The blockchain is the technology behind it. And yeah, there's money involved which always complicates everything, but from my perspective steemit is first and foremost a distributed content platform with a matriocratic reward system that supports an active community. It's broken in all sorts of ways (that @ned should be fixing) but not nearly as broken as Facebook in others.

And I am not in it for the money. I would actually be making a lot more running campaigns for clients on Facebook. :)