Steemit as a social media platform

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to discuss Steemit as a social media platform. I'm an IT pro and security is always a hot topic.

Before we get any further, this is only my second Steemit post. I am by no means an expert on Steemit. If I am misunderstanding some of the functionality or technology, please be gently telling me I have no idea what I am talking about.

With that aside, let's talk about Steemit as a social media platform.

From what I have seen in the last few days of perusing Steemit, it sort of has a mix of functionality and feel similar to facebook and twitter. The look and feel of the wall is like facebook. The followers are like twitter. In both cases you share some form of content with others.

Facebook offers options for the security of an individual post. Twitter (from my understanding, which is limited) does not offer this same functionality. Anything you post on twitter is viewable by all.

In both instances, twitter and facebook support themselves by advertising.

How does Steemit measure up to facebook and twitter? As discussed earlier, the look and feel take elements from both of the big social media players. From a security point of view, the functionality is closer to twitter.

How about privacy? There is no doubt that facebook and twitter collects (and profits from) a large amount of personal information about its users. I think most people would be shocked at the amount of information that these companies have on them. Regular users need to be concerned about the privacy and security of their information from sites such as facebook, twitter, google, bing, their ISPs, and (especially if you are in the United States) your government.

And then you have the uneducated individuals who do such things as this:

For individuals who are considering posting their credit card numbers on the Internet, I've got a proposal for you... Don't post your credit card numbers on facebook... send it to me instead. I promise that I will only use half the credit available on your card. I'll have some cool new stuff and you will have only half the debt that you would have had otherwise. We will be both better off for it.

All kidding aside, even without the release of highly sensitive information such as the example above, privacy on social media sites should be a consideration for any user of that platform.

So, how does it work on Steemit?

Again, I'm new to Steemit, so please forgive me if I'm misinformed on any of this...

With Steemit:

• There is no corporation that is profiting from my personal information.
• In fact, Steemit turns things on it's head by rewarding community users for participating in the community.
• Presumably there are developers that are profiting from the community in much the same way that other members of the community are rewarded.
• Posts do not have granular security associated with them. In fact, the design is that anything posted will be accessible by anyone else (much like twitter).
• Posts are part of the blockchain, which means that once they are in place, they will never be removed. My understanding is that a post can be hidden from steemit.com but the content will always exist in the blockchain until the end of time (or the end of the Steemit blockchain, whichever comes first).

This last point is an interesting one. Consider that once a post is added to the blockchain, the only way to remove that post would be to perform a hard fork (please let me know below if I am incorrect in my statement). I wonder if there will be issues with certain types of content? What if someone posts copyrighted materials? The materials could be hidden from the site but the materials would still exist within the blockchain. Could the copyright holder pursue legal action because the material has not been entirely eliminated from the technology? Let's take it a step further. A couple of months ago, an individual live streamed a killing on facebook. If a similar thing were to happen on Steemit, how could the developers/technology deal with this? Presumably they would not want to retain any amount of this sort of material within the blockchain.

With all of this said, I'm having fun with exploring what Steemit has to offer, interacting with the community, and posting some (hopefully) interesting content.

Let me know what you think of Steemit versus other social media sites. Do you agree that there may be issues with not being able to delete content from the blockchain? Have you seen someone posting their credit card information on Steemit yet? (I hope not, I'm hoping that the Steemit community is a bit more savvy than that!)

Have fun my fellow Steemites, participate in the community, stay safe, educate each other, and most of all, have fun.