After lightly following the story of bitcoin since Ross Ulbricht’s arrest, I finally delved in deeper last year. With the basic understanding of how blockchain works, I came into Steemit a little over confident on my level of knowledge about the system. So with my perceived knowledge high and my understanding low, that left me stranded with some questions on Skeptic Avenue.
After about a week on-board, some great discussions with other users, more research, and spamming 
[disclaimer: I’m a non-technical person, as laymen as it gets really. If I’ve missed the mark on any of these or if you have any additions, please let me know. Also, I’ve written this post from a confusing mixture of notes of which I did not properly correlate sources to info nuggets. This contains words from Ned and Dan in interviews, plus some references from other sources and personal conversations. All sources listed below.]
When I asked users why they like Steemit, the most common response was that it puts the power of social media into the hands of the users. “Power to the People!” I understood how the currency distribution was controlled by the users, but I didn’t understand how the non-technical person could influence the system itself. Here’s what I learned:
Headquartered in Virginia, Steemit Inc is a DAC – a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation – a concept first proposed by Dan Larimer, one of Steem’s founders, back in 2013. This, essentially, is a type of business that utilizes the blockchain to record it’s financial transactions and program rules (smart contracts). At the end of the day, Steemit is still a privately owned company. But why is this different and better than Tumblr?
Every time you post on Facebook or Steemit or Reddit or wherever, you are adding value to that site. Although Steemit is privately owned, the value distribution is determined by the users – the people who are creating the value control where it goes. With a monetized "like" system users are rewarded for posting content and comments, an immediate value transfer to the user.
How can we influence the system itself if we are not programmers? Steemit has a witness system that each user gets 30 votes for. The witnesses are people who get rewarded for hosting nodes of the STEEM blockchain and work to help improve the system. Not only can we vote on 30 witnesses of our choosing, we can also utilize the SteemChat #help channel and Steemit’s (less reliable) support email for help.
Steem is also the name of the cryptocurrency on the STEEM blockchain. Initially, Steem was produced both by mining and through user upvoting. Today, the currency is only generated when users upvote a post or a comment. The result is the perfect fit for a social media cryptocurrency – a subjective proof of work. This serves as a unique metric for distributing currency, and the byproduct is content. Is this system sustainable?
The aim of Ned and Dan, the creators, is to build an established community around a cryptocurrency. The incentive of posting and curating on Steemit encourages users to aim for the tenure track, and the growing number of long-term users adds to the currency’s stability. “Steem Power” helps to keep money in the system. With this collective invested interest in the currency’s survival combined with users’ incentivized success to maintain a good reputation, a civil environment is cultivated.
This, to me, is the real beauty.
100% of the creative value goes back into the creators of that value, and to receive a return on your time and content investment you as a user have to have consensus with other users. Trolls and general mean people do not get rewarded for that behavior, lowering their consensus (aka Steem Power) with the community. They are easily weeded out. This is the magic key that significantly reduces cyber bullying. Reduces. Unfortunately, trolls are still out there. As a result of the civil environment created around the platform’s value distribution, several groups of users have volunteered or dedicated their Steemit participation to combating abuse.
@Steemcleaners and @Cheetah are the two main ones I’m familiar with. They utilize downvotes/flagging and commenting to warn other users of plagiarism, harassment, or other unethical actions. Since flagging/downvoting removes rewards, the content becomes less visible. Trolls like to be heard, but in a community centered around a currency that everyone has control over, no one is going to waste their Steem Power on content they disagree with.
Forget about trolls, what about all of those bots who comment on your posts? After some investigating I’ve learned that some bots were in fact created to take advantage of the system while others are created for non-upvoting solicitation. Because Steem has a monetary value, people care and are active in blocking the manipulative users from accruing Steem wealth. As Dan pointed out in a 2016 interview, what’s interesting is this level of accountability wasn’t programmed into the system, it’s a social phenomenon. People don’t like seeing someone get something from nothing.
As the user base grows, will this social-driven accountability hold up to millions of users? Additionally, does this intrinsic nature of Steemit help mute fake news and dangerous propaganda? My speculation is yes, however I welcome other opinions on this matter.
So far, we’ve got Steemit at like 1,000 amazing points and Reddit/other social medias at Zero. Here’s where things get less encouraging.
Security. The blockchain is secure. Everything else however, is vulnerable to hacking. Within the first few months of Steemit’s launch many users' wallets were hacked (and reportedly reimbursed by Steemit). Dan released an announcement last year that Steemit created a hacking recovery system that allows for users to efficiently recover lost accounts and assets using account recovery partners. Dan went on to say that it’s extremely difficult to protect wallets and accounts from hackers in the same way banks or casinos can’t perfectly protect their vaults from robbers (we’ve all seen Oceans 3000). Steemit is on a level playing field with any other online platform’s security vulnerability, except that the presence of online wallets attracts more intruders. Their philosophy, Dan says, is to focus on recovery rather than prevention.
Privacy sort of goes against the nature of blockchain. Blockchain is designed to be transparent, open. So the lesson here is – don’t post anything that is private to you. I was assured by the volunteers of Steemchat’s #help channel that our email and number used for identity verification were not added to the blockchain.
Ads! Hooray for no ads! With the value creation and distribution in the hands of the users there is no use for advertisements. Which obviously hugely improves the reader experience.
CURATION
Because a blockchain site is overseen by multiple sources, with each and every edit getting verified multiple times, this limits the site to flexible content curation. Not having as much freedom to go back and refine old posts is probably the main downside for me.
According to my highly technical analysis, the second-most common reason people like Steemit (besides the #1 “Power to the People” reason) is because the rewards incentive pushes you to produce creatively. That’s what I experience, for sure. Like, what the hell am I doing? Is anyone even going to read this? I feel like I’m being driven by some invisible force saying “Do this, dammit! This Steem thing equals money! Why are you hesitating?? Money!!!!!!!! **M – O – N – E – Y **.”
But not just the money. The peer-to-peer incentivized content creation drives users to create thoughtful content and leave thoughtful, helpful, supportive comments. This frees you up to focus on esteeming others and yourself, creating a positive social media reader experience rather than a negative, judgemental one.
The rewards allocation quota requires each user to be more selective about which posts they upvote. If you're someone who likes to spread the love then this could definitely be a downside. This quota severely limits the amount of interaction with other users compared with other sites, where "liking" posts is unlimited. On the other hand, this compels users to do their best and expand what their “best” is through a very honest and effective way at receiving feedback.
So here I am. Writing stuff for all to see, forever. This is quite a vulnerable position for me. In my experience, the best paths to explore are the ones that initially evoke fear. And yes, i included a picture of a path to go with this path comment.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. – Thank you to 
{All pictures are mine unless otherwise specified}
Sources:
The Steem Wiki that anyone can add to!
https://www.steem.center/index.php?title=Main_Page
Steemit's Account Recovery Solution
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@dan/steemit-releases-groundbreaking-account-recovery-solution
@Steemcleaners abuse guide
https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/abuse-guide-2017-update
Interview of Ned by Jon Reed Audio
Interview of Dan and Ned by #Blocktalk
Cheerleading Photo
https://www.thoughtco.com/cheerleading-4132814
