There are huge fundamental differences between sites like Facebook and Steemit. Where Facebook provides it's users a little glimpse into the social and personal lives of others, Steemit provides concrete journalism on the crypto-sphere. Where twitter provides the current activities of its users and celebrities, Steemit lets its users share their personal and professional experiences. Where reddit provides karma, Steemit provides Steem. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are very big differences behind the curtains that if I get into, I'd spend the rest of this post rambling on and on and on. So I won't do that. Instead I will get into what exactly sets it apart and why its well on its to establish its very own place among the social media giants.

K is for Karma, S is for Steem

If we look at reddit, we find that for some reason karma is valued like gold there. Anyone who gains enough karma becomes instantly well-known in the community. Although, the karma is absolutely useless, it has no use except that it makes you ahem... famous. In the community. Take for example. GallowBoob. If you ever had a chance to visit reddit's frontpage, there is a quite big chance that one of the posts on the top were submitted by GallowBoob. He is immensely popular in the community. There is even a website that sees if he's on the front-page or not. There is little doubt that everyone who uses reddit knows him. But does he gain anything from it? Of course, if he does it for pleasure but if he had spent the same time here on Steemit, posting that content on here, I only imagine what could've happened.

In comparison to Steemit, reddit falls flat. Steemit excels where reddit has failed. I think that one of the biggest and major downsides of reddit is it's circle jerking community. They circlejerk so much that to a new user, the lies start to become the truth. They first look at the how many votes it has and how many positive comments the post has. If it has the right amount that passes the check in their mind, no matter how fundamentally and logically wrong a story or even a comment is, they start to follow it blindly. I call it the Reddit Hug Of Circlejerk. You can probably come up with a better name but right now this will suffice.

There are few who realize how ridiculous the replies and thread is and try to post the correct answers there but they get downvoted into oblivion. The circlejerkers rule in that thread and it is theirs to keep. Cunningham's, law for some reason, doesn't apply to reddit 80% of the time.

Cunningham's Law

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.

You post the wrong answer and it becomes the right answer. That's reddit for you.

I personally believe that reddit is a volatile community. Every other day, new drama stirs up on that website. Last year it was Ellen Pao, today it's Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The community starts to ask for the resignations of reddit heads. Ellen Pao left last year and today they want spez to resign. What kind of community does that? The reddit community is infected with an internal incurable disease. The only cure would be to shut down but who wants to be unemployed. Reddit is in no way a bad website or even a bad community most of the time but when it does get bad there is simply nothing that can be done to stop them. Censor them and they start posting about censorship and adblock. Reddit lives on ad revenue like other websites eg. imgur. They probably suffer big losses when most of their traffic starts to use adblock. It's almost as if the users of reddit want the very same site to shut down on which they are posting. It's the most self-destructive and volatile community that I have come across.

The reddit circlejerk

But it does it's job. Social media's purpose is to become an addiction for it's users. And it completes its objective perfectly. It keeps users coming back time after time, as it offers excellent entertainment and at times slight educational value. But what good is a website without a good community?

Steemit, on the other hand, offers large educational as well as entertainment value. It incentivizes the time and effort that authors, writers, analysts and commentators put into their work which ultimately encourages them to produce more quality work. This not only keeps the community steady, but also helps the professional writers and bloggers to publish their work online and make some money to support themselves. It becomes a kind of a job for the people that use it while for some it begins to become an addiction. These two things prove that not only Steemit fulfills its purpose but also that STEEM, the life of Steemit, also accomplishes what it was supposed to do.

As a social media network, Steemit's job is to keep it's users glued to their screens for hours upon hours. While as a crypto-currency, it's STEEM's job to provide support to the very same writers, developers and bloggers that drive the platform forward. They both succeed in their missions amazingly and brilliantly. Not only this, but one of my favorite things about Steemit is that along with writers, the readers and voters also get to have an interaction with the post that they are reading. The readers and the voters determine which post is good enough to trend and which one isn't. They decide which content ultimately helps the community and which one doesn't.

Communities make websites and social media, not code. Atleast not technically.

By negating the recent circle-jerking and the "uprising-against-the-admins" social media culture, Steemit proves that it has the most non-volatile community currently in existence. And that it dwarfs twitter, facebook and reddit by miles. In my very honest opinion, the worst social media that you could currently think of is facebook and not just because of the tons of stupid shit that's on their but some other reasons that I also won't get into. Maybe I'll do another post solely on these kinds of topics in the future.

For now, Steemit is, in my opinion, currently dominating the social media industry. It has proved itself to not be another reddit or tumblr clone; it has proved that the innovation of this idea stretches upto Pluto and no one is it's match. Make no mistake, Steemit has come to stay.

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