'Decentralized Reddit' Steemit Awards $1.3 Million to Users

The social media website Steemit that’s similar to Reddit has just announced it has distributed $1.3 million USD in the platform’s native cryptocurrency Steem. The website’s user base will have a lot more digital currency to earn just by posting original content on the decentralized platform.

Also read: Japan’s Largest Q&A Platform OKWave Adds Bitcoin Services

Steemit Users Rewarded

On July 5, the Steemit (steemit.com) social media platform distributed 10% of the Steem market cap to reward contributors and early adopters of the newly created community. So far there are lots of content submissions with a vast array of subject matter spanning topics such as gardening, politics, and finances.

Steemit, a decentralized social media platform, is celebrating its third month of operation and to make it even more memorable, so the company decided to add this multimillion dollar payout as a milestone.

The CEO of Steemit Ned Scott said during the announcement the distribution has marked a “pivotal moment” for the social media platform. This comes after exponential growth from its user base growing 1,600% from May to June. During June and July, the Steemit community doubled again, says the company, as it continues its path of progressive expansion.

Contributions have come from all over the world including users from “mainstream media, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, social media buffs, and tech-savvy writers.” Scott explains:

This was an opportunity for us to thank our growing community, to reward them for building a sustainable ecosystem that’s much more than the sum of its parts. Yesterday, more than $1.3 million worth of the Steem supply was distributed into the wallets of thousands of users across the world. From every corner, users have been drawn to Steemit because the system actually rewards thoughtful comments, unlike Reddit or Twitter. The community and the blockchain together power a system that gets better and better every day.

So far half of the $1.3 million supply of Steem was distributed in Steem Dollars, which each is worth roughly one USD. The other half of the paid out supply came in the form of Steem Power, which is a cryptocurrency that enables voting power within the social media’s platform. Since the platform is open source and transparent, people can see that things are not being cheated or manipulated. It also keeps the community free from censorship, the team says, and has allowed third party applications to be built with its technology. This includes platforms such as steemle.com (user tracking charts) and steemd.com (category specific threads).

“Because it’s based entirely on a blockchain, Steemit shows what social media can look like without censorship,” Scott continues. “Everything we see on Steemit.com comes from the open source Steem blockchain, so the entire network is replicable on any front-end application.” He adds:

Attempts at censorship can be proven by anyone with a blockchain explorer or another front-end application built on the Steem, so users can feel free to post how they really feel. This freedom is what empowers the Steemit community, and it’s one of the major ways we’re different from centralized, controlling and manipulative social media networks.

Steem Trading Volume Doubles

Scott says that since the payout Steem trading volume doubled to $26 million and at the same time the website’s traffic doubled. The Steemit founder also claims that the company’s developers are steadily working on new features and easy to use applications throughout the Steemit ecosystem.

For instance, a Steemit embeddable button is being designed so it can be posted throughout other blogs and news outlets. Scott says his co-founder Dan Larimer has a broad range of experience building systems such as Steemit from the ground up. They hope that a year from now there will be a vast array of bloggers and content providers pushing the platform to the next level. Scott says the company will be far more robust by then stating:

By the time we get there, we’d like to be much further along in our development of side chain plugins too, which will allow Steem to support a decentralized app-store, similar in appearance to Facebook or Google’s, but based on decentralized, provably-fair technologies and new business models.

Giving Back is the New Black

Steemit isn’t the only social media platform paying out cryptocurrency for content as Bitcoin.com reported on the Latin American website Taringa! in December of 2015. Taringa! paid out US$76,000 in Bitcoin to its 15,000+ content providers using the platform. As well as the Latin American social media outlet there are others operating with similar methods such as Zapchain and the Japanese platform OKWave.

Steemit hopes to continue its growth and seems to be progressing at a fast rate with registrants coming every day, and large sums of payout distribution. Currently, the Steem trading market is number 15 out of 705 different cryptocurrencies according to Coinmarketcap.com. Ned Scott and Dan Larimer hope that someday “there will be many bloggers using the platform to monetize their content without using advertisements.”

Have you tried the Steemit platform? Let us know what your experience was like whether it was good or bad. We’d love to hear your opinion about this new social media experience.

Images courtesy of Pixabay, and Steemit websites