I have read a lot from users that are hooked on Steemit because it pays them to write and share their views on the internet and of course this is great and I am glad that we have so many excited bloggers are writers that are finally getting paid for their work instead of making someone else money with their page views.
However, I wanted to take a moment and try to explain why I think steemit is much more than just a platform that pays to write and vote.
Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS)
Bitshares (Also created by 
… the fastest, most efficient, most decentralized, and most flexible consensus model available. DPOS leverages the power of stakeholder approval voting to resolve consensus issues in a fair and democratic way. All network parameters, from fee schedules to block intervals and transaction sizes, can be tuned via elected delegates. Deterministic selection of block producers allows transactions to be confirmed in an average of just 1 second. Perhaps most importantly, the consensus protocol is designed to protect all participants against unwanted regulatory interference.
All of these may seem too complex at first but it really is quite simple; unlike Facebook, Reddit or Twitter, Steemit runs on top of Steem’s Blockchain, we could say that steemit it’s an explorer of steem’s Blockchain and it shows us what writers have put on it.
Now, Witnesses are those accounts that run a programs (nodes) that put our information on the blockchain and for that they get a reward in the form of Steem Power, this is why most witnesses hold a lot of SP which also makes them big stake holders of the platform.
We can elect witness and therefore decide who should be getting these rewards, this is why witnesses have a direct responsibility with the users and the platform as a whole and we choose them so like politician they should work for us, some of them even provide valuable services like Steemd or Steemle. Witnesses also get to decide which software gets implemented by upgrading or not their nodes.
Conclusion
Steemit is yours, if you write and hold SP you are part of this “company”, you can choose who gets paid to be a witness, what software gets implemented and you could even become a witness yourself if you wanted to and convinced enough users to vote for you.
This for me is the real value of steemit, it’s up to us to make this work so lets try to not fuck it up!