RE: What the Hell Is Steemit, Anyway?
Well Steemit is just a single website within the greater ecosystem of Steem the platform. Steemit and the several other frontends are focused on content publishing similar to Medium. While Medium has centralized curators hired by the company to find and curate content, anyone on Steem can curate as well as produce content.
People on Steem congregate on both Discord and Twitter to socialize beyond the comment sections of posts. Discord also is a good place to create Steem centered podcasts with live audiences.
Steem truly is a growing ecosystem which is becoming like a mini internet of its own with the various use cases, written content, video content, sound content, gaming content, virtual reality content etc.
The biggest mistake I think we make is trying to define it in terms of existing categories. There are elements of most of those categories within the ecosystem. I think the one thing that is missing from most frontends though is a 'wall' where people can post those short statuses. That would bring some real social into the system.
These are all great points. I completely agree that we can't define Steem in terms of existing categories. Maybe that's the real answer to the question in my post: not that Steem doesn't fit into some traditional categories, but that it's really something unique and that it's in a category of its own.
I like thinking of the Steem blockchain as a mini Internet, like you said. I think we're just starting to see its potential beyond blogging/socializing, and I can't wait to see what comes next.