I highly recommend reading the Steemit Whitepaper found on the flyout menu bar about halfway down. It goes into detail on how steemit works, but wasn't created for general consumption. Not easy to understand in some parts.
It's titled "Steem An incentivized, blockchain-based social media platform.
Daniel Larimer, Ned Scott, Valentine Zavgorodnev, Benjamin Johnson, James Calfee, Michael Vandeberg"
March 2016