Steem has given out $70,000,000!
Most of these alternative social media sites are asking for money, conducting public raises and still rely on banks/PayPal.
These websites popping up aiming at censorship resistance are setting themselves up to fail simply by the methods they are going about it. And it amazes me that most of them pretend to act as if Steem does not exist. Or if they do acknowledge Steem, it's in a hateful way.
Exhibit A:
This is from there FAQ on their site for crying out loud!
It's all a diversion game. The masses don't know what decentralization is or how much it matters. These new social media sites can slap up the words "unstoppable" & "decentralized," and content creators and consumers will be none the wiser. This is a terrible trap because as a culture, we're already divided; YouTube, Google & Facebook saw to that. To have round two with all of these hollow alternative sites, like balloons waiting to be popped.
Steem is the real deal, Holifield. No one can ever take Steem down. You can spin up a new UI to view Steem data quicker and easier than anywhere else. Steem is a liquid cryptocurrency that is censorship resistant, free transfers in 3 seconds; thus, never needing the approval of a bank or payment processor.
Steem does not accept donations because it's a blockchain and not a company or human. Steem, the blockchain, gives money and never takes it. The community uses that money to build and spread the platform. It's the first online DAC - and C as in community, not corporation. Steem has been trucking along for three + years, dishing out value every day without ever skipping a beat.
Alternative sites get praise and publicity for having their patron/PayPal shut down, well I ask, why do they even rely on the legacy system in the first place? It's like the good child being unnoticed but the bad child getting all the attention. Steem went about this decentralization in the right way, quietly humming along.
Steem is obviously, hands down the best way to create a decentralized social media site on the planet, yet the fake sites get more publicity and Steem gets all the hate. This is not a coincidence, and just as Bitcoin was smeared, so is Steem.
Steem isn't in competition with anyone but itself. If people were wise, they would be leveraging Steem to create truly unstoppable dApps. Cloaks and smoke only last so long, and what remains is a solid foundation. Steem is the bedrock of how we will build our online futures.
When the dust settles and we're still around, we'll tell them all: "You should have built on Steem!"