What it is: SteemIt is a new social network that pays contributors using cryptocurrency.
Facebook dominates the social network market even though they weren’t first. Earlier social networks like MySpace and Friendster should have dominated, but Facebook took over. The next question is what will take over Facebook?
Right now, Facebook has to worry about fake news and misleading posts. Unless Facebook fixes this problem, they could risk losing their dominance to a social network rival like SteemIt. Unlike Facebook, the basic idea behind SteemIt is to pay contributors for their posts. People vote posts and the most popular ones get paid in Steem cryptocurrency.
Of course, people could vote false and misleading news posts, but hopefully the masses can outnumber the deliberately malicious people who support and distribute lies and falsehoods. By paying people for contributing to the SteemIt network, SteemIt provides a built-in incentive for people to join and profit from their contributions.
If more people join and use SteemIt, they might still stay with Facebook or they might abandon Facebook altogether. After all, if someone is paying you to contribute on SteemIt and someone is not paying you to contribute to Facebook, what’s the incentive to stay on Facebook?
Just building a carbon copy clone of Facebook and hoping to attract people isn’t realistic because Facebook already has users and no one will have an incentive to switch to a rival network that doesn’t offer anything that Facebook doesn’t already offer. However, SteemIt’s cryptocurrency payment feature could be the enticing feature that draws people to using SteemIt. The more people using SteemIt, the more people will hear about it and use it until it builds critical mass like Facebook and suddenly everyone decides they need to be on SteemIt just like most people today feel a need to be on Facebook.
There’s always the possibility that SteemIt will simply wither away and linger in the shadows, but SteemIt offers the first real chance for a social network to rival Facebook in a long time. With the growing interesting in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, the idea of earning cryptocurrency for posting on SteemIt gives it a good chance of succeeding where other rival social networks failed.
Could Facebook lose its dominance so quickly? Maybe, considering how fast the technology world changes. If MySpace could lead their lead to Facebook, there’s nothing say Facebook can’t lose their lead to someone else. It might be SteemIt, it might be another social network, or it might never happen at all. The only certainty7 in the technology world is that you can be sure that life will never stand still.
To learn more about SteemIt, click here.
