I've been active on Steem(it) for a couple of weeks and I've been having a great time posting, commenting, voting and exploring both the technology and the community and I think I've gained a good picture of what's going on. And as I talk to people a lot and advertise signing up to Steemit (which multiple people have done already, keep it up!), I wanted to give these people some more arguments why they should get started.

#1 - A working DPoS chain

While I've admired Delegated-Proof-of-Stake ever since an interview I've had with Max Kordek, the founder of Lisk, I've always had troubles fully understanding how this would work in practice. How do you vote for delegates? Who are these people? How do they get their rewards?

This changed fundamentally after recognizing Steem and the witness system. In addition, as Steem itself is about community, engaging in the community is natural and beneficial for the witnesses.

The result is a super-fast blockchain network that can handle heaps of transactions. Awesome!

#2 - Everything is on-chain

Due to #1 and the speed of the Steem blockchain, everything can be on the blockchain. Even from a theoretical perspective that is really fascinating - all transactions are on-chain and can never be altered (well, at least after the reward payout period, which is 7 days).

But what's even more important is that you can view the content on the network with any client, you don't need to use Steemit for it. This is a real wow-effect and a game-changer!

#3 - It's fully decentralized

This is basically a consequence of #2, but I like to emphasize the effect on community rather than the technical aspects here. It means that there is nobody - neither a single person or a group or organization - who can edit or censor content on Steem. Even if it's inappropriate stuff, but that belongs to a freedom of speech. It will have to be the community that takes care of that by flagging inappropriate content, so the majority will (hopefully) win. But even if doesn't, this is probably as democratic as it gets.

#4 - The community

From my experience in the last weeks, the community is awesomely helpful and unselfish. You find a lot of support, great content to get started, communities, and - suprisingly - nobody who wants to take away anything from you. Of course I'm aware of Steem Wars, but I think this is a very natural thing to happen and will be solved over time, one way or another.

#5 - The ecosystem

It's really fascinating to witness, how much of an ecosystem has been built around Steem. Voting services, bots, minnow communities, it's all there, ready to be explored and used by anybody.

#6 - Make money with content

Steem is a relatively easy way to make some money with good content. Sure, it's longer-term game and not all good content gets the amount of rewards it would deserve. And also, not all well-rewarded content is good. But in general, it works quite well and can be done for a living - especially since the latest big price-surge for Steem Dollars and Steem in December.

The downsides

There's also some issues with Steem in the current version. I'll name the two biggest issues I have so far, that will hopefully be fixed - either by the developers or the community somehow:

Votes are linear

I think one of the biggest issues of Steemit which also fosters centralization (of Steem Power) is that the rewards a user is getting for other users voting on his post is proportional to the Steem Power of the voter. To me, this doesn't make a lot of sense, because more votes should be generally worth more (because more people liked your content) and also, issues like what's being discussed in Steem Wars (some people with a lot of Steem Power voting for the same content creators over and over so they get a big portion of the reward pool) could be avoided to grant a bigger portion of the pool to users with a smaller and worse-funded network.

Short-term > long-term

As the reward period is set to 7 days, there's no way you can get rewarded for older content. Imo that leads to the following effects:

1. Steem is cluttered with content that is very up-to-date like the newest price mark of a crypto-coin, ICO announcement, quotes from the news, etc., which add relatively little value, but can become trending quickly.
2. Long and extensive pieces of content with a larger portion of research involved have no particular chance of bringing revenue to the creator. This is actually quite sad and opposed to how you would generally want to reward the creators of content who take care and keep it up-to-date, etc.

Conclusion

There's a lot of great things going on on Steem, with Steemit being a great service on top. However, there's also a lot of potential which we all can help unfold. So for whoever isn't using Steem(it) yet, please sign up and become an active member of the community. For those who are here already - what are the aspects that you like or dislike about Steem?