What is Steemit? It is basically a social media platform similar to Facebook or you may have heard of Reddit, where users can post content, upload and curate content. So how is is platform different from Facebook and Reddit?
Facebook & Reddit
First of all Facebook and Reddit are centralized. That means they have somebody who controls the platform, where's in Steemit there is nobody who controls the platform.
In Steemit you have the only pair of keys to your own account and there's nobody else who has those keys. When the platform as a whole has to make certain decisions then the users vote for the proposals they like with their unique key.
The second important point to distinguishes Steemit from Facebook and Reddit is that it is completely transparent. So with Facebook and Reddit, there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes that you don't have access to. On Facebook, there are a lot of feeds that you don't have access to outside of your friend circle, but with Steemit it's all open. So everyone can view everything that's posted and everything that's upvoted. You can also view the code, the underlying mechanism of the system. If you're a coder or your friend a coder then you can check that everything is working as it should work.
Finally what distinguishes this platform from Facebook and Reddit is that it gives rewards directly to the users who post content and vote on content. If you post an article there that is really good and gets a lot of upvotes then you get certain payments. And the payment is done directly with cryptocurrency. It's also a mechanism where if you vote, you also get rewards and your reward is proportional to how accurate you are on voting for a good content. So if you vote for something before it gets popular and you're one of the early voters who made this big contribution to making this content popular then you are rewarded for your efforts and this incentivizes people to go through a lot of posts and check that everything is all the good.
You might ask yourself all these things, the transparency, decentralization and the reward system, it sounds a bit complex maybe too good to be true. But all of this possible because of blockchain technology so you may have heard of Bitcoin is very successful. The market capitalization the value of one as a whole is about 10 billion dollars now. It has been subjected for the past eight years since inception, it has been subject to a lot of attacks and people have tried to hack it and gain the system but nobody has succeeded and Steemit is built on the same kind of technology. You might wonder how are the rewards created in Steemit well they are created exactly like the rewards in Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, the network issues new bitcoins for people who mine, secure and verify the transactions on the network. The same is true in Steemit. We know that this kind of system works, a decentralized network issues new currencies to pay for its own security verification. Steemit uses this process to pay for the people who post and vote on content. These are really the main features and the main reason, it's not impossible to suppose that Steem and Steemit will continue to grow just like Bitcoin did the last eight years.
To sum up, I think we should realize that the value of Steemit is that it enables a system where the system pays for the most valuable content. This also serves as a kind of what is called inbound marketing, where people search different things on Google. They may search for makeup or cryptocurrencies or news or stuff like that and if a good article is posted on Steemit then Google will index this result. You have users coming in directly from Google so people will search for things they are interested in, and by accident, the Steemit platform has produced content that is valuable for this audience so it draws in more and more users as it gets more valuable and more resources to pay for more content. It's really interesting viral dynamic. So I think that sum it up on how Steemit is different from Facebook and Reddit.
