Steemit is an American blockchain-based blogging and social media website. Users can gain a cryptocurrency, more specifically STEEM, for publishing and curating content (i.e. posts). Users can also be rewarded with STEEM based on their comments. The company is owned by Steemit Inc., a privately held company based in New York City and a headquarters in Virginia. HIVE is the official cryptocurrency on the successful fork of the main Steem blockchain in 2020. In addition, this fork has many of the features of the main Steem blockchain, as well as a series of original ones, such as badges.
 | |
Type of site | Social media platform |
|---|---|
| URL | steemit |
| Registration | Free |
| Users | 1,238,717 registered users[1] |
| Launched | March 24, 2016 |
| Current status | Active |
Operating principle
Steemit is designed as a decentralized application (DApp) built upon the Steem blockchain, using the eponymous cryptocurrency STEEM to reward users for their content.[2][3][4] By voting on posts and comments, users get to decide the payout of those posts. Users also get "Curation Rewards" for finding and upvoting content that gets upvoted by other users afterwards.[5][6]
History
On 4 July 2016, Steemit, Inc., a company founded by Ned Scott and blockchain developer Daniel Larimer, launched the social media platform Steemit as the first application built upon Steem blockchain. On 14 July 2016, Steemit announced on their website that they were hacked. The attack, according to them, has compromised about 260 accounts. About US$85,000 worth of Steem Dollars and STEEM are reported to have been taken by the attackers.[7] In March 2017, Larimer stepped back as Steemit's chief technology officer and left the company.[8] With the STEEM price dropping during the 2018 cryptocurrency crash, Steemit faced financial difficulties and had to lay off 70% of its staff.[9] In 2020, Steem successfully forked and the HIVE blockchain was created in the process.[10]
References
Further reading
- Guidi, Barbara; Kapanova, Kristina; Koidl, Kevin; Michienzi, Andrea (September 14, 2020). "Evaluating Posts on the Steemit Blockchain: Analysis on Topics Based on Textual Cues". Proceedings of the 6th EAI International Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good. GoodTechs '20. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 163–168. doi:10.1145/3411170.3411248. hdl:11568/1054609. ISBN 978-1-4503-7559-7.
- Thelwall, Mike (December 2018). "Can social news websites pay for content and curation? The SteemIt cryptocurrency model". Journal of Information Science. 44 (6): 736–751. doi:10.1177/0165551517748290. hdl:2436/620844. ISSN 0165-5515.