Intro

STEEM's price surged up and its market cap reached $1,515,084,438 USD (01.25 CoinMarketCap)

No one can say the exact cause of the bull run but maybe it would be due to the Weiss ratings. Only Cardano, EOS, Ethereum and STEEM was rated B on the ratings. I, as a Steemian, am pretty optimistic about the future of Steemit, but 1.5 billion dollars is a big money by itself and Steemit's limits might be it.

Predicting the future of Steemit

Price prediction of STEEM is not the same thing as prediction of Steemit's future. STEEM is a very important component of Steemit, but it is not the platform itself. When the market stabilizes it would be Steemit making the value of STEEM, not the other way around.

Currently: STEEM's value -> Steemit's value
Future: Steemit's value -> STEEM's value

There are big social networks and big blogs out in the market. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, etc. I will analyze the SWOT of Steemit compared to those platforms.

S: Strength

1. One strength of Steemit is that writers get directly paid for their work. That's a unique strength of Steemit. No other platform pays for writing and that means writers would have more motivation to write better posts. That leads to a better quality of the community itself.

2. Steemit runs on a blockchain. Blockchain's security does not allow any interference by authorities. Maybe in the future it can be a place to criticize the government or to initiate a movement.

3. Also, Steemit already has a firm user background. It lasted for an year and a half already. Many blog and social network startups sinks down in the early stage.

4. People are voluntarily developing third-party applications for Steemit which is a very powerful support for the community.

W: Weakness

1. Posts are too concentrated in the cryptocurrency topic. It is natural because STEEM is one of the leading cryptocurrency and people get to know Steemit in that route but for it to grow as big as facebook, trending articles should be filled with other topics.

2. Examples like haejin, the reward pool might be compromised. It needs to find some way to prevent that.

3. Account approval takes too long. Many people do not want to wait for a week to join a website.

4. Lot of people are not used to HTML writing. GUI improvement needed.

O: Opportunity

1. As the whole crypto market grows Steemit can gain benefits from it. There's no competitor of Steemit, at the current moment, in the market. It is ranked 25th in the whole market and big coins gets bigger as time grows.

2. This might be not true in general but I see many new users joining Steemit in real life.

T: Threat

1. On the other hand, crypto might collapse. Market is not stabilized and STEEM's price and SBD's price might go bearish which leads to little interest in Steemit.

2. Centralized blog, social media platforms already exist and they might launch a decentralized platform themselves. Imagine what might happen if Facebook launches its own. That might be a disaster to Steemit.

Summary

I am an optimist and I want to be an optimist of Steemit. As a user of Steemit according to the SWOT analysis, what we should do is write a high quality post and have faith in it. I'll end it with a quote.

Some days are just bad days, that's all. You have to experience sadness to know happiness, and I remind myself that not every day is going to be a good day, that's just the way it is!
-Dita von Teese