We have earned $1500! Early adopters of Steemit, received the first reward for their contribution. The payout of $1.3 mln fell on Independence Day in the US.

“This was an opportunity for us to thank our growing community, to reward them for building a sustainable ecosystem that’s much more than the sum of its parts,” — Steemit CEO Ned Scott said in a press release.

The payout was provided 50/50 in Steem Dollars, the native cryptocurrency units worth roughly one US Dollar, and Steem Power that enhances voting abilities on the platform.

According to Steemit, the number of its registered users has doubled in June, after a record-breaking 1600% growth in May. The platform plans to introduce some new features in the near future, such as an embeddable Steemit button for sharing the content throughout the internet. During the next 12 months, the platform developers are going to launch side chain plugins allowing to create a decentralised app-store “similar in appearance to Facebook or Google’s, but based on decentralized, provably-fair technologies and new business models.”

The success of Steemit is due, among other things, also to the ability to engage users in advertising the new platform through all possible channels. A good example of their advanced marketing strategy is the publication of the ebook Steemit 101: Discover How to Make Money and Haven Fun on the Social Media Site that Pays YOU to post and Vote on Content. The work was written not by the Steemit team but by four members of the community who claim to have earned “several thousand dollars for posting content that became popular” within their first month on Steemit. Their names are Tom Janowicz, Renaud Gagne, Leah Stephens and Richard Kaplan.

The authors of Steemit 101 also criticised corporate-owned and controlled centralised social media and singled out Facebook as the most notorious example of all that:

When big companies come calling, Facebook and other social media sites are only too happy to sell them data they have gathered on their own users. They gladly sell advertising to these companies. Advertising is content that someone has paid to put in front of you. And Facebook is happy to let big corporations dictate the content that Facebook’s users see first. …Why would Facebook and other social media sites sell out their users this way? Even if the Facebooks of the world began as tiny, innocent startups with good intentions, they now are owned by mega-banks, corporations and rich individuals. These owners and shareholders demand constant growth and increased profits; truth and privacy are lower priorities. …In their world, people are money. Users are a commodity to be mined for information…

The alternative, that is Steemit, has been described in almost utopian terms:

Imagine a social media site that rewards people and not greedy shareholders. …Steemit is controlled ONLY by its community members. There is no agenda. Most certainly, there is no large corporation or government calling the shots. …We still believe in the free and open market place of ideas. We believe that when differing opinions are allowed to compete against one another, everybody learns more about those issues and perspectives. Everybody has a chance to discuss and debate ideas. May the best idea win, and may everyone treat each other with respect and understanding.

While Steemit is very much about creating an autonomous, free and safe space for discussion and self-expression, and should not be viewed simply as “a money-making opportunity,” its economic model is what sets it apart from other similar initiatives, says its CEO and co-founder Ned Scott as quoted by Core Media:

There are many great projects in the blockchain and social media space, but Steemit is different in that it brings a new economic model to the table. The model is a sort of fountain of youth, similar to the mining rewards of Bitcoin, rather than a tipping or revenue sharing model. Steemit users are rewarded by the Steem blockchain itself. The blockchain tallies posts by their votes and then rewards the best poster and their voters accordingly. Because of this, Steemit can be an ad-free, decentralized social media platform where anyone can get rewarded just by posting or finding good content.

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