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What is it about steemit that makes it so different from other social media platforms?

Well, there are a number of things like the fact that it works on the blockchain and the fact that you get paid for posts. There is even a major or perhaps even more fundamental difference in these.

When using other social media sites, most of the times you're using or consuming the service for free and at the same time the value of you as a user is extracted, analyzed and then used and put at least to serve ads. These ads are where most of these other sites make their money and are also how independent content creators on these sites make money as well.

With Steemit, content creators are paid based on having their work recognized and liked by the steem community. These creators are not having to run ads on their contents in order to be compensated for their work. At the same time, steemit is not currently showing ads on the site and for my initial research, the majority of steemit's revenue appears from mining the steem blockchain.

As more users come to steemit, use the steem blockchain and demand for steem, the more value the steem tokens will gain.

Where does the value of steem come from?

Users on steemit have a reason to value steem. The reason is that if you're on steemit and you have steem, you have the ability to convert this steem into SteemPower which will directly influence the amount of money you can make on your posts, comments and upvotes. So there is a demand for steem from both users creating and consuming content on steemit.

As the steemit platform continues to grow and attract more users, steem will increase as well. Since these rewards from steemit take the form of cryptocurrency tokens, they can be traded on financial markets where there is the market for buyers and sellers to buy and sell steem based on anticipation or speculation about where the price will move in the future. So the value of steem is determined by whatever value the players in the market assign to it.

What can you do with steem, SBD and SP?

With steem tokens, you can PowerUp to SteemPower which will give you more influence in the steem community and allow you to earn more for your contribution and interactions. You can also trade steem for other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum. You can convert each of these currencies; that is to say steemit and steem dollars for one another. SteemPower, on the other hand, we know it is more limited in terms of what we can actually do with it because it's sole purpose is to be a measure of influence within the steem network. So depending on what your individual objectives are, you may have more reason to accumulate, purchase or hold one of these over the other.

Regards,
@brayan256