This is a chapter from the Token Economy book series. All subchapters are collapsed under their subchapter headings to make the page more readable. Find copyright information on this text and about the book an the end of the page.
<aside> 🦚 Steemit was a decentralized social network that introduced the concept of using tokenized rewards for social media contributions. It operated on the Steem blockchain, a special-purpose blockchain that provided a public infrastructure not only for Steemit but eventually also for other decentralized social networks of the time. Steemit was very successful in its peak years, and arguably the first decentralized Web3 application with significant user traction, but it suffered an exodus of users mainly because of unsustainable token economics. Eventually, the Steemit ecosystems split in a new continuation (Hive), which was driven by the core community for political reasons. This hard fork serves as a textbook use case for when and how political secessions in DAOs happen and what implications such a secession can have. Today, neither Steemit nor Hive have significant user traction anymore. The reason why I still selected them as a use case for this book is that, at the time of writing, no other tokenized social network has outperformed Steemit in certain metrics – and also because there is much one can learn from the failure of Steemit.
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Disclaimer: The governance rules of Steemit and the underlying Steem blockchain were subject to frequent protocol changes. Documentation was patchy, and some facts were hard to research. In order to grasp the governance rules, one had to read the computer code of the respective protocols implemented, which few people had the capacity to do. Some facts mentioned in the following chapters might, therefore, be inconsistent. This chapter should nevertheless be helpful in painting a big picture of the complexities of the Steemit system in particular, as well as the necessities and pain points of social tokens in general. To give an outlook into the future of social tokens aka “SocialFi,” I will outline emerging Web3-based social networks such as “friends.tech” as well as Web2 networks that have ventured into the social token space, such as “Reddit.”
<aside> 📖 This is an excerpt from the book “Token Economy: DAOs & Purpose-Driven Tokens” Author: Shermin Voshmgir
LICENCE: Copyleft 2024, Shermin Voshmgir: Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.
For commercial use contact:Â [email protected]
BibTeX: @book{title={Token Economy: DAOs & Purpose-Driven Tokens}, author={Voshmgir, Shermin}, year={2024}, publisher={Token Kitchen} }
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