Steemit, the decentralized social network rewarding people for their posts and votes online, has reached the 100,000 user milestone in just its fifth month of operation. The popular platform, leveraging custom-made Blockchain technology, has begun to redefine social media by building a living, breathing, growing social economy; a “small town” community where users are getting rewarded for their time, effort and creativity through digital points called Steem.
Steemit has also leapt to half a million unique monthly visitors in September, and is now experiencing similar signs of growth to Facebook and Reddit in their early days: In October 2006, 16 months after Reddit was founded and acquired by Conde Nast, the company reported 2.1 million unique monthly visitors. Steemit reported 550,000 unique monthly visitors in less than a third of the time. In December 2004, Facebook recorded 1 million users in its first year. Steemit, after five months, has 100,000.
CEO of Steemit Ned Scott said:
“It’s tremendous to have met company milestones well before we thought we would, especially this early in our development, and its all testament to the thriving community and the technology that underpins our platform. While its nice to receive praise and comparisons to well established social media platforms, we have a much different objective, and that is to remove the element of centralization or the single point of authority, and give the power, influence and rewards back to the people.”
Steemit is quickly becoming the blogger’s favorite destination, with mainstream social media features recently added, and retention rates at an all time high. Its Blockchain, Steem, is now the second most used Blockchain by transaction volume after bitcoin, boding well for a promising Q3 and Q4.
Scott added,:
“We’re retaining a very large core group of contributors who see the potential for Steem as a new paradigm in social networks and online communities. Also, we will soon be opening up sign-ups through SMS verification. It’s a tool that will allow us to make the process much simpler and familiar to new users while continuing to be effective in resisting sybil attacks. This means a lot of great things, including a simplified account recovery process, improved user experience for new users and the ability to offer additional reputation badges.”
Despite its rapid rise, Steemit has seen some early adopters criticized for holding too much voting power on the platform.
Scott said:
“We are proposing a first of its kind solution, Curation Guilds, to the community to distribute voting power amongst many active curators such that the best authors and content are truly being rewarded. Whales will in essence delegate their voting power to many individuals instead of casting their power upon posts by themselves. Through this process, we’re very excited to see the power be distributed into the hands of those who can use it to create a web experience that is organic and competitive with some of the best content sites on the internet.”
