A small comparison with Facebook's History and the sign-up issues lately

thumbail, source here

Although I can understand that it can be really annoying not to be able to get onto your account and start out your Steemit Journey, a couple days of down-time are not that bad, really.

I remember playing multiplayer games that on the day of their launch had massive issues with server load and players couldn't play the game they bought. Looking at you, The Burning Crusade...

I understand that your friend who told you about Steemit has gotten you so hyped up that you just can't wait to start posting your content and interacting with other users. In the meantime while its not working though - feel free to browse around, read and become familiar with the site. You will have more than enough time to use it soon enough, just be careful not to get too addicted to it!:)

We have really great users who are posting content daily about how stuff works and giving out starting information for new readers. Here are a few great examples.

Link here

Link here

and of course @thecryptofiend's phenomenal starting guide: (didn't have all night to scroll through all re-steems so didn't get a good thumbnail for it :P)

Link here

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With that being said, I remembered how Facebook used to be "Harvard Only" and no one outside of that could sign up either.So I did some re-search about it.

First I looked for statistics but it was really hard finding anything accurate about users for the early years.

These 2 were the ones that I found gave a good picture of it and were the 2 more important ones.

and this one that shows that first in 2006 it was open to anyone!

Now think about how Steemit started out by being open to anyone.

Of course many sites have to deal with users creating more than one account and trying to abuse the free money that comes with them, I remember creating like 5 facebook accounts with real ease in as late as 2011 just because I wanted to send hearts to my main account to be able to beat that Candy Crush level. Of course users are going to try and abuse that in any way possible knowing those 30 SP could be worth a lot more in the future and no one can touch their private keys that belong to them.

As I was reading more and more about Facebook's history here I kept comparing the 2 C.E.O's in my head to make it more entertaining, was kinda funny.

Quoting some parts from the wiki:

Facemash, Facebook’s predecessor, opened on October 23, 2003. Initially, the website was invented by a Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg
The website was set up as a type of “hot or not” game for Harvard students. The website allowed visitors to compare two student pictures side-by-side and let them decide who was hot or not.

Remember Steemy or Not by @roelandp? Another random similarity :P

Damn, @ned seems like a much nicer person than Mark. :P

Mark Zuckerberg hacked the "facebooks" Harvard maintained to help students identify each other and used the images to populate his Facemash website. That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook.

The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers. However, the website was shut down by Harvard executives a few days after it opened. He later faced expulsion from Harvard University for his actions. However, all the charges were eventually dropped.

This part here reminded me of Steemit a lot more!

Not to mention these users weren't even incentivized with real money for their efforts of "being the best at it"

He said in an article in The Harvard Crimson that he was inspired to make Facebook from the incident of Facemash: "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."

While the technology for a decentralized Website/Platform is still not 100% complete - we are on a good road towards it with our project and @dan's work and genius.

Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.

Decided to add this quote just because of the Winklevoss's current activity with their exchange Gemini.com and being big backers of bitcoin. Are they focusing on the wrong project this time around as well? Who knows, maybe they'll come around. ;)

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Anyway, this is becoming a lot longer than I expected - should've maybe made it a two-parter. But bear in mind that Facebook opened to everyone first in september 2006, almost 3 years after it launched in February 2004. So please try and be patient about your sign-ups and access to Steeming! :)