With social media having a big impact on our daily lives, some of us just want to start a career with our expertise in posting stuff. But the biggest problem with this soon emerges – no proper revenue streams. Well, Steemit is here to change that with its social network that allows users to generate revenue from upvotes and posting.
What exactly is Steemit?
Steemit is a new social networking site, similar to Reddit, that launched in June. There are several differences, including the ability to let you generate revenue. Reddit itself was designed to only share content, but this new service also provides a way for the platform to share revenue with its users. Steemit has built a Reddit-like platform on their own blockchain to allow users to be rewarded Steem Dollars and Steem Power just for voting.
The social network itself is a website, which can be viewed without an account or if you want to start being rewarded, sign up. It was designed for content creators/entrepreneurs who have work they want to share and be rewarded at the same time and readers who want an ad-free experience and to reward people with something more than just a vote.
How to earn crypto?
The site uses 3 different types of ways to reward users: Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars. Steem Dollars are used mainly on the website as rewards and Steem Power is used to increase rewards. Steem is the cryptocurrency that can be traded outside of Steemit, which you can convert Steem Dollars into.
There are several ways to earn but I found that voting is the most interesting way of earning. All you need to do is check out the feeds and categories, most of the stuff is actually quite interesting, and give it either an upvote or downvote. You get rewarded and the reward is 50% Steem Dollars, 50% Steem Power. This can earn you a decent amount if you are one of those people who like to check out content. Even though the amount you earn isn’t much, it adds up after some time since you can upvote/downvote as much as you like per day.
Another way to earn is simply posting content. Yes, even though there are no ads on Steemit, yet, you can get rewarded for posting content and unlike Youtube or ads, you are being rewarded per vote which is pretty awesome compared to the services such as Youtube which do not pay much for any video that has less than several thousand video views.
Interestingly, Steemit is ad-free, unlike Reddit or other social media sites that have “promoted posts”, “Sponsored links” or ads in general which gives the user a smooth, clear experience rather than annoying ads that sometimes become very annoying when trying to view content.
The overall website is very easy to use and probably easier to use than Facebook, to be honest. You can submit “stories” also known as posts with fonts, links, etc and checking your Steem wallet is quite easy.
Withdrawing and depositing Steem
The main problem I found was withdrawing and depositing Steem into an external account because right now, Steemit is still new and it takes time to convince an exchange to trade it. As a result, there are only 4 options to trade Steem: Poloniex, OpenLedger, BlockTrades and Bittrex. The good news is that all 3 will be able to withdraw and convert your Steem to Bitcoin. The bad news is that OpenLedger requires either Bittrex or BlockTrades to fund your account which will take time. Also, BlockTrades is fast but takes a high convenience fee. Lastly, Bittrex is a full exchange, it needs you to verify an account which takes some time and since this is a forex exchange, it will take time for your Steem to sell.
Other than that, I found that Steemit is worth my time and effort. My rewards for my first post was decent and with Steem tokens going over 1000% in value, if you or your friends enjoy Reddit but want to try out blockchain-based social media platform, you can join the Steemit community and get rewarded.