TLDR: Steemit is the social network applying the blockchain for the masses
By Wired
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“ Steemit, a nascent social media platform, is trying to change all that by rewarding its users with cold, hard cash in the form of a cryptocurrency. Everything that you do on Steemit — every post, every comment, and every like — translates to a fraction of a digital currency called Steem. Over time, as Steem accumulates, it can be cashed out for normal currency. (Or held, if you think Steem is headed for a bright future.)
“ User-generated content, the authors argued, had created billions of dollars of value for the shareholders of social media companies. Yet while moguls like Mark Zuckerberg got rich, the content creators who fueled networks like Facebook got nothing. Steemit’s creators outlined their intention to challenge that power imbalance by putting a value on contributions
^ Traditional social media arbitraged economies of scale: The value of one unit of content is infinitesimally small, so no creator can make a living off it, nor will any consumer pay for it — especially since it’s an infinitely sustainable, fungible commodity.
#null hypothesis #aggregation #aggregator
“ the Steem that rolled out to users translated to more than $1.2 million … Overnight, the little-known currency spiked to a $350 million market capitalization … Today, Steem’s market capitalization has settled in the vicinity of $294 million … at the edge of the top 20 most traded digital currencies.
“ “We realized that this is going to look a lot like Reddit,” says Scott, “but people are going to get paid for participating.”
“ According to Scott, Steemit boasts an “incredibly small” number of trolls, which he argues is because of the cash incentive. (It could also be due to the relatively small community, which includes around 350,000 registered accounts as of September.) “For the first time, there’s an opportunity cost to trolling … Every second that someone spends trolling, they’re potentially damaging their reputation and preventing themselves from earning any Steem.”
^ Opportunity cost is not a deterrent to bad actors. Because Steemit pays content creators and curators per upvote, it’s optimizing for engagement without deterring associated misincentives like misinformation, clickbait, or ideological campaigning — in fact, it incentivizes them. For example, Russian ideologues wouldn’t even have to pay to promote their fake news on Steemit; rather, Steemit will pay them for the engagement they garner.
#quantity over quality
“ Its tokens are generated at a fixed rate of one block every three seconds, which are then distributed to various parties in the system based on the blockchain’s rules. These parties are incentivized to compete in ways that add value to the network: 75 percent of new tokens are distributed to the “rewards pool” for content creators and curators, while smaller fractions are awarded to vested token holders.
“ There are two ways of earning Steem. The first is the “rewards pool” of digital tokens, which incentivize content creation and curation — in other words, quality posts that are upvoted by other users. The second is a voting system which assigns a value to each post and comment on the platform, and then distributes Steem tokens to the creators based on the wisdom of the crowd. The more users that upvote your posts on Steemit, the more Steem you’ll earn
“ A weighted voting system places greater value on votes placed by the older accounts of early Steemit adopters
“ the most innovative aspect of Steem is its lack of friction: New users can join Steemit and begin earning tiny fractions of the currency immediately, without even understanding how it works.
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