Steemit, Hive & Reddit: Tokenized Social Networks

Steemit is a decentralized social network where contributions to the network get rewarded with network tokens. It runs on the Steem blockchain, a special-purpose blockchain that provides a public infrastructure for the decentralized social network.

Disclaimer: The governance rules of Steemit and the underlying Steem blockchain are subject to frequent protocol changes. Documentation is patchy and some facts are hard to research. In order to fully grasp the current governance rules, one has to read the current code. Some facts mentioned in the following chapters might, therefore, be out of date or inconsistent. They should nevertheless help paint a picture of the complexities of the system. At the time of writing the book, the Steemit network split in a new continuation (Hive) driven by the core community and is subject to current events. Even though the network seems to be on the decline, it nevertheless serves as a tangible use case for the exploration of best practices and worst practices for tokenizing social networks.

Steemit is a decentralized application that runs on the Steem blockchain. As opposed to Web2-based social media applications, Steemit has (i) no advertisements; (ii) all data is public on the ledger, which means that no single institution owns your transaction data; and (iii) contributors to the network are rewarded with network tokens. How much you get paid is a function of the number of your contributions, and the popularity of your contributions. Steemit is permissionless, allowing any user to join for free. Sign up is either by email or phone number and manually verified by an administrator. Alternatively, one can pay a fee to create the account. Both procedures intend to create an effort/cost for account creation, in order to combat spam, bots, and name squatters.

Steemit is probably the first and longest-running decentralized application. It was conceptualized in 2015 and has been operational since 2016. At the time of writing this book, the network has over one million registered users, 25,000 posts, and 100,000 comments, and 1.4 million transactions on the Steem blockchain per day. It is therefore one of the more seasoned projects in the crypto community. Steemit went online about the same time that the Ethereum network emerged, which was before it was possible to create a decentralized application without having to create your own distributed infrastructure. From today’s point of view, the Steemit protocol seems too complex and outdated. Back then, however, it was a visionary project that was ahead of its time. The project founders created their own special-purpose infrastructure (the Steem blockchain with the native token, STEEM) and their own stable token (STEEM dollar). Today, this level of complexity would not be necessary, given that anyone could build a decentralized social network on a smart contract network such as Ethereum, and use one of many publicly available stable tokens. The founder, Dan Larimer, also created “BitShares” and the “EOS” blockchain network, which both use “Graphene” as a consensus mechanism. The Steem blockchain also uses Graphene and provides an infrastructure for the Steemit social media network, as well as for other decentralized applications such as (i) “d.tube,” a decentralized video platform similar to YouTube, and (ii) “d.sound,” a decentralized audio streaming service similar to Spotify or Soundcloud. Both d.tube and d.sound use the Steem blockchain to enforce their smart contracts, but have less users and traffic than Steemit. Video and sound files are stored on “IPFS,” a decentralized file storage protocol. While Steemit has many design flaws, it provides an insightful use case for understanding tokenized and decentralized social media applications.

Problems in Social Media Today

Over the last decade, social media has become an important part of how people communicate with their peers and consume information. With the emergence of social media, traditional media has become de-professionalized. Everyone can contribute and curate content to influence public opinion, simply by creating a social media account. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit replaced newspapers, YouTube replaced television, and swiping and scrolling has become the new channel hopping. As these social media platforms gained traction, they transformed from an open space for free expression into an oligopoly of a few big players.

In the early years, the curation process on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter used to be in the autonomy of the user. This autonomy was replaced by data feeds based on algorithms developed by the platform providers, and the feeds are now being injected with an increasing number of ads. Social media platforms have become the curators of our content and are in full control of our data feed. Very often, these socially engineered data feeds are programmed to retain the user on the platform as long as possible, make them addicted, and optimize advertising revenue, often giving priority to posts with more popular content and repressing fringe posts that don’t get as many likes (read more: Basic Attention Token & Token Curated Registries).

While users contribute with valuable content and curation services, they have no way to directly monetize their contributions to the network. Furthermore, content that is posted on those platforms is subject to potential censorship and control by the companies that operate them, and in some countries, even by government authorities. Users can be prohibited from posting specific types of content, and user accounts can be deactivated any time. Data privacy and control is another issue of these Web2-based social media platforms. Personal information and user behavior, such as content preferences, buying patterns, sexual orientation, race, gender, or political views, are tracked and stored on the servers of the companies that provide those social media services. That data can also be passed on to other companies and institutions. While such data collection mostly serves as the basis for generating advertising revenue from targeted advertising, it has also been used for political manipulation, and could serve as a basis for character assessments and social profiling. Incidents such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where personal data was passed on to other institutions who subsequently used the data to manipulate voters in the 2016 US presidential election or before Brexit referendum, have eroded the trust of the general public in the social media networks.

Token Economics of Steemit

Decentralized social networks such as Steemit have (i) no data monopoly, meaning everyone has access to all transaction data, which is publicly visible on the Steem block explorer, and (ii) no advertising revenues are necessary, as the network is collectively managed by (iii) contributors who get rewarded with tokens for their contributions to the network. To find or tag content, one can use “tags and topics” that help sort content into individualized streams. As such, Steemit is much more similar to Reddit than Facebook. Users are rewarded for contributions to the network with three different types of network tokens: “Steem,” “Steem Dollar,” and “Steem Power.”

Steem (STEEM) is the native token of the Steem blockchain. As with any native blockchain tokens, the tokens are transferable and new tokens are created every day.

Steem Power (SP) is a reputation token designed to reflect one's influence in the social network. Anyone who opens a new account receives an initial amount of SP tokes. After that, one can be rewarded for contribution to the network in SP. Alternatively, SP can be bought with Steem at a 1:1 ratio. This process is referred to as “powering up.” The more SP one has, the more one’s contributions to the network are rewarded. If someone with a lot of SP upvotes a post of another user, that user will get rewarded with more tokens than they would receive if another user with less SP upvoted their content. SP can be converted back into Steem, which is referred to as powering down, but the process is intentionally slowed down to thirteen weeks to keep users from selling their tokens all at once to prevent price crashes and market manipulations.

Steem Dollar (SBD) is designed as a stable token that is pegged to the US dollar in a 1:1 ratio. It can be bought on the open market or earned (fifty percent of the reward for contributions to the social media network are paid out in SBD). Once earned, these SBD tokens can be: (i) cashed out; (ii) held; or (iii) converted into Steem and then sold on the open market after a 3.5-day conversion process to avoid “arbitrage attacks.” Since SBD is designed to have a stable price, SBD token holders miss out on Steem price increases. To incentivize SBD token holders to hold onto their SBD, they receive 10 percent interest per year. This interest rate is variable and can be changed in a protocol upgrade.

The Steemit network has three different types of users: (i) content creators: publish content; (ii) active users: curate content by upvoting (liking) the content, and (iii) passive users: consume content. A content creator can publish a post but will only get rewarded with tokens if and when the post is upvoted by other users (content curators). If a post performs well, a curator who upvoted this post will earn more SP than for upvoting a less popular post. Rewards are paid out from two reward pools and distributed in a mix of the different tokens, Steem Power and Steem Dollar, and this distribution is determined individually by the content creator. Rewards are only paid in the first seven days after content is posted. After that period, the post will still be online, but one will not be able to earn rewards with the post anymore. Anyone can post and upvote content, therefore contributing to the collective curation of content.

The exact amount of tokens earned is a function of the number of upvotes a post receives, and also a function of the amount of Steem Power the curators making the upvotes have. If a curator has 2,000 Steem Power and another has 20,000 Steem Power, the effects of those two upvotes will be different. To incentivize quality content, the number of upvotes a user can perform within a certain period of time is limited. To add to the complexity, if the same user decides to upvote several posts, the weight of each vote will diminish, depending on how much time passes between votes. The network recharges voting power by 20 percent a day. The idea of both mechanisms is to prevent vote spamming and incentivize quality decisions. In reality, however, in order to earn more tokens, people vote for content they expect to be popular, such as memes, and not necessarily what they would regard as quality content.

The Steemit application runs on the Steem blockchain network that uses “Delegated Proof-of-Stake” (DPoS)” as a consensus algorithm. DPoS is a variation of Proof-of-Stake where the community of token holders on the underlying blockchain network votes for 21 so-called “witnesses” to which they delegate their STEEM tokens. The witnesses verify transactions and create blocks on behalf of the token holders who delegated their tokens to them. When it comes to network performance, DPoS is much more scalable than Proof-of-Work, which is a prerequisite for a social network with thousands of transactions per second.

The Steem blockchain consistently creates new STEEM tokens, which are added to a “rewards pool” from which token holders will be rewarded according to the governance rules defined in the protocol. According to the current governance rules, 15 percent of the newly minted STEEM tokens are awarded to the people who hold SP, 75 percent go to content creators and curators, and 10 percent of the new STEEM tokens are paid to witnesses. The initial monetary policy of the STEEM token was highly inflationary in supply, almost doubling every year. Due to community pressure, the inflation rate of STEEM was adjusted to 9.5 percent per year. At the time of writing the book the inflation rate of STEEM is 9 percent, and it will decrease by 0.5 percent every year.

Criticism of Steemit

While Steemit and the underlying Steem blockchain infrastructure are a great use case for how we can redefine social networks, the economics behind the token design have a few fundamental design flaws. Furthermore, since all data on the Steem blockchain is public, anyone can create decentralized applications with this data to create useful tools for the Steemit community, such as “Catch a Whale”[^1] or “Steem Market.”[^2]

• Open Data: As opposed to Web2 social media platforms, all transaction data on the Steemit blockchain is public and transparent to everyone with simple chain-analysis. This means that anyone can inspect what happened when or who did what in the Steemit ecosystem. As such, Steemit is less like Facebook (where only your friends can see what you publish), but more like Twitter, Medium, or YouTube, where everyone can see what you did. Alternative cryptographic algorithms like multiparty computation[^3] or zero-knowledge proofs[^4] and additional obfuscation techniques need to be implemented in the protocol to provide more privacy by design[^5]. The current trend in the Web3 community to build more privacy-preserving blockchain networks seems to have inspired Steemit to develop a roadmap for obfuscating at least some of the public data.

• Reputation can be bought with money: Steemit originally intended to design a social media network for quality content. However, due to the design flaws of the reputation token, there are currently many issues with incentivizing and providing quality content. While Steem Power (SP) was supposed to be a reputation token, it is based on oversimplified assumptions of how network actors behave. The token mechanisms don’t take into account tragedy-of-the-commons or short-term economic thinking. Reputation tokens, in the form of Steem Power, can be bought with fiat money. Users who are willing to invest a considerable amount of money in Steem Power can, therefore, bootstrap their network power and earn more money more quickly than users who try to organically build up reputation. This rather simplistic token design is based on the assumption that those who have more tokens, a.k.a. stake in the network, are automatically incentivized to contribute to the network with the best quality content or curation activity. Furthermore, the design of the reputation token does not take into account that different users have different interests, and that individual tastes are relative. Any meaningful reputation token design probably needs to be subjectified, instead of being a universal metric for all users in the network. Over the years, these design flaws have led to a monopolization of power by a few wealthy token holders, creating large power asymmetries in the network. Whether or not it pays off economically to contribute to the network depends on current exchange rates of all tokens, and is also a function of your own SP. Recent network analysis shows that only 2 percent of posts get noteworthy returns, most of which probably do not offset the costs of production, which is largely also a result of the power asymmetries.

• Power Asymmetries: There seems to be a lot of intransparency around the state of token distribution, which is odd for a blockchain-based application. Steemwhales.com and steemd.com have published distribution charts at some point in the past, but stopped operations. The current level of intransparency around this topic is striking, as exact numbers are hard to research, mainly as Steem Power and Steem Dollar are convertible, and lists thereof are weirdly ranked or have been abandoned. Any online request concerning this topic is answered by bots providing non-answers (check sources at the end of the chapter). The only reliable numbers are from several years ago, when the top ten token holders controlled 79.3 percent of SP, 85 percent of Steem, and 45 percent of SBD. Based on the available numbers, the median users hold an average of roughly 2,000 SP or less, while high–net worth token holders, also referred to as whales, hold 2,000,000 SP. Please note that it is unclear if rich-lists published are up to date, and that there is no distribution graph to be found. The available lists (see links in references) have little documentation. It is safe to assume that this power divide has widened in the last two years, based on the current incentive design that favors large token holders to make proportionally more tokens in one contribution.

• Bots & Vote Selling: In theory, the incentive mechanism was designed to encourage users to create and curate relevant and quality content. The reality of the network activity has shown that the reward model very often encourages the creation of clickbait-style content driven by bots. While there is some bot prevention, related to the process of account creation, Steem Power is a transferable token, which means that it can be delegated from one user to another. This has led to the emergence of bots programmed to upvote posts based on their potential profitability. Bots can split the reward with the token holders that delegated their SP to them. As a result, curation of content on Steemit is often not based on quality but optimized for maximizing profits. Content is produced to be potentially profitable, and creators can take into account which content will likely be noticed by high-reputation curators and bots. Bots can upvote other bots to create circular feedback on profit expectations, taking into account that a vote is more profitable if it’s cast relatively early, and in a case that more votes will follow. Other challenges of Steemit’s governance design are vote-selling and bullying by wealthier members, as well as the monopolization of influence to set policy, overt control by large token holders, and forced censorship.

• Self-upvoting: Steemit allows users to self-upvote one’s own posts, and this has been subject to many discussions in the network. Opponents criticize the bias in the act of self-upvoting, as it reduces the quality of the curation process. Proponents say that not upvoting your own content means diluting your own stake, and giving your power only to other users. Furthermore, they argue that if users want to self-upvote and are no longer able to, they will simply create a second account.

• Governance of content: Content on Steemit is not being moderated or censored. Some see this as a lack of governance. While some members of the community favor “censorship-resistant decentralized applications,” others criticize the lack of moderation of content, especially when it comes to child pornography. On the other hand, it seems that some users have been banned from Steemit for “Terms of Service” violations.

• Key Management: Usability of wallet software and key recovery is important. Blockchain-based systems don’t allow for centralized password recovery. Steemit users who lose their passwords, and don’t have a backup, lose access to their funds. As long as social key recovery solutions are not in place, secure key management will be a bottleneck to user adoption.

• User attraction & retention: While many early Steemit users joined the network for ideological reasons, a large majority of users are one-time users only, or make a few posts and never came back for several reasons: It takes time to build a following before you can start earning money with your contributions. Furthermore, the current distribution inequalities in the network, which are a result of the token incentive mechanisms that favor first movers and large token holders who have a disproportionate number of network tokens, don’t make it attractive for users to remain on the network.

Steemit Hard Fork: Hive Network

In February 2020, Steemit Inc. was acquired by the Tron foundation, which manages the Tron blockchain. Community members of the Steem ecosystem expressed concerns about this takeover and the new leadership, in particular about the CEO Justin Sun who, among other things, proposed a plan to migrate STEEM tokens to the Tron network. The biggest concern, however, was that with this takeover, the Tron Foundation also gained control over an estimated twenty percent of the total supply of STEEM tokens that the community colloquially refers to as the “Steemit Inc ninja-mined stake.” These ninja tokens were pre-mined years ago and distributed to the founders of STEEM, who now sold Steemit Inc. to the Tron foundation. While the ninja tokens had always posed a threat, they had never been actively used (such as for voting on Steemit upgrades). In the past, the STEEM community was confident that the network founders would not misuse the tokens to take control of the network. However, due to mistrust of the new owners and fear over a potential power grab, STEEM witnesses almost immediately executed a soft fork of the Steem blockchain using votes of network users that had been delegated to them.

With this soft fork, ninja token addresses were blocked from future activities to seize control over the network. The community voted for this soft fork to prevent the new owners (the Tron Foundation) from using the ninja tokens. The witnesses justified the soft fork as a “temporary protective protocol to maintain the status quo currently established in regards to Steemit Inc's stake and its intended usage […] and its continued use of the assets it controls.” Early in March 2020, a community-led fork failed because the Tron foundation coordinated with a handful of token exchanges to retroactively undo the soft fork with the STEEM tokens of users tokens hosted on those exchanges. This misuse of user token by the exchanges was highly disputed.

Instead of fighting over power within the Steem network, a secession was conducted by the core community via a hard fork. Mid-March 2020 saw the fork of the Steem blockchain protocol and the Steemit app into a new network called “Hive.” All ninja tokens controlled by Steemit Inc. were censored and will not be reflected on the Hive network. All other network tokens are being ported to Hive. All the blogging data from the Steemit application has also been ported to the Hive network. It will depend on each single blogger to decide which applications to use in the future, Steemit or Hive. If bloggers continue to post on Steemit, their new posts will still be managed by the Steem blockchain; if they choose otherwise, their new posts will get posted on the HIVE network. In theory, all other applications running on the Steem blockchain, such as “Splinterlands,” “Steemian,” “d-tube,” and “d.sound” could, in theory, also migrate to the Hive network.

The takeover and subsequent soft-fork and hard-fork demonstrated the decentralized nature of blockchain networks and also showcased potential attack vectors with Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. What was originally intended as a decentralized social network proved to be prone to centralization efforts, both on the side of Tron foundation’s takeover and their collusion with the exchanges who used the tokens of their users to conduct votes (without prior consent of their users). It also showed the power of witnesses, who acted as the ring leaders of these forks.

The Tron foundation CEO perceived the forks to be an act of “malicious hackers” violating the “sanctity of private property” and censored around 4500 posts and comments related to the Hive hard-fork. However, given the diaspora of bloggers to Hive, the Tron foundation and the exchanges involved in blocking community activities later backtracked their decisions and moderated their tone. The new Steemit Inc. owners admitted that they had censored Steemit-based posts that discussed the Hive hard-fork and justified it with preserving private interests. The diaspora of users forced the new owners to put out a blog post in an attempt to regain trust, saying that they wanted to “put governance back in the hands of the community as soon as possible [...] and to convince users to come back to the Steemit project.” The whole conflict reflects the cultural change between the Web2 and the Web3, and shows that some individuals and institutions are still struggling to understand the decentralized nature of the Web3 and the paradigm change regarding centralized control.

While Steemit has paved the way for a new era of social media networks, demonstrating how we can rethink social networks in a tokenized economy, the design flaws are considerable. If Steemit or Hive want to survive, they will need to change the token economics and eradicate the inequalities in power structures and design a reputation token that is tied to a user's identity. Otherwise, new content creators will have a hard time getting noticed in the system. While the Steem blockchain and the Steemit application have continuously adapted the governance rules, taking some of the community’s feedback seriously, the token design flaws might be too fundamental. New competitors, such as “Akasha,” “all.me,” “Belacam,” “DLive,” “E-chat,” “Golos” “Minds,” “Mithril,” “5media,” “Social X,” or “UUNIO,” might provide more resilient token economics in the years to come.

Reddit: Tokenizing Web2 Platforms

“Reddit” is a Web2 social media platform for topic oriented discussions - subreddits - and comes with a contribution rating system. The subreddits represent user-created boards that help to channel discussions around a variety of topics. Users can submit their comments which can be upvoted, downvoted or commented upon by other users. The ranking of a post’s visibility is determined by the number of up-and downvotes. "Karma" points determine the user’s reputation in the network. Reddit was originally founded in 2005 and has over 2 million subreddit communities^6 and is ranked in the top 20 most visited websites worldwide.^7 In May 2020 two subreddits - r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR - with over 2.4 million users announced the launch of their own subreddit tokens - MOON and BRICK - that will each be managed by the Ethereum network. Both tokens could be seen as a test use case for tokenizing all subreddits with their special purpose community tokens. The tokens will be initially managed by the Ethereum testnet “Rinkeby” for a few months before migrating to Ethereum’s mainnet. “Reddit Vault” is an Ethereum wallet integrated into Reddit’s mobile apps and communications with the Ethereum network. Both tokens are designed to be transferable, and users can send their MOON and Brick tokens to any other ERC-20 compatible wallets. The tokens also come with special voting rights within the community, however, it is still unclear how such a voting process will look like. In this initial design, the tokens can be used to animated emojis, exclusive badges and to reply to Reddit comments using gifs. The monetary policy of the tokens varies and can be determined by the community of each subreddit, at least to some extent. This means that each subreddit community will have certain control over the properties and function of the token (issuance rate, minting process, voting rights, transferability, utility properties.) “r/Cryptocurrency” announced that MOON tokens have a fixed issuance rate per month, 5 million MOONs, which will decrease by 2.5% every month until a total of 250 million is reached. “r/FortNiteBR” has not specified an issuance rate for their BRICKS tokens. At the time of writing this book it is still unclear if or when exchanges will list the token. With this move, Reddit is the first Web2 based social media network that has officially announced to tokenize their social media activities. It is likely that other existing social media networks will follow soon. The greatest challenge will be to design the token so the desired purpose of the economic system created by the token cannot be gamed.

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Chapter Summary

Steemit is a decentralized social network where contributions to the network get rewarded with network tokens. It is a decentralized application that runs on the Steem blockchain. As opposed to Web2-based social media applications.

Decentralized social networks such as Steemit have no data monopoly, meaning everyone has access to all transaction data, which is publicly visible on the Steem block explorer, and no advertising revenues are necessary, as the network is collectively managed by contributors who get rewarded with tokens for their contributions to the network. How much you get paid is a function of the number of your contributions, and the popularity of your contributions.

Steemit has three different types of users: (a) content creators: publish content; (b) active users: curate content by upvoting (liking) the content, and (c) passive users: consume content. Users are rewarded for contributions to the network with three different types of network tokens: “Steem,” “Steem Dollar,” and “Steem Power.”

While Steemit and the underlying Steem blockchain infrastructure are a great use case for how we can redefine social networks, the economics behind the token design have a few fundamental design flaws. Due to the design flaws of the reputation token, there are currently many issues with incentivizing and providing quality content. While Steem Power (SP) was supposed to be a reputation token, it is based on oversimplified assumptions of how network actors behave.

The token mechanisms don’t take into account tragedy-of-the-commons or short-term economic thinking. Reputation tokens, in the form of Steem Power, can be bought with fiat money. Users who are willing to invest a considerable amount of money in Steem Power can, therefore, bootstrap their network power and earn more money more quickly than users who try to organically build up reputation. Furthermore, the design of the reputation token does not take into account that different users have different interests, and that individual tastes are relative.

The reality of the network activity has shown that the reward model very often encourages the creation of clickbait-style content driven by bots. While there is some bot prevention, related to the process of account creation, Steem Power is a transferable token, which means that it can be delegated from one user to another. This has led to the emergence of bots programmed to upvote posts based on their potential profitability. Bots can split the reward with the token holders that delegated their SP to them. Bots can upvote other bots to create circular feedback on profit expectations, taking into account that a vote is more profitable if it’s cast relatively early, and in a case that more votes will follow.

Steemit allows users to self-upvote one’s own posts, and this has been subject to many discussions in the network. Opponents criticize the bias in the act of self-upvoting, as it reduces the quality of the curation process. Proponents say that not upvoting your own content means diluting your own stake, and giving your power only to other users. Furthermore, they argue that if users want to self-upvote and are no longer able to, they will simply create a second account.

As opposed to Web2 social media platforms, all transaction data on the Steemit blockchain is public and transparent to everyone with simple chain-analysis. This means that anyone can inspect what happened when or who did what in the Steemit ecosystem. Alternative cryptographic algorithms like multiparty computation or zero-knowledge proofs and additional obfuscation techniques need to be implemented in the protocol to provide more privacy by design.

In March 2020 there was a hostile takeover and a contentious hard fork where the community forked into a new network called “Hive.”

New competitors, such as “Akasha,” “all.me,” “Belacam,” “DLive,” “E-chat,” “Golos” “Minds,” “Mithril,” “5media,” “Social X,” or “UUNIO,” might provide more resilient token economics in the years to come.

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Chapter References & Further Reading

• Adams, Colin: "Steemit Review: How Does It Work And Can You Really Earn From It?", Invest in Blockchain, March 20, 2018: https://www.investinblockchain.com/steemit-review/
• Barbaras, C.; Narula, N; Zuckerman E.: “Decentralized Social Networks sound great. Too bad they will never work”, https://www.wired.com/story/decentralized-social-networks-sound-great-too-bad-theyll-never-work
• Cadwalladr, Carole; Graham-Harrison, Emma: “How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool” 17 Mar 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorith
• Cadwalladr, Carole; Graham-Harrison, Emma: “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach”, 17 Mar 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
• De, Nikhilesh: “Steemit Sets Up Shop on Tron Network, “ Feb 14, 2020, retrieved from: https://www.coindesk.com/steemit-sets-up-shop-on-tron-network
• Dale, Brad: "Steem Community Plans Hostile Hard Fork to Flee Justin Sun’s Steemit" Mar 17, 2020, retrieved from: https://www.coindesk.com/steem-community-plans-hostile-hard-fork-to-flee-justin-suns-steemit
• Dale, Brad: “Justin Sun Bought Steemit. Steem Moved to Limit His Power,” Feb 24, 2020, retrieved from:https://www.coindesk.com/justin-sun-bought-steemit-steem-moved-to-limit-his-power
• Donnelly, Jacob: “Steemit Bridges Blockchain and Social Media, But How Does It Work?”, Aug 26, 2016: https://www.coindesk.com/security-token-trades-on-regulated-platform-in-market-first
• Frost, Liam: “Community-led fork of Steemit is outperforming its predecessor Hive, a hard fork of decentralized social network Steem, is already outperforming its parent blockchain.” Mar 28, 2020, retrieved from:https://decrypt.co/23854/hive-decentralized-fork-outperforms-steemit
• Harper, Colin: ”Reddit Is Launching Ethereum Tokens For Its Subreddits,”Forbes, Crypto & Blockchain, May 14 2020: https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2020/05/14/reddit-launches-ethereum-tokens-for-subbredits-in-new-community-points-campaign/
• Kharif, Olga: “Reddit Launching a Cryptocurrency to Reward Users for Engagement,” Bloomberg, Cryptocurrencies, 15 May 2020, retrieved from: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-15/reddit-launching-a-cryptocurrency-to-reward-users-for-engagement
• N.N.: "Steem An incentivized, blockchain-based, public content platform" June 2018: https://steem.com/steem-whitepaper.pdf
• N.N.: “Steemitboard.com”, Ranking: https://steemitboard.com/ranking/index.php?p=0&s=vests
• N.N.: ”Steemit FAQ”, https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_Steemit_com
• N.N.: ”Steem Upvote Bot Tracker”: https://steembottracker.com/
• Redman, James: "Free from Tron: Steemit’s Blockchain Fork Hive Outperforms Steem Token Value, MArch 30 2020, retrieved from: https://news.bitcoin.com/tron-steemits-fork-hive-outperforms-steem/
• Thelwall, M. “Can social news websites pay for content and curation? The SteemIt cryptocurrency model”, Journal of Information Science, 2017
• Usman W. Chohan: “The Concept and Criticisms of Steemit”, Feb 23 2018, Electronic copy: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3129410
• @arcange: “Steemit Statistics – 2018.07.30”: https://steemit.com/statistics/@arcange/steemit-statistics-20180730-en
• @blocktrades: “Why I won’t be compromising with Justin Sun by blocktrades,” steempeak.com steem, retrieved from: https://steemd.com/steem/@blocktrades/why-i-won-t-be-compromising-with-justin-sun
• @chasad75: “2018 Best and Most Profitable Bots on Steemit”: https://steemit.com/steem/@chasad75/2018-best-and-most-profitable-bots-on-steemit
• @capgains: “Major Problems With STEEMIT That Sadly go Ignored”: https://steemit.com/steemit/@capgains/major-problems-with-steemit-that-sadly-go-ignored
• Chohan, U. “The Concept and Criticisms of Steemit”, 2018
• @hisnameisolllie: “STEEMIT Statistics, WEEK 3”: https://steemit.com/steem-stats/@hisnameisolllie/steemit-statistics-week-3
• @ibrahimmurtaza: “Top 50 steemit user who has highest steem power”: https://steemit.com/ cryptocurrency/@ibrahimmurtaza/top-50-steemit-user-who-has-highest-steem-power
• @Initforthemoney: “Steemit’s Three Major Problems”: https://steemit.com/steemit/@initforthemoney/steemit-s-three-major-problems
• @liberosist: “Steem Power distribution trends - Steemit is becoming more democratic, diverse and equal! A detailed analysis,” : https://steemit.com/steemit/@liberosist/steem-power-distribution-trends- steemit-is-becoming-more-democratic-diverse-and-equal-a-detailed-analysis
• @ned; @theoretical: “Smart Media Tokens A new way for publishers to monetize their online content and community, based on battle-tested blockchain technology”, https://smt.steem.com/smt-whitepaper.pdf
• @nickypapers: "Basic Attention Token: Everything You Need To Know" Steemit, Category: bitcoin: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@nickypapers/basic-attention-token-everything-you-need-to-know
• u/jarins: “Introducing r/CryptoCurrency Moons,” r/CryptoCurrency, May 2020, retreived from: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/gj96lb/introducing_rcryptocurrency_moons/
• u/jarins: "Introducing r/FortNiteBR Bricks," r/FortNiteBR, May 2020, retreived from: https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/gj8tm1/introducing_rfortnitebr_bricks/
• Akasha: https://akasha.world/
• DLive: https://dlive.tv/
• E-chat: https://investors.echat.io
• Golos: https://golos.io/
• Hive: https://hive.io
• Minds: https://www.minds.com/
• UUNIO: https://uun.io/
• d.tube: https://dsound.audio/#!/feed
• d.sound: https://d.tub

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Footnotes

[^1]: “Catch a Whale” is an application that tracks what large token holders (whales) have voted for.

[^2]: “Steem Market” lets users buy, sell, and rent goods with Steem.

[^3]: Multiparty computation is a cryptographic effort that allows several servers to jointly compute an output without any single server knowing all the inputs, and can help anonymous aggregated advertising.

[^4]: Zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic schemes that allow a party to verify a solution with as little to no information conveyed as possible. Usually, applications here are confidential transactions, and allow proving authenticity without giving up personal details. Another possible use case could be in proving applicability of ads to publishers without giving up personal data.

[^5]: Privacy by design refers to efforts undertaken when designing a system to protect privacy in all possible steps, rather than neglecting privacy and trying to find ways to implement it later.