I recently took the leap of joining Steemit.com yesterday by signing up for a free account after taking a good look at blockchain technology and the various decentralized applications springing up around it like crytocurrency (Bitcoin, STEEM etc), blogging (Steemit), smart contracts (Ethereum, Namecoin, Steem Power), cross border financial bank transactions (Ripple), data storage (Siacoin, Storj, Steemit) and so on.

I then proceeded to post my first article through my browser based Steemit account and, to my great surprise, got immediately welcomed, curated, rewarded and encouraged by fellow Steemers in a number of cryptic ways!

Inspired to know more about the platform and decrypt what was given to me (and why), I used Steemit's integrated Google search tool to find the answers within Steemit's trove of articles and what I found was very promising (keep in mind that these are my preliminary impressions not necessarily up-to-date facts - so feel free to clarify anything I missed by commenting)...

Ideology of Steemit

Steemit, being a real cyber community of real people, offers you a number of reasons to join, and underlying all that is an impressively contrived system of digital power and profit sharing that appears on the surface to run along very American democratic and capitalistic lines. At this point, I would place the Steemit platform into the ideological box of "Activism" (see above chart).

Power Sharing

Steemit is very democratic. For instance, there is a voting mechanism for the 100 Steemit "Witnesses" who host critical Steemit block mining servers (at their own expense) and are amply rewarded with Steem Power (SP) for doing so, especially the top 20 witnesses. The witnesses collectively control the implementation of newly proposed changes in the Steemit code, called "hard forks", by agreeing to implement and run the new code or not (when 63%+ implement a hard fork it becomes the new officially adopted standard), and they collectively determine the interest rate earned by keeping your money invested in Steem Dollars (SBD).

Steem Power determines who controls the system and who profits to a larger extent. Currently, there are 135k Steemit accounts being tracked at Steam Whales ranging in Steem Power from 1 SP to 70million SP (the Founder @steemit). Only 19 accounts have SP over 1 million. I started out with .5SP given when I opened my account and was loaned 27 SP by well wishers at Steemit who said, in effect, "more power to you" (in the 70s we used to only say it, now in the 10s you can actually do it by delegating SP!).

Profit Sharing

When it comes to profit sharing, Steemit resembles a typical capitalistic free market model rewarding work (via authoring blog posts and comments), reading (via curating and upvoting) and investment risk (via delegating/loaning Steem Power). These mechanisms operate in a very democratic and capitalist manner ("upvoting" is liking a post) and "delegating Steem Power (SP)" is a type of venture capitalism that loans your available Steem Power (capital) to another user so that they can earn more SP and Steem Dollars (SD) that you are entitled to a share of.

Like I said, I was delegated 27SP on creating my account by Steemit (a new benefit since Q1 2017 according to @minnowsupport chat room). The result of that SP loan was to increase my voting power to 49%, which empowers me to earn more and reward others more by upvoting their content.

Coming next in Part 2...

Sociology of Steemit

There is a somewhat opaque, at first, social order based on...

To make sure you don't miss the next installment follow @cyberspace and help us by upvoting, resteeming, and consider delegating us some Steem Power!

I am trying to raise some "VC" Steem Power and invite you to:

1. See my Introduceyourself post and then
2. Invest in @Cyberspace by delegating any amount of Steem Power you see fit.

Thanks in advance for your support in any form be that SP, STEEM, SBD or some good pointers/links!

@Cyberspace