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Review on Steem by sam lieberman
There are extraordinary aspects to this - it's a fully functional socialβ¦
There are extraordinary aspects to this - it's a fully functional social network which is decentralized on the blockchain. It works, unlike 99.9% of crypto projects. It works well and fast.
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But there are issues, and only time will tell if these will ever be addressed.
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Pros
- - It is a fully functional, blockchain-based, decentralized social network. This alone is incredible. - The basics are simple: There are posts, with comments. Each post has up to 5 tags. You can search by tags. You can upvote or downvote any post or comment. - The transactions are faster than almost any other blockchain right now. You can send directly to a user with just his username, no need to copy and paste addresses. - There is an enthusiastic and growing user base with communities and projects popping up all the time. - There are quite a few security features that are nice: you can put your steem into "savings", which makes it so that it takes 3 days to get it if you want to withdraw. So even if your account is compromised, they can't just take it. Same thing with Steem Power. - A social network is the ideal form of DPoS (delegated proof of stake). This is because the witnesses post and you can interact with them and see who they are. Also, since the users earn through content, the witnesses don't need to pay people to vote for them. This makes it so that people vote for witnesses that they like.
Cons
- - There was a very sketchy and seemingly dishonest pre-mine, which resulted in the founders holding more than 40% of the Steem in existence. Ned Scott admits to this on the episode of the podcast Epicenter where they interview him (google it). Many believe the number is a lot higher. They are constantly moving money through many different accounts. This is worrisome and troubling in many way, in particular in terms of centralization. The founders may own more than 51% of all steem, which means they essentially own the network and can vote in whichever witnesses they want at any time. - People are able to "game the system" by creating multiple accounts and upvoting their own content. The fact that the amount of Steem Power you hold directly determines the worth of your upvote is problematic. There are cases of rich users upvoting their own mediocre or worthless content and getting rewarded, and there is little anyone can do aside from downvoting them, but there is no real incentive to do so. - The use of bots to buy votes has made the platform very artificial feeling at times. All the "trending" articles are simply the articles written by people who spent the most on vote buying. - Anyone can build a UI on top of the public blockchain, but there are still no good mobile apps, and the only decent web UIs are steemit.com and busy.org, both of which leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability. - The coin system, with steem, steem power, and steem dollars, is extremely confusing for newcomers. - The Steemit development team doesn't seem to be active beyond developing Smart Media Tokens, which may or may not even come to anything.
