Where did Steemit come from?
Its the brainchild of @ned and @dantheman . You can look up their bio: Ned Scott and Daniel Larimer
Why is it here?
As mention in my article Confession of a Facebook Ad Man, Facebook and other are clamping down on free speech and they make money from us creating content for them for free.
Where is it going? (ideally...)
Is this there to eventually replace the establishment. To create a new way to distribute earnings in social media. Rather than users doing all the work for free and then get sold to advertisers, Steemit aims at distributing a part of it's value back to those who increase it's value -> content creator and curator.