Right now we see new "crypto" media appearing everywhere. While the average user may not care to much for the underlying fundamentals I want to give a more technical perspective on these platforms.

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Crypto is not equal to decentralised

Currently a lot of platforms are adopting crypto tokens to pay their users, while the rest of their platform is centralised. Examples are Narrative or Minds. These platforms do not run their own chain, they have people in charge of the platform and they provide a service to the users. They only use crypto as a simple way to pay people for various actions.

This type of gamification is not new. We all know forums where you level up after making a few posts. Now instead of being levelled up in a central database, you level up by getting a crypto token and what is new is that these tokens are tradable.

Crypto is not magic money

It might seem that way during the bull runs. But a token does not have value just because there is crypto in the name. If a platform gives you some tokens, that does not make them valuable anymore than your account level in a random forum.
There needs to be something giving real value or a use case for the tokens.

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Always ask what gives the value to the token. Or rephrased, why would somebody buy the tokens? Because if nobody wants to buy them, their value is simply zero.
Possible options of providing value could be advertisement or governance tokens. But when the token is nothing but a collectable, I would not think they will be very valuable.

There are many new and promising business models that can be realised on centralised 'crypto'-platforms. Especially in advertisement. The operators provide infrastructure and manage the adds. The users consume the adds and get some tokens for it. Advertisers buy those tokens to pay for adds. And the operators take their cut out of the business cycle.

But realise that facebook can do that without solving any of the massive problems on their site. Just having a crypto-token does not make demonetarisation, censorship, filters or security concerns go away.

How decentralised can you be?

Steem is not a platform like that. There are no owners and nobody is special. Every account has the same rights, determined by their sp stake alone.
The true beauty of steem is that there is nobody owning the infrastructure. Everything is provided decentralised by the witnesses and these do have no rights beyond the votes given to them that can be pulled at any moment. All of this cryptographically secured.
There cannot be any censorship here and content cannot be modified after it is posted. Everything happening at the chain level is guaranteed open source and we know the rules and these rules will be executed as written 100% of the time.
Nobody will be demonitised, nobody will be subject to some people making crazy decisions.
Steem also cannot and will never work together with government agencies given them special backdoors, because there is no single point of failure. They also cannot be hacked and account data compromised, only individual users can be hacked.

The price to pay for this having to deal with the struggles of decentralisation and taking personal care of your account.

Will all social media go the path of steem? I highly doubt it, at least in the near future. Centralised solutions with a crypto-token are viable and can currently offer services that facebook or twitter simply cannot provide. But when there is a central point of failure corruption always gets in. All of these centralised sites will only be free as long as they are relatively unknown.

If you want a truly free medium, less than steem will not do. I would even go the opposite direction and welcome a completely slow and unfriendly social network based on proof of work, being even more decentralised that steem.

My verdict

Most of the new platforms are not even in direct competition to steem. They are offering a very different service and are more similar to facebook than to steem. Facebook will certainly add a cryptotoken in the next 5 years or so and then they have to be ready. But they are not decentralised enough to make them truly free and open. There is a special party and that party will make sure they are the ones that benefit the most.

Use whatever you like. But do not be fooled. Having crypto in the name does not make an network decentralised and just having a token does not make it money.