For anyone that may not know what Steemit is, it’s a social network / blogging platform that pays you in cryptocurrency for your posts. Payment is made in the form of STEEM, which is the platforms cryptocurrency, and the amount you recieve is basically determined by the popularity of your posts and the amount of votes each post recieves.
I should state two things right from the start. I was more than a bit skeptical when I first signed up, and I never read the white paper.
My reasoning for not reading the white paper was simple. First off The Dood’s a bit lazy at times and this was one more white paper that I’d have to read. Also, I wanted to look at this as just another social networking platform. Most people don’t read the TOS/EULA of social sites like Pinterest, Facebook, and Google + and I wanted to approach this from an end user point of view. Most people aren’t concerned with the inner workings of their social site, they just want it to work.
The blogging platform itself reminds me of a cross between Blogger and Reddit. You can post articles and content you create in a blog style format, and your followers can comment and share additional information with you in the comments section like on Reddit. Users have to be Steemit members in order to comment on posts and interact with other users.
The interface is user freindly and comparable to anything you might find on Blogger or WordPress. A first time user can use the built in editor to create a post, and more experienced users can use either markdown or html to format their posts. Either way the interface is fairly straight forward and intuitive allowing most people to create a well formated asthetically pleasing post on thier first attempt.
The community is diverse and you can find just about any topic imaginable to talk about. Topics range from politics, cooking, health and wellness, to crafts, wildlife, cryptocurrency and just about anything else your brain can think of.
The platform wallet breaks down into four ways to save your STEEM, you can save it as STEEM, STEEM Power which increases your voting power, and STEEM dollars which are always worth one dollar of STEEM. There is also a savings account you can use to save.
On a final note, I would strongly encourage anyone into blogging and social networking to give the platform a try. The community is large and growing all the time, and most of the users are extremely friendly. From an investors stand point I’m real bearish on STEEM the currency. I’m watching the market closely and waiting to see a bottom start to form and consolidate before I even consider hodling as an investment long term. I hold some earnings in my wallet, transfer a small portion each day into STEEM Power, and trade the highs and lows on the exchanges regularly. Hey, a traders got to trade! It has proven to be a fun and volatile market to trade. My personal opinion is that if STEEM can maintain a healthy market, and the dev team continues to improve on the platform at the rate they currently are, Steemit should have a long healthy life in the cryptosphere. Regardless of the end, this will be a history making project that will probably change the face of social networking as we know it. Steem on brothers and sisters! Steem on!