What do you do when you love somebody? Tell them about Steemit of course! Just recently my girlfriend, , joined Steemit and wrote her first introduction post. As she was doing so it dawned on me just how common this is becoming throughout Steemit. Post after post can be found where a Steemian has convinced someone they love to take a crack at Steemit including everybody from grandparents to spouses to children.
For those of us who are more familiar with "traditional" social media platforms I'd like to ask the question: Would you honestly tell someone like your grandmother to start an account on Reddit or Tumblr? Probably not. If you did would they even get anything positive out of the experience? Even less likely.
Trolls, toxicity and bitterness abound in sites like Reddit, Tumblr and Facebook because at the end of the day there really is no real significance or incentive to being decent, productive and unique. In such an environment people also have less reason to reply to comments and further engage the larger community overall. The result becomes a muddied mess of posts which tend to be less than original and whose only comments and discussions come from outraged or sarcastic readers.
On so many levels Steemit fixes all that. There is far more incentive to be productive and truly discuss topics you actually like as opposed to debasing and detracting from those of others. The implementation of the reputation score is the most literal example of this, as someone is probably not going to risk losing a hard-fought reputation score by being rude or insulting to others.
While the mighty Steem is certainly a great incentive to do anything on Steemit, it also serves as a marker for how effective your content truly is in terms of both reach and merit. Is your content being read and appreciated or people simply passing it by? This system pushes you to make wiser choices with your upvotes and produce higher quality content which in general which greatly changes one's mindset for the better when compared to sites like Reddit or 4chan.
So far there are definitely some common characteristics among Steemians that I think demonstrate a tremendous advantage over competing social media platforms. Just sit down on Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, etc. and tell me if you think the average user is also:
- Productive
- Friendly
- Helpful
- Dedicated
- Understanding
- Legitimately interesting
Bet I got you on the last one especially :P That's because Steemit gives people the drive to explore, be themselves, try different approaches and ultimately produce better content.
Fear the future? Move out of the way! The Steem train's a-comin!