Social Media Sites Similar to Steemit

xervantes (60)in #steemit • 7 years ago (edited)

After reading a great article by @infobunny (here), I decided to give some of the other social media platforms like Steemit a try. Until now I have only been focused on Steemit. I was interested in what the other sites could do for me.

Divide and Conquer

There is a trend of new Social Media sites focused on rewarding authors and creators for their efforts. Conventional Social media is all about reaping the rewards while the people who post, comment, like or upvote the posts actually do all the work.

We can divide the new Social Media sites into 2 categories:

Sites that reward authors and creators by sharing the ad revenues
Sites that use cryptocurrency to reward authors and creators

The contenders

I decided to compare the following sites by registering, configuring my settings and posting my first blog.

The sites I tried were:

Akasha

Very similar to Steemit, it uses a upvote reward system, but instead of Steem they use Ethereum

oNG.Social

Uses a share-in-the-ad-revenue system. I understand that they are going to use their own cryptocurrency system in the future but I saw no option to get paid in coins instead of fiat.

Patreon

You get patrons to give you money to support your creations

Akasha

Well, this is going to be a very short review. Akasha uses an app that you have to download from Github. At first I was annoyed but my curiosity got the better of me and I downloaded the .exe file. When I tried to install the program however, my antivirus program (Symantec) popped up and blocked the installation and immediately moved the file to quarantine.
That concluded my first test...

oNG.Social

This site has a very Facebook-like interface. You can create groups specifying your subjects. I proceeded to make a gaming group called "Casual Gamers" so that I could post a Gaming story just to see how it worked. Making a group was not too difficult, you needed to name the group, add a short description what the group is about. You can add an avatar and banner to give the group some flair.
Posting something is quite simple, again a lot like Facebook. Just add text to the "Share what's new" line in your group and add links, pictures or videos.

There are ads on top and to the right of the pages, these ads will determine your rewards. You can even choose which ads you want on your page, unfortunately the choices are quite limited at the moment. If someone clicks the add you will get 10% of the revenue, there is an option to increase the revenue to 80% but when I tried to go to the page to upgrade my settings I was redirected to webpage displaying the "404 error" message.

Now for the main event, how do you get paid?
The site has a "bank" where you can view what you have earned thus far.
You can choose how you would like to get paid, Paypal, bank transfer, echeck, wire transfer or just a plain check. I went for Paypal because for some reason I could not enter my last name, the site kept insisting that my last name is "1". This prevented me from linking my bank account to the site so that I could transfer my earnings to my bank account. I contacted support and am still awaiting their response.

A nice feature is that you can immediately share your content on other social media sites like Reddit and Facebook. However I read that this is a paid service and is only free for 1 month after that the service will cost $47. This was not the only paid service that the site offers.

Check out the cool gif of Mario and Luigi playing pong

The good
The site is easy to navigate, there is nothing complicated here. It will remind you a lot of Facebook with the exception that you get paid for generating traffic. Upon registering you get a $10 bonus which is always nice.

The bad
The site still has some issues, not being able to upgrade or fill out my last name. The site doesn't seem to have many active users, maybe it was a bad time, but it felt "quiet". You also get paid for something called "Impressions" , I tried to find out exactly what impressions were but I could not find any information about it. At first I thought that Impressions stood for views but I was wrong. I made about 2 cents with almost 600 impressions which is nice but It would be good to know how the site works so that you can improve your earnings.
Also paying for extra services up to $700 seems a bit too much. My guess is that this will put off a lot of people.

Patreon

When I registered for Patreon I did not exactly understood how the site worked. I guessed it was just like Steemit and had to post to receive my rewards. Well, I was wrong. On Patreon, you can either give support (Patron) creators or get support (supporter). You can become a Patron and give other creators money for their endeavours or you can lay out your projects and present these to the Patrons and if they like it you will get their support (aka money). So me just posting will likely go unnoticed because I haven't put in the time to find Patrons.
However I think this is a great concept. You can find people to finance your projects, art, or whatever and they will pay a monthly fee.

If any Patreon Patrons are reading this, here is the link to my Patreon page

The Good
A great concept, get backing for your projects and creations. For the people, by the people. Easy interface to navigate and an active community.

The "Bad"
Actually nothing but praise for Patreon. But it just wasn't what I was looking for. I want to post and when people find my post and like it they can give me their feedback, upvotes or likes. Finding a patron is nice but it does nothing for my visibility as an content creator. I will try to find Patrons and see if maybe I missed something. If so I will report back with a follow-up.

Conclusion

First of all, Steemit is not perfect. The markdown and cryptocurrency hurdles are still too high for my friends to join and I can completely understand that. But compared to the competition, Steemit is still "Streets ahead"(a little Community humor). The community is very active, friendly, supportive and always trying out new things. Posting is straightforward and if you have a basic knowledge of cryptocurrency it is easy to revert you coins to cash (if you wanted to).

For me oNG.Social suited my needs the best for crossposting and generating traffic for my Steemit posts but in my search for sites like Steemit I also learned something valuable.

If you are thinking about crossposting in an effort to generate more traffic. Medium and especially Google+ are your best bets. If you post on Google+ you will be easier to find because Google ranks it's social service high in the search engine.