Steem Thoughts - Traditional Apps vs Steem Apps

Hello everyone! This month marks my 1 year anniversary on the Steem platform. To celebrate this milestone, I will be posting "Steem Thoughts", which is a series of posts related to the Steem platform. Each post will be bite-sized (under 800 words) and focused on a specific topic.

Through my first year, I noticed that there are many people who do not understand how the Steem platform works. One major misunderstanding is to equate Steem with Steemit Inc (and Steemit.com). I hope this series of "Steem Thoughts" can help people understand Steem a little deeper. With better understanding, you will be able to appreciate the value of the platform and why the cost-cutting measures from Steemit Inc do not really matter.

In today's post, I will be discussing about the architectural differences between traditional applications and Steem applications.

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Traditional Application Architecture

The diagram below illustrates the typical architecture of a traditional web application. The entire stack of layers are wholly owned and maintained by a centralized party, which is typically a company. Examples are Facebook, Twitter, Medium and Reddit.

The obvious drawback with such an architecture is that information is concentrated with a single party. This makes it a prime target for attacks by hackers. This type of architecture is usually susceptible to DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. However, DDoS attacks are less common these days because solutions are available to mitigate them.

Another disadvantage of this architecture is that it is not censorship resistant. When a country wants to ban a particular site, they can do that with ease. Furthermore, countries can ban the legal entity (usually the company operating the application) from operating within the boundaries. This is evident for Facebook and Google in China.

Finally, transparency is also an issue as we have zero knowledge of what is going on beneath the web layer. How our data is actually used remains a mystery. Though companies will typically have a privacy policy documenting how they are using our data, we can never be 100% sure.

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Steem Platform

The diagram below is my attempt to represent Steem Application ecosystem in a conceptual manner.

The Steem Blockchain

You can view the Steem blockchain as a data layer similar to the one in the traditional application architecture. However, this data layer (blockchain) is immutable, public and distributed. As a result, this data layer is transparent, attack-resistant and censorship-resistant. Users can directly interact with the blockchain (through the APIs) if they want to. Otherwise, we typically interact with the Steem platform via Steem interfaces or services.

Unlike other public blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum, the key differentiating factor Steem has is its native reward and reputation system. Users can own STEEM, power up STEEM, transfer STEEM, create content and upvote (reward) content. These activities are recorded by the blockchain and are native to the system.

Steem Applications

Steem applications make use of the underlying Steem blockchain as the data layer. Most of them keep their own centralized database for better performance but the Steem blockchain is still the golden source of truth.

I categorize Steem applications into 2 main buckets. Interfaces and Services. Examples of Steem interfaces are, Steemit.com, Busy.org, Steempeak.com, Steeve.app and many others. Most interfaces are generic blogging interfaces, but we are starting to see the rise of niche interfaces like Steemhunt, Musing, dTube, and dPoll. These niche interfaces leverage on the native reward system of the Steem blockchain to build their business use cases.

Steem services are non-interfaces that are providing a service to us. There are productivity services like SteemAuto and data analytics services like SteemAgency.

While there are many who coin these Steem applications as dApps. I beg to differ. These apps are still fundamentally centralized. However, collectively, they are a bunch of decentralized apps. The litmus test is again how easy is it to ban or censor these applications. It is easy for a government to shutdown any one of them. But it is tough to shutdown all of them.

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Conclusion

Steem is a powerful platform for content creation and incentivization. If you are looking to build an application with those features, Steem is the perfect platform for you to do so.

There are many who still think that Steem equals Steemit. That is wrong. I hope this post is able to shed some light to that.

To those Steem pros out there, I wrote this article to my best knowledge. I do not run a witness node and isn't a full time programmer on Steem. So do point out my mistakes if there is any.

Finally, thanks for reading and share your thoughts with me.

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Links to my "Steem Thoughts" series:

• Part 1 - Traditional Apps vs Steem Apps
• Part 2 - Is Steem a Fat Protocol or a Thin Protocol?
• Part 3 - Inequitable Value Between Users and Apps

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View this post on Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface