC 307, you’re well aware of just how bad judging in MMA can be, even at the highest levels of the sport. Note the time stamps on the tweets below - these were reactions to three separate fights on the same card!
Even Dana had choice words for the judges at UFC 307.
Aside from fan-aggregated scores, wouldn’t it be great if your personal scores were displayed neatly on a virtual scorecard when you post them to social media? And what if you had access to a complete history of your own scores? You would be able to easily compare your own scores to those of all others who scored the fight.
These are just several possibilities with Crowd Card, a platform that I’m building to let fans score fights in real time. My mission is simple: I want to create the world’s best platform for crowdsourced judgements in sporting events. In some sense, you could think of Crowd Card as the Rotten Tomatoes of sports.
In the coming days, I will publish a more detailed timeline for development. Although I’m starting with MMA (and the UFC specifically), my long term vision is to expand Crowd Card across a much larger audience. I would eventually like to expand Crowd Card into other judgment-based sports, like grappling, gymnastics, figure skating, etc.
While I build the platform, my goal is to use this blog to document progress and share a bit about what I learn along the way.
The future is bright. I hope you will join me on this journey.
P.S., if by any chance you’re interested in helping me build Crowd Card, please reach out!
DK