What makes steemit more resilient than other platforms like Reddit?

Besides making cryptocurrency with your posts that is. The main attributes that strengthen Steemit over its competitors are its open, un-censorable and decentralized platform based on the blockchain and its talented, diverse userbase. How can the system differentiate itself from major sites like Reddit? Quite strikingly.

With all upvotes and downvotes recorded on the blockchain for all to see, it's easy to know who voted for what. Each vote is actually worth something - compared to a Reddit upvote worth absolutely nothing. This makes people more thoughtful about what they upvote, and discourages too much bot voting. This is actually key, because it proves the fairness of the game for all watching, there is no back-end fiddling with downvotes and upvotes to decide what goes to the front page. Only the users decide on Steemit - there are no mods, just whales.

Does anyone know really how many upvotes are real or legitimate on sites like Reddit? They can be bought in packages of 1000s for the cheap. Setting up similar bot accounts for Steemit would be much more costly, and time consuming. Even if people disagree on the fairness of the game (like the reward shares or voting power), it allows them to co-ordinate better and use their voting power in groups much like parties in a healthy democracy. Of course, most democracies don't say one steem power equals one vote in their constitution, but every system has its idiosyncracies.

In the end, the open voting of Steemit may prove to be an interesting experiment. It seems like it hasn't encouraged flag-wars of voting and counter-voting, just collaboration and mutual upvoting, a way of showing respect for fellow users. With an open wallet, transparent voting and blockchain solidity and immutability, Steemit is a one of a kind social network with some vast improvements over its dinosaur competition.