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We are excited to announce the official release of Communities on Steemit.com!

With this release steemit.com transforms from a decentralized blogging platform, to a decentralized communities platform similar to reddit.com, and finally delivers on its original promise as stated in the Steem Whitepaper:

Collectively, user-generated content has created billions of dollars worth of value for the shareholders of social media companies, such as Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. In 2014, Reddit hypothesized that its platform would be improved if everyone who contributed to reddit.com by posting stories, adding comments or voting were rewarded with a fair share in Reddit, Inc. Steem aims to support social media and online communities by returning much of its value to the people who provide valuable contributions by rewarding them with cryptocurrency, and through this process create a currency that is able to reach a broad market, including people who have yet to participate in any cryptocurrency economy.

Steem is capable of handling a larger user base than Reddit. In 2015 Reddit’s 8.7 million users generated an average of 23 comments per second, with an average of 83 comments per year per user. There were 73 million top-level posts, for an average of 2 new posts per second. There were about 7 billion upvotes creating an average voting rate of 220 votes per second. All told, if Reddit were operating on a blockchain it would require an average of 250 transactions per second.

Steem has now proven that it can handle orders of magnitude more transactions than necessary to support an application like Reddit, and thanks to innovations like Hivemind and MIRA, it can do so without hitting scalability bottlenecks. Also thanks to Hivemind, users can expect the Communities features to rapidly improve over time because we no longer need update the blockchain itself in order to improve steemit.com and other Steem-powered applications.

Transforming Social Media

While many claim to be using blockchain technology to disrupt the social media landscape, with today’s public release we believe we are demonstrating once again that the Steem blockchain and steemit.com remain years ahead of the competition.

We would like to give a special thanks to the developers and users who helped us make Communities on steemit.com what you see today: