In short, I like to think of steem as a cryptocurrency where content creators are similar to bitcoin miners (mostly them, Witnesses as well, as we see in the picture). So it's the first crypto where Proof-of-Work is not just solving some kind of algorithmical problem, but also doing something productive like creating or curating content. Which makes a lot of sense.
Offtopic: bids api example link in bot owner config returns "Cannot GET /api/bids". Is there any other docs around? I'd like to add new bot to steembottracker, and I want it to be nicely integrated with the platform. Thanks.