My thoughts on Steemit and it's recent controversies after Justin Sun's takeover
This is a story about steemit - the "Facebook" or "Reddit" for the crypto community if you are not aware of it. Community members are called Steemers who get together in "Steamfest" festivals in real world. So, this is a real community where people create real value by writing posts and sharing their experiences.
Steemit.com (http://steemit.com) is basically a social network site where users publish their articles just like blogs or Facebook posts or Medium posts. The idea is that if the post gets liked or gets popular, with every like by the readers, the post earns "Steem" tokens which then can be converted with "Steem Dollar" and "Steem Power". These "Steem" tokens can be converted into "Bitcoin" or "Ethereum" or "US Dollar" or "Japanese Yen" on popular exchanges (see https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/steem#markets). For example, the posts that I make on this group, I also post them on steemit. So with full disclosure, I earn money by writing good posts, good informative blogs and if they are popular, I can earn "Steem", get my popularity, inform other people with good substantive material and also get rewarded. Therefore, you can earn money by writing good posts. It's similar to youtube or instagram or tiktok where your videos, instas get popular and then you can earn money through view counts, direct or indirect ads. But, what is the difference? The difference is again in the case of Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, these are the middleman between you and your followers, viewers, fans and they take a commission (which can be pretty high) for providing the platform and the robust service.
So then some background..
The visionaries in Crypto thinks about creating communitites which are not controlled by centralized authorities. Just look at American politics or any other government in the world, only few powerful people control the fate of the whole population in the name of democracy, only few banks control large sum of people's money in the name of protecting people from bad actors. The irony is most people who govern, who own more money and power turn out to be the real bad actors. Similarly, we already know how Facebook, Youtube and other social media giants also can abuse the content creators. They definitely provide great service and platform but many content creators like me like to become independent of these mediators.
So, Bitcoin was born with the idea of reducing power through decentralization. Now there exists real bad people who will use the network to do bad things. But the hope is that majority will act with good faith to do good and develop communities. And it's always a struggle but Bitcoin and other Crypto projects proved it.
Bitcoin is an innovation with money. Then Ethereum came with the idea of performing mutually agreeable contracts in a decentralized way which was also revolutionary.
Then the idea of decentralized social media came into existence.
Hope you got the full picture.
However, Steem is recently experiencing some governance issue as one of the whale (Justin Sun - the main guy in Tron (http://tron.com) bought the steemit, Inc and tried to get more governance power with his high stake ( ) of Steem. But then the steem community tried to reduce Justin Sun's power by forking the steem blockchain. This is another great example of how decentralized system can fight against centralized power abuse. But as you can see, even in the decentralized world, people with money try to take over a community. Read more:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-publishes-apology-letter-to-steemit-community-and-says-it-has-unvoted
Binance's appology letter: https://www.binance.com/en/blog/421499824684900453/A-Letter-to-the-STEEM-Community
Sometimes monopoly is good. But as we all know, crypto is an ongoing adventure.
I hope you learnt more about steem and feel free to venture to the "Steem".