Steem definitely has the potential to rival other social media platforms, @charles1. The real question is will it? Possession is 9/10ths of the law, as they say. It is King of the Hill, and to wont go down without a fight.
FB also has, as you state, billions of dollars with which to wage war against its adversaries. They can buy advertising. They can buy other media outlets. They can add new services and features that rival Steem or other platforms. Facebook will not let go their grip on consumers without a fight.
Perhaps more importantly, being better isn't always the key to success. Was VHS better than Beta? Blue-Ray superior to HD-DVD? Being first has its advantages. People are resistant to change, and so, asking them to change their connect provider after they've already made a significant personal investment in their current one, may be a difficult sell. (All my pictures are already on FB... All my memories...)
Steem may very well go on to dominate all the other Social Media outlets, but the road will be fraught with challenges. In addition to being better, they'll need to out-advertise, out-innovate, and out-wit the giants of our era. That, my friends, will require an investment of time, money, and intelligence that perhaps we haven't yet truly considered or understand.
Upvoted and I follow. Cheers to Steem!
Good point, I agree with you hence why I indicated that it will take time and a lot of things need to be done. On the other hand, we should never underestimate the power of disruotive technologies especially power of money ie when the masses see that they will make money in a platform than facebook then will move over in millions!!! since signing up on steemit, my friends and I rarely go to facebook and Linkedin because we at least get some revenue on steemit-that will be the case if many people on face book (not all) know about the opportunities here, however it will take some time and cost money in advertisement. Furthermore, Facebook structure (with its greedy share holders ) is fraught with greed and will never share revenue with members which is a limitation in the era of blockchain technology. See my older post for info abot the next update https://steemit.com/investing/@charles1/why-you-should-stop-powering-down-and-rather-buy-more-steem-now
I like your "All my memories..." comment, and would imagine that someone will write a "Facebook reflector" which will take all your posts and comments, and reflect them to another social media site. This one, of course, but I'm also thinking of the more general case. Just saving them locally would be helpful; their "download my account" has very little of "what I typed" in it. Would be nice to have my posts, and especially my comments on other peoples' posts (which wouldn't be uploaded by the tool, those would be in the "save locally" portion).
VHS was "better" than Beta in the sense that most movies could fit on a single tape; Beta often had two. It did have superior picture quality, but the added expense of having to make two tapes for many movies had a negative effect. And you're right -- better marketing often trumps better quality.