In one of CoinDesk’s recent articles on the home page, titled “Blockchains Alone Won’t Fix the Facebook Problem,” Steem was mentioned as a coin trying to fix the ‘Facebook problem.’ Their article can be viewed here: https://www.coindesk.com/blockchains-alone-wont-fix-facebook-problem/

They criticized Steem for many things, concluding that Steem could not succeed with its many flaws. This is an OK point of view to have, and I am fine with them saying this, but their reasons were not based in fact and did not hold up to any real scrutiny.

After CoinDesk explained Steem, they wrote this:

But let's be clear: blockchain-based models are nowhere near ready to subvert the entrenched social media industry.

Any truly decentralized blockchain won't have the on-chain capacity to handle the masses of data and billions of posts that any large-scale system would run.

This is completely not true. The Steem blockchain handles the large amount of data just fine, and looks like it will scale in the future. The big reason for this is Steem’s unique block confirmation system: Delegated Proof of Stake. This means that people can vote on who should create and confirm the blocks using the tokens they have in the network.

This means that even if I don’t have the resources and/or time to create my own full node to confirm blocks, I can vote with my Steem Power on who gets to. People who are trusted by the community are voted for, and even though not everyone can own their own node, as it could require a large amount of storage space, etc., everyone can have a say in who confirms the blocks, making it in fact more decentralized than, say, Bitcoin and Ethereum.

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One limitation can be seen with the upvoting model in Steemit, which rewards top voted stories with steem tokens and which invariably results in posts about Steemit itself rising to the top of the trending ranks.

What is the one thing everyone on the Steem platform have in common? They have a vested interest in Steem and want to hear future updates and development of their favorite interfaces, etc.

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The model, intended as a decentralized, censorship-free way to distribute funds for popular content while allowing advertisers a way to buy more favorable positions in the feed, appears to have created another self-reinforcing echo chamber. It's not composed of Trump voters or Trump haters but of steem HODLers.

While many people on Steem do support the coin, most people who own cryptocurrencies that I know on the platform don’t even have any Steem in their portfolio, or only a small percentage made up of Steem. And what are the top 2 tags on Steemit? Life and photography, which are definitely not the tags steem and steemit!

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Moreover, as a number of critics of blockchain-for-social media point out, the technology on its own won't protect the privacy of user data.

Steemit doesn’t track nearly as much as Facebook does! Steemit only knows what is publicly available on the blockchain.

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Once users place it in an open platform, any outside party can mine their data and do what they want with it. Even if user names are anonymized, artificial intelligence and network graph tools make it easy to uncover real-life identities.

Facebook provides the same amount of data to outside parties. You can just look at someone’s Facebook page and see when they post and when they vote. As long as Steem users are responsible about not revealing too much to the public, it is fine.

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I hope you enjoyed this post, and make sure to comment on your opinion! If you think your followers will like this, then resteem!