What Are Steem and Hive? | Blockchain Today

What is Steem?

Steem blockchain was created to power the Steemit network.

Steemit is trying to change how social media works. Unlike platforms like Facebook, where users are not paid a financial reward for the content they create, Steemit rewards the content makers.

In addition to the creators, curators are also an essential part of the Vox community. Users who support voting and help rate the quality of content are called "curators" in Vox.

Curators are also rewarded at Vox as they help maintain the quality of the content!

That's what Steemit and decentralization are - power in the hands of the community.

How does Steem work?

The concept is interesting as it offers many unique advantages over the social media we are used to. For this reason, 2017 saw a tremendous rise in the price of the token.

However, while it may look exciting, it is currently facing some pretty severe problems. If the platform doesn't overcome these challenges quickly, then it will just be another social media platform with missing potential. Let's take a look at the key issues that the Vox platform is currently facing.

Voting process

Curation of content through voting is one of the most significant aspects of Votes. Steemit is the cryptocurrency awarded to content creators directly related to it. Unfortunately, it is easy to write a few lines to create a spam voting bot.

To make matters worse, Steemit has openly shared the measures it has taken to combat bots. With this information, coders can easily make bots look like real Steemers.

It would be fair to say that the Steemit team did not take enough action to address this issue.

On the other hand, if you look at Reddit, you will see that resisting measures have been taken to fight this voting game and stop the bots. All their calculations and models are hidden to make it difficult for coders to create working bots.

Even with these hidden calculations, Reddit still faces the problem of fake voting accounts and has to keep updating. So if Reddit is struggling even with its hidden computing, Steemit will have to get actively involved in the game if they want to stop the problem.

It might be a good idea to reward users with a Steem coin for their contributions to content creation, but that also has many drawbacks. The biggest problem is that users are so driven by a financial perspective that the whole idea of knowledge sharing is compromised.

Steemit was supposed to be a great place to connect with like-minded people, but now it has evolved into a competitive space that feels more like a workplace. Users now see this as an opportunity to make money, so their views have completely changed.

People don't share freely, but rather try to come up with viral material that will help them get as many votes as possible. They don't end there - money is a powerful motivator and can trick people into doing wrong things, such as building bots to fraudulently raise their fortunes.

The same is the case with curators!

Instead of appreciating something genuine and good, they are looking for an article that gets the most votes and, in turn, increases their chances of making more money.

When an activity is monetized, it often loses its primary purpose. If the exchange is monetized, people will stop sharing what they like and value. If you monetize comments, people are more likely to just comment on what they think will make the most money.

That is the sad truth about Steemit nowadays.

Of course, not every user does this. But there are many of them.

When money is involved, people usually start thinking. It can also be said that this system attracts the wrong users. The type of users who don't hesitate to turn a blind eye to morality or ethics.

That brings us to the next problem - plagiarism.

Plagiarism

One of the saddest results of monetization is that even plagiarism is rewarded.

In many cases, original stories do not get the credit they deserve. However, they are quickly replicated and can generate significantly more interest. That is because most curators just want to be part of the stories that are going well.

Thus, not many of the curators are concerned about the fact that the replicated story appeared later than the original. Duplicate content is their least concern, as their chief focus seems to be on making money.

Perhaps the worst thing about this situation is that it kills the interest of real users. It is the experienced marketers or bot creators who begin to control the platform and accumulate more cryptocurrency.

That can lead to a lack of original content. That is not what Steemit was created for - it completely contradicts some of its core principles.

While Steem has been able to create a marketplace for itself as a pay-to-publish place, it needs to address these issues as soon as possible. How Steem addresses these issues directly affects its future, and can also directly affect the price of the Steem coin.

Steem Coin

The coin saw an enormous jump in value on July 20, 2016, when it surged from $ 0.27 to $ 4.34 in one week. As a result, Steem had a market capitalization of $ 384.5 million. The USA, only Bitcoin, and Ethereum are ranked third.

As you can see in the chart below, it failed to hold the rally for a long time, and the price dropped to a low of $ 0.12 in November 2016.

However, in January 2018, the coin hit a new high of $ 7.28. That's an increase of roughly 4.853% when compared to the January 2017 price of about $ 0.15.

Like most other cryptocurrencies, the price dropped later in Q1 2018. Since then, the rate of the Steem coin has not risen and is currently trading at around $ 2.85.

A factor driving the price drop is that more coins are added every day to reward content creators and curators. Users who receive coins also cash them out. That is one of the reasons for the creation of Steem Dollars and Steem Power in addition to Steem.

What is Hive?

Hive was created after Steem was forked. It owns state-of-the-art digital currency mining facilities in Canada, Sweden, and Iceland, which produce newly minted digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum continuously. Our deployments provide shareholders with exposure to the operating margins of digital currency mining as well as a growing portfolio of crypto-coins.

Comparison of Hive and Steem

Steem fundamentally serves as the basis of Steemit; Hive’s comparable platform is Peakd.

However, both platforms also host several unattached third-party DApps.

Steem and Hive rely on delegated proof-of-stake consensus (DPOS), which allows the token holders to vote for block witnesses. These witnesses govern the blockchain and make decisions.

Steem decentralizes power to some extent by allowing the token holders to vote. However, Hive aims to replace the point of centralization that allowed TRON to buyout the voting process. Hive’s solution is the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF), which allows users to suggest proposals, fund those proposals, and cast a vote for their favored changes. Unlike with Steem’s reserve of ninja mined funds, Hive’s fund is set up so that no actor (or group of actors) can have sole administration over immense changes.

Of course, both of these platforms have their pros and cons, so it's up to you to choose which one suits you the best.