I recently came across Steemit, a Reddit-esque platform which seems to be running on the Steem blockchain. It looks like it is paying its users to post and curate content. However, it looks rather leery that essentially a lengthy blog post could have a pending payout of over $3900. Even taking into account the exchange rate of about 0.25 USD/Steem, that is a good pay for writing articles.So I wonder - what's the catch? What is Steem and Steemit all about? Is the platform really paying people hundreds of dollars to post articles, or is there something fishy going on? 

What is Steemit?

Steemit is a social media platform where everyone gets paid for creating and curating content. It leverages a robust digital points system, called Steem, that supports real value for digital rewards through market price discovery and liquidity. 

Steemit.com is the main website "wrapper" for a social network platform that allows access to STEEM blockchain.There are some more wrappers and tools that allows you to access this social network. You can find a huge list of STEEM tools that allows you to access many features of this network.STEEM blockchain is supported by a network of servers that are backed up by people so called Witnesses that allows it to stay alive. They receive a portion of generated STEEM. The amount of STEEM they receive is based on a votes they receive from users who vote for them.The main currency that this blockchain generates is STEEM and it is base for everything. You can trade it in exchanges. And I suggest to invest only in STEEM if you decide to.This social network is like a Bank that generates this currency and uses it inside of it. But the tricky part is that inside this social network it uses a "frozen" STEEM variants.STEEM is converted into 2 other currencies:

• STEEM POWER - it is like a deposit that you keep inside this network and is kind of frozen while you use it there
• SBD or STEEM Dollars is equivalent of USD or at least was meant to be

STEEM social network users get rewards for writing posts and comments, as well as upvoting other posts or comments. It is very complicated formula that takes into account many aspects of a user rating and network. It is far from perfect.Those rewards are paid in those 2 currencies - STEEM POWER (SP) or STEEM dollars or (SBD).For newbies it is seems not fair. Because as a new user you get something like:

0.001 SBD and 0.001 STEEM POWER

At the same time, if you have invested time and got some network of other users that have reputation then you can earn 10 or 100 times more. And yes, you can get a $1000 per post.Current implementation of reward system is crippled. Like it is in other networks. You get rewards not for writing good content but for being a leader of a strong follower network. You can get $100 for a post that shows a silly image of your cat. At the same time other user will be paid $0.001 for posting an article that was posted on Wired.com.Steemit user base is growing fast and is more than 400,000+ users. Bounce rate is 40%+. So, around 10% are alive and probably human that make all the activities on network. And only 41 of users are called Whales that has the power of giving away those magical $100+ per vote that everybody whishes to get.This network is full of bots and scammers that use the reward system to earn some cash. Average post receives 2 comments. Most probably one of them is a bot.

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