The string of bad news hitting Facebook have some questioning; is this FaceBook’s “MySpace” moment? News reports surfaced today that 14 million Facebook users’ settings were made public from May 18 to May 22, while testing a new feature to be released on the platform. Facebook’s reputation has been severely damage due to fake news, spam and clickbait advertisement. Furthermore, Facebook and other traditional centralized social media companies have profited handsomely off of their users meta-data which does not help from a PR stand-point.
The issue of data privacy is a hot topic in 2018 and could be the catalyst for decentralized content publishing platforms like Steem to step in as a replacement technology. The Steem network delivers powerful design features such as on-chain governance built into the protocol. Steem has the potential to up-end social media and the entire content publishing industry.
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Twitter and Facebook have been experiencing declines in user growth. In particular, Facebook is losing young people at an alarming rate. According to an article published by Insider Business, Facebook has experienced a -20.7% decline in users between ages 11 - 24 years old. Facebook has lost its appeal to young people and the platform’s reputation is only getting worst. The only saving grace for Facebook is Instagram which has seen exponential growth since its launch, from 1 million users during the first two months on the market to 800 million users by September 2017. In 2012 Instagram was acquired by Facebook an estimated $1 billion.
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Only time will tell if Steem will be able to scale to size of an Instagram which has 800,000,000+ users on its platform. Currently Steem has only 1 million accounts registered on the blockchain. Nevertheless the opportunity for Steem to disrupt the current social media landscape is enormous. The technology is impressive. Steem has demonstrated so far that it can scale, with the most transactions of any blockchain including Bitcoin. Steem’s main-net just went live in June 2016.