What steemit did that reddit didn't, redditnotes.

Initially, after raising significant funding of $50m from several investors including Peter Thiel, Snoop Dogg, Jared Leto, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen, reddit had promised to reserve a portion of the company's shares to give back to the community, as a reward for using their site, and creating content.

This was planned to be done with "reddit notes".

They had asked the community about what kind of ways they can distribute the notes, as well as what other ideas came up. The entire community was excited to be able to receive a reward for their content and their sharing of content.

The reddit administrators planned to create ~950,000 shares to represent 10% of the company to give back to users in a random lottery. They had decided how much, the specifications and had asked the community in a huge thread about the idea and received an incredibly great response.

This was planned to launch in the Fall of 2015.
It is currently the Summer of 2016.

It's almost been a year, and many people have reported that the project was cancelled, leaving the community empty.

Now, looking at Steemit,

Steemit was able to distribute rewards to content creators, not by lottery or chance, but by the community, allowing the community what deserves their vote and money.

After the initial investment of $50 million, the investment put the company's value at $500 million. 10% of that would be $50 milion.

Steem is currently worth almost $400 million in market capitalization.

Steemit has been able to provide the community, upto 8x more than reddit would have, in much less time, with much less resources, with much less community backing ...

and they actually did it.