I am one of the lucky ones. I found Steemit quite early on and was captivated by the concept of a social network powered by a blockchain, which integrated a cryptocurrency for rewarding posts. I smiled as I read through the entire whitepaper in the early hours of the morning, because I knew that this would be huge. In my time browsing and researching Steemit, there are 4 advantages that Steemit has over its mainstream centralised competitors, which I don't believe are being addressed as much as they should.

1 - Steemit's complete lack of advertising.
This not only vastly improves the look and feel of the website, but also makes it more powerful than any other social media website on the planet for one simple reason. It is free of the shackles of needing to submit to the will of advertising interests. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are all dependant on being funded by the advertising revenue that can be generated with page views. Advertisers are able to exercise control over a site by threatening to remove advertising, leading to censorship, dilution of content, the wholesale selling of users personal information for advertising targeting benefits, and subversive commercial influence. The old corporate media business model of selling your user's attention is made obsolete. Without needed to pander to advertising interests, the users of Steemit are able to post more freely than any other social media users. Steemit is also impervious to the effects of widely increasing use of ad-blocking extensions. These will come to plague the cash flows of advertising dependent sites, but Steemit will be blissfully unaffected.

2 - Steemit's Illiquid ownership structure.
The usage of vesting Steem Power as a token of ownership over the Steem platform ensures three important things.
a - That the owners of Steem cannot sell out rapidly, requiring a long term commitment of anyone who seeks to have stake in the platform. This by necessity ensures that curation and voting control over the platform lies in the hands of those with a long term interest in its value, and prevents the large stakeholding creators of the platform from dumping the cryptocurrency rapidly.
b - That the ownership of Steemit cannot be rapidly bought up, or taken over by a hostile party. As most of the value of Steem is vesting, and cannot be traded quickly, Steemit is protected from hostile takeovers, or corporate acquisitions of the platform.
c - That it's invested users are drawn back to the site over the long term, and that ordinary users are given a financial interest to make sure that the content is of a high quality. Never before have a seen a site so clean from trolls, after all, why would you damage or pollute a platform when you benefit from its success?

3 - The Steem blockchain allows for the development of any number of different front end UIs to interact with the content.
Imagine a few months or years down the line, and multiple different front ends have been developed, all with different features, different appearance and interfaces. They would be compelled to compete with one another, and would drive UI development to be faster and more robust. The Steemit that we use today may not be the same one that we use in 6 months. Developers could program a better Steem UI with new features and become more popular than Steemit, sparking a kind of browser war over how best to engage with the Steem blockchain.

4 - Steemit comes with a built in ability to crowdfund its own expansion and development.
Got a cool idea to improve Steemit, or an application to provide a service to users? No longer do you have to depend on donations to develop third party add ons or tools for Steemit, you can just make a post describing it, and the community can upvote you and fund it for you in just a matter of hours. This kind of power will enable an incredible ecosystem of third party applications to build on, and expand the capabilities and value of the platform.

All of these lesser discussed features combine to create what I believe to be the most independent, corruption and censorship resistant, pro-user, empowering, and resilient social network I have ever seen. We are witnessing an entirely new business model, the first successful Decentralised Autonomous Corporation, one that places an unprecedented amount of power right in the hands of its users. We are the revolution. The future is now. Steem the fuck on.