Urdu community Contest / S2W1 - Social Media Platforms: Why Steemit is my Favorite | by @ononiwujoel

Hi friends, it's another season of the steemit engagement challenge and I'm glad we can participate in this community. The subject of discussion is very interesting as it centers on steemit in comparison with other traditional social platforms to discuss differences and ideas of improvement. This is my entry below

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SOCIAL MEDIA BACKGROUND

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Media is a very important part of our society as it helps spread news of events making it easier to understand things happening around us. The social media was introduced by Six Degrees platform in 1997 which displayed the potentials of social networking. After which popular social media services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram caused major breakthrough in the social media world.
Social media has made the world seem like a little village as people can easily connect to each other over long distances to share ideas, messages and other content. It has become a viable means for adverts and group gatherings without having to meet the other party physically.
Social media has also become a better alternative for authentic news and sharing of opinions on issues freely as there has been several cases of mainstream media being used to propagate opinions without room for counter opinions but with social media news can always be questioned.

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MY DAILY MOST USED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

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Twitter

Twitter is one of the biggest and most popular social media platforms having over 300million daily active users and serving as one of the best platforms for sharing opinions, information and business ideas. Twitter has features that allow people to engage tweets, retweet opinions and chat people directly. As a matter of fact most organisations and popular persons thrive to have a verified twitter handle because twitter has become a powerful social networking tool well recognised by most people.

Benefits I derive from Twitter

• It is very useful for following popular characters and organisations to get firsthand information on opportunities, incidents and trending topics. Twitter uses hashtags to make a popular opinion or topic trend thereby improving the quality of social networking.

• Twitter is user friendly and makes it very easy to share information, adverts and opinions to a large number of people. It also creates room for peer to peer private discussions

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Facebook (Meta)
Facebook also known as Meta remains the most popular and largest social media platform with Billions of active users across the world. Facebook was created in 2004 and has since then continued to see waves of improvement, growing from a little message and media sharing platform to a social media giant having variety of features including content sharing, video games, advertisements, Marketplace, voice/video calls and private chat.

Benefits I derive from Facebook

• I use Facebook for following entertainment contents, friends and colleagues, news and affiliate marketers. Facebook makes it very easy to do the aforementioned through it user-friendly service and impressive network speed.

• Facebook offers a level of protection from harmful content and individuals by providing an option to report uncomfortable messages, content and pages so there is a level of security from trolls and harmful people

• Facebook remains the most low cost social media platform because there is a provision for operating even without data although there are limitations but this is an impressive concept that deserves some applaud

• Due to the popularity and wide adoption of Facebook it is very easy to market products and services to reach more people efficiently than in most other platforms

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WhatsApp

WhatsApp happens to be the most popular social media platform in the country I reside (Nigeria) with almost everyone using the platform. WhatsApp is used for exchanging texts and media content with your contacts, it is very easy to understand and efficient. It has features for texting, group chats, sharing media files (pictures, videos and records), voice call, video call, sharing content on status.

Benefits I derive from WhatsApp

• I literally use WhatsApp round the clock daily for sending messages and files. I also use it for video calls and voice calls

• WhatsApp group chat is very effective for coming to together with people with same objectives. I'm currently in many group chats on WhatsApp ranging from educational to crypto groups

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WHY I THINK SPENDING MORE TIME ON STEEMIT WILL HELP MY GROWTH

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Steemit unlike the previously mentioned platforms is a decentralized social media platform so it operates in a very different way. Steemit focuses on blogging and content creation in such a way that people can curate good contents and hence earn from both content creation and curation.

I joined Steemit in the first quarter of last year and it has really help my growth in some areas including;

• Steemit has helped me financially through the upvotes I've gotten from content creation. As a student, the earnings I make from steemit is very useful for making ends meet in school and solving other personal issues

• The use of Steemit introduced me to the crypto world, Steem is the first cryptocurrency I had and I've been able to learn a lot about Web 3 applications and how to use them via steemit lectures and articles

• Before joining steemit I knew nothing about blogging let alone on blockchain applications but the PoB system used in Steemit has made me a blogger being able to create my own contents efficiently

So these points highlighted above are the major reasons why I will continue spending quality time on steemit.

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ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF STEEMIT IN COMPARISON WITH OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

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ADVANTAGES

• Steemit is structured in such a way that people can earn real monetary value via content creation and curation even without having a large followership unlike centralized social media platforms where you need large followership and engagement to monetize your account/page

• The PoB system used in Steemit promotes original content creation and gives the proper credit the real owners of articles. The PoB also helps counter plagiarism and content farming thereby making the platform safer for bloggers. Meanwhile in other aforementioned social media platforms there is little or no resistance to plagiarism hence thee are many cases of original content creators losing credit for their work to plagiarists

• Steemit runs on a blockchain hence has a strong security system whee accounts and wallets are secure with cryptography making it impossible to hack any account on-chain, meanwhile centralized social media platforms have lower security and there are steady cases of accounts being hacked and manipulated by fraudsters online

• Steemit is a decentralized social media platform hence there is real freedom of opinions and speech. Accounts are fully controlled by their owners as they're the only ones in custody of their private keys. Meanwhile in centralized social media, the platforms are controlled by a central authority who dictates how to use the platform. They even block people for making posts which is tagged inappropriate by the central authority. So freedom of speech in actually nonexistent in centralized social media

DISADVANTAGES

• Steemit is difficult to understand by newbies and lacks several features found in traditional social media platforms like peer to peer messages, video calls, private groups etc. Functions like uploading videos on steemit is tedious unlike other social media platforms where its just few clicks away

• Steemit like other social media dApps are still gaining popularity and is not yet known or used by majority of the population on social media so its less interesting and not really a good idea for marketing as you can't reach so many people like in centralized social media platforms

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CONCLUSION

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The fact that centralized social media platforms has the upper hand in terms of popularity, active users and user friendliness remains true, however, Steemit offers other options that cannot be found in traditional social media like decentralization, PoB, topnotch security and earning from curation. Moreover steemit is still new compared to most other social media platforms so its still growing and a large number of people are discovering the benefits in decentralized social media and are gradually shifting to steemit so it's just a matter of time before we see steemit competing with social media giants.

Steemit has brought several improvements to me personally ranging from the monetary value I've earned to helping me become a content creator and others.

I really appreciate the community and steemit team for this contest and the ability to engage. I hereby invite @gabikay, @whitestallion and @kingsworldline to participate in this contest.

Thanks