To my Prof @yousafharoonkhan,
Good day.

It is my pleasure to present my homework task to your class, expressing my gratitude to this lecture on Centralized and Decentralized Social Media Platforms. I must say it is very timely because I have nursed the desire to create a community of my own and work hard to promote it so as to add great value to Steemit Blockchain. Thank you for bringing up my heart desire to limelight. Here I go.

To define the above two subjects, I created an image very simple to understand as shown below:

#image is mine

In a centralized social media, there is an authority at the center who controls all activities of users. Without this authority one can not interact with the other. He is the go-between, an actor, a decision maker who controls and governs the network. Think of Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube or Twitter, all are examples of a centralized system of social media. They have a central server that stores users' data meaning that they determines who access such data. If their server malfunctions the whole system is in trouble.

#image is mine

In a decentralized social media, the opposite is the case. There is no central authority, no central server that stores users' data, instead power is in the hands of users, they govern and decide what and how their data is accessed. There is a distribution of workloads among all devices participating in the system such that any malfunction from any device do not have adverse effect on the entire system.

Talking about which one that will carry the day, let's look at their performance over the years so as to determine this question.

In a centralized social media, there is efficiency of data flow across users. This is because data follows one path, the central server, making it sometimes faster in relaying information across board. Again during upgrade, the system have only to upgrade a single server instead of the whole participating machines in the network. But more is involve as the following indices are considered:

Safety of users' data: It is a human right thing to keep privacy of individual information but it becomes a problem when such right is deprived from a user of a centralized social media through what they called data mining wherein a user's data is illegally accessed for whatever reason say for political undertone.

This is one big issue in a centralized social media because the privacy settings are usually hidden at the central server meaning that even when a user decides to delete certain content, it is not actually deleted as the content is still stored at the back-end of the central server.

Think too of the vulnerability of centralized social media platforms to hackers who could overpower the central server and then gain access to the user's data like what happened to Yahoo in 2015 because the major components are all linked together to one server.

Another notable thing with Centralized social media platforms is that user's account can be blocked or even deleted at will even after years of hardwork to build such account. If it violates the central authority's rules either by error of omission or commission, the user loses such account.

Decentralized Social media is democratized, that is to say that there are a large number of participating computers having different nodes in the system. It is more reliable and secure. Users control their activities, privacy settings are not hidden, no one actor detects what goes on. The likelihood of hackers attack is minimal as there is no single server to be targeted at to break down. If a hacker is to attack, he will have to gain access to all the participating computers, and that is virtually impossible.

There is transparency and consensus in a decentralized social media, for instance in Steemit where curators agree on what content gets quality and what do not get quality. So there is no blocking of a user account and no data mining.

With the aforementioned points, decentralized social media platforms get the future.

Steemit is a decentralized social media platform while Twitter and Facebook are centralized social media platforms. Registration in both platforms are free but the beauty of Steemit surpasses that of Twitter and Facebook in many ways:

My personal experience

Prior to December 2020, I have engaged in many money making platforms to earn a living, It has been a very stressful experience where after working very hard, still I have nothing to show for it. But I thank God for product networks as using them has enabled me to remain physically healthy. But it has not been enough as solving other nagging financial needs continue to be an insurmountable task. Not until I come in contact with Steemit.

Just few months in Steemit, I have got evidences to prove that I am working real hard. I have changed the face of my shop to look new, I am able to render help to the needy around me, I can now take care of my personal needs, pay rent as at when due and many more. Steemit has brought to limelight my creativity, my intellectual ability is being sharpened. It is still changing my life and that of my family members.

I know this experience is not peculiar to me. Many hardworking users are testifying positively.

Making money in Steemit is not too complex but possible in many ways as enumerated below:

• Money is made in Steemit by what people do in the network such as writing a post, upvoting a post, and commenting on a published post.
• Creating quality and original content is paramount to making to money in Steemit.
• Upvoting a post at its early publishing say after 5 minutes makes you earn higher if the post later became trending.
• Upvoting a post just before a whale upvoted same post earns you a higher income.
• Upvoting a trending post that already above $100 also increases your earning potential
• Investing in Steem Power gives more strength or influence to earn higher. For example if your voting power is above 0.20, each upvote gives you income than a user whose voting power less say 0.04 like me.
• You can make more money by setting up your reward system to 50%SBD/50%SP in which case you earn Steem backed Dollar (SBD) which amount is higher than Steem itself.
• Delegation of steem power also makes one to earn money in Steemit.
• You can also make money by creating a community and building it up through users' subscription, through contest making and using it to promote steem.

Step 1

I login and click on the green Steemit by my top left side.

Step 2

I clicked on create community icon by the top right side

Step 3

I entered my community name - Steem-On-The-Street

Step 4

Wrote my 'About' description, Save my Password and owner key and then click on create community icon below.

Step 5

I click ok on the request to pay $3 steem after entering my Active Key as required.

The process was completed landing me to the above page where my community becomes active for posting things as can be seen on the following image.

Conclusion

Thank you my professor @yousafharoonkhan once again for this opportunity to learn from you. This is the longest task I have done in the Steemit Crytoacademy. But it is enjoyable and very educative, so I must share this work on my Facebook and Twitter pages.

I remain yours truly,
@meymeyshops.

Reference
Reference
Reference