Learning About Steemit

I love technology, travel/tourism and social media. I'm passionate about the way our world has evolved in recent years with the explosion of social media as well as various technologies like drones and crypto currency. Although I'm intrigued by each of these topics individually, I'm even more interested in the overlap of these topics and applying the latest trends and technologies to industries like travel/tourism. I have a diploma in Recreation Management and a degree in Computer Science, which seem like opposites, but in reality it's an exciting combination. All this to say, I'm extremely interested in what Steemit is doing in the crypto space, combining the latest in blockchain technology and applying it to the social realm and blogging platform.

I discovered Steem recently by searching for crypto currency coins focused on the social realm. Initially, my search returned a wide range of coins from Doge coin, Reddcoin, Pac coin and several others. Although these coins were engaging in the social realm, none met the description of what I was looking for in terms of being implemented into real world applications and platforms. I continued my search and discovered Steem, which at first glance, is much more along the lines of what I was looking for. Steem seems to be setting the bar in terms of creating a solution that is implementable into their own platform (Steemit) and can hopefully be implemented into other existing social platforms.

I'm looking forward to learning more about Steem including both the long term benefits as well as the potential growth challenges. I hope to learn from others within this community as to you're personal experiences with the Steemit platform as well as the Steem coin in general. I have a lot more learning to do about the future vision for Steem, upcoming updates, partnerships and new feature integrations.

Although I'm very new to the Steemit platform, my initial thoughts are that it has a lot of potential for growth to become a thriving social platform for bloggers. I'm curious as to the long term goal of Steem... Is the goal to grow the Steemit platform to be a leading social network. Or is the goal to integrate the Steem back-end solution into other social networks/websites such as Wikipedia? I'd love to hear the thoughts and input from others within the community to learn from your knowledge and to create some engaging discussions as to where this platform can go.

Any and all input is welcome. Thanks!