Four Recent Steemit Mentions in the Media

These four steemit mentions turn up in a Google News search for "steemit" in recent news articles. @ned is quoted in the first article, @dan is quoted in the second.

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1.) Rupert Hackett – Steemit, Using Blockchain to Compensate and Protect Speech (the-blockchain.com, Jan 30, 2017)

Steemit, a social media platform running on Blockchain, set out to fix two main issues that we see in social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. It’s designed to (1) enable content creators to profit from their creativity, and (2) to secure the freedom of people to share ideas without risk of censorship.Facebook’s revenue hit $27 billion in 2016. The current business model of social media, however, doesn’t extend profits to the creators of the content. The users on networking sites are there if not to churn out free content, then to be a product to sell to advertisers.The centralized structure of the platforms is also susceptible to censorship. Powerful actors such as governments can exert pressure to block users and content they don’t like. A case in point follows the sharp focus that has followed Facebook after the 2016 US presidential elections.

2.) Blockchain experts discuss fake news and reputation (International Business Times, Jan 27, 2017)

Steemit is a popular blockchain-based social news service which debuted last year. Text is stored in a blockchain and authors who get upvoted can receive a monetary reward in a cryptocurrency called STEEM.

Dan Larimer, co-founder of Steemit, said there is no shortcut to eliminating propaganda and fake news but pointed out that censorship is much worse. "The power to censor is the power to manipulate reality as perceived by the masses. Propaganda (fake news) also has the power to manipulate the reality of anyone who fails to consider all opinions," he said.

"The difference is that propaganda only works on those who trust the source of propaganda. Once that trust is lost the propaganda loses all power. Censorship, on the other hand, denies people the opportunity to think for themselves."

3.) William Mougayar: The Future Of Blockchain? (Huffington Post, Jan 26, 2017)

An example might be a marketplace called Steemit.com If you go there and you spend time writing content or upvoting content or promoting content, you earn a cryptocurrency that can be valuable, that you can spend in this non-money economy. So I am seeing a merging of the money economy and the non-money economy. And cryptocurrency is going to be this new enabler of a new economy that, as I said earlier, is going to be potentially bigger than the web economy.

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4.) A new social networking that could pay you for posting (Business Standard, Jan 26, 2017)

Most of these services are in pilot stages but one, Steemit, has been successfully operating for a number of months and its user numbers have grown significantly. Its main function is as a content-sharing site where posts are ranked by popularity, similar to Reddit, although it has recently added a private messaging function and the ability to follow specific users.

Perhaps its most important feature is the way users are rewarded. Every time they produce or share content, they receive Steem tokens, which are like shares in the organisation. These can be exchanged for any real-world currency or used to vote on how the platform will develop, giving users governance power.