The cryptocurrency world is still surprised at Steemit's unexpected sucess. As usual, who never heard about Steemit before think it is a classic 'pump & dump' scheme with no real use case and therefore no inherent value. In a second approach, they may begin to understand why it is more probable that Steemit is here to stay for the long run.
It's not that the idea of a social related cryptocurrency is original at all. Sometimes you may have a great idea, the 'best idea of the world', but if you lack the resources or will to further develop it, it will never really happen or someone else will achieve it.
Let's take for example ReddCoin (RDD). Reddcoin was conceived like 2 years ago to be a social network coin aka "The Social Currency".
Here a 2014 roadmap for ReddCoin:
and an explanatory video:
The Idea
What was the central idea of ReddCoin? The central idea was simple: people are posting content on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit (hence 'ReddCoin') and whatever other social networks so that people should be rewarded for their content (actually ´tipped´) by the people who appreciated that content. Therefore ReddCoin was proposed as the means for that end.
Why it failed?
The traditional social network business is to offer people a free platform for their content in exchange for selling ad space to the audience that content generates to a third party. ReddCoin would need specific app's to be integrated into those social networks and users would only then directly reward the content providers on those networks. The problem is unless Facebook (or Twitter or any other platform) decides to officially integrate a ReddCoin rewarding app there would be no network effect for ReddCoin itself as a rewarding tool on those platforms. In other words the mere existence of a social platform content rewarding tool does not necessarily mean that the users of those platforms have easy access to the tool or even are aware it exists.
Basically there is no tool awareness, the original idea is good, but the project fails.
Steemit: learning from others mistakes
Now, two years later, the idea of rewarding people for their content on social network platforms is still a good one. Most content providers still haven't heard about cryptocurrencies, but are more than aware what a dollar is. So Steemit provides a "Steem Dollar" (SD) that is easily converted into real dollars at least on a 1:1 ratio. So the idea of "tipping" evolved into an easy understandable monetary system. You don't need to guess how much the content provider is being "tipped", also if the content is appreciated the concept of being "tipped" (meaning small values) evolves into the concept of being REWARDED. This means content that is judged as good content (at least from Steemit's ecosystem point of view) is rewarded with an actual real amount that makes a real difference, not just the usual 2 cents.
Steemit has its own platform, so it doesn't depend on others to viralize the Steem Dollar (SD) rewarding tool. It also develops a specialized cryptocurrency (STEEM) and an idea to provide stability for the ecosystem (the STEEM POWER mechanism).Now that Steem Dollars (SD) and STEEM are viable rewarding tools for rewarding social media content and independent from established social platforms, there is nothing stopping those platforms to offer the possibility of rewarding their users with this tool.
Those are the reasons why Steemit succeeded where ReddCoin failed.