Competition for Steemit? New Platform Crowdsale!

Worthwhile news, sourced from the community. A refreshing solution to a stagnant industry. Snip is a decentralized news platform, that is designed for members of the community to create and publish news articles. The question is, will Snip and Steemit be complementary or competitors?

Well, I have my own idea of how they'll interact, but first let me give the rundown on Snip:

• The Team
  The CEO, Ran Reichman, and the CFO, Rani Horev, both graduated Tel Aviv University, with Masters degrees in Political Science and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science. Snip's team is very open and transparent. All members of the team have professional profiles and/or social media linked on their website. You can see for yourself, if you scroll down the landing page: https://www.snip.network/

• Community Engagement
  The team has been great about community engagement and has been quite open to answering questions we might have, as well as providing timely updates. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2074134.0

• The Whitepaper
  The whitepaper gets straight to the point and says what it means in easy-to-understand language. A great read! I recommend that anyone considering participating in the crowdsale, read the whitepaper first. I will break it down for you guys, following the summary. https://media.snip.today/Snip_Whitepaper_en.pdf

• US Investors
  US Investors are approved up to purchase up to $4,500 worth of SnipCoins, without providing ID verification. They make this very clear on the website and walk you through the details.

• Partners
  Snip has acquired 4 partners - Bancor, Goodwin, Wings, and AdEx.

• Crowdsale
  Here are the specifics on the crowdsale(pulled directly from the whitepaper):

"Our goal is to raise $8 million USD ​(hard cap). Upon reaching the goal the sale
will stop and no more contributions will be accepted.
● The minimum goal for the crowdsale is $0.8 million USD ​(soft cap).
Contributors will be refunded if the goal isn’t reached.
● The duration of the sale will be no more than 30​ ​days​.
● 10 billion SnipCoins (SNP) will be minted, of which 80% are designated to
the community and the contributors​. The initial distribution of tokens will
be:
○ 28%​ ​is​ ​available​ ​in​ ​the​ ​crowdsale​.
○ 30% will be sold in the future token sale and will be locked for 3 years.
○ 21% is reserved for the initial pool of contributor rewards. This is kept
in a time-locked vault and released every month according to the
amount transferred to the contributors during that month, with a hard
limit of 90,000,000 SNP. A portion of the contributor reward pool is
reserved for community developers (bug bounties, contributing
algorithms, etc).
○ 20.5% is designated for the Snip company and will be used internally
and for advisors and partner companies. Snip employees and founders
will not hold tokens prior to the sale and will not be rewarded with
tokens in the first 6 months after the sale. In the period of 6 to 12
months after the sale, Snip employees and founders will be rewarded
with no more than 4% of the total tokens.
○ 0.5% is designated for the Snip bounty, helping to spread the word
about the Snip platform before the crowdsale."

Snip's content is uncensored. The platform is geared towards shorter content, but will provide for content of any length. Snip revenue shares with private contributors, publishers, and non-profits, but not with corporations or governments. Snip's open-source algorithms filter content to specifically tailor a reader's feed, to their interests. Snip provides an API and data sets for developers to work on their own algorithms.

Users can filter out content that they don't want to see, using a variety of rules. This is intended to allow people to avoid "fake news." They can create private filters and share them with others, as well. Scarce content and suggested content will be assigned bonus tokens to incentivize contributors. Referrals will be rewarded with bonus token incentives, so as to more cheaply advertise the platform.

Monetization employs several methods: Subscriptions, tipping, and advertisements. There is a subscription, paid for by tokens. One of the first offerings will be audio snips, designed for commuters or people who like listening to the news. Another subscription benefit will be an ad-free platform. Tipping allows people to pay writers for good content - much like Reddit Gold. Advertisements allow for free content on the platform, but are personalized based on your interests, and can be flagged for various reasons. You can personally access your individual advertising profile.

While the platform is already up and running, the crowdsale just began on the 29th.

Snip is designed to be a healthy environment for valued news articles. Because of its detailed focus, I don't believe it will end up as a competitor to Steemit. I think it will enhance the blockchain-based social media atmosphere, by filling a void. Steemit will probably lose a lot of news content, but I think that will be healthier in the long run. It allows Steemit to focus more on the personal blog side of things. It will definitely be exciting to see how they match up.

Do you think Snip will end up being a competitor to Steemit, or a complementary partner? Please let me know in the comments! If you enjoyed this story, please upvote, follow, and resteem! If you are excited about Snip and enjoyed the article, please consider using my referral link for purchasing your SnipCoins: http://www.snip.network/sale/invite/KeU0B1YNqo/ Thanks for reading!

Spacecadet1