What is Steemit?

Steemit was created in march 2016 by two chaps, Ned Scott and Dan Larimer; it was created to introduce a blockchain based social media platform to the market place.

Steemit is a combination of Redditt, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube combined and presented on one platform.
Steemit was created by an experienced team, Dan Larimer, one of its creators, is also created for creating “Bitshare”.
Steemit combines all of the attributes of the social platforms listed above with the additional unique selling point that Steemit pays content creators monetary reward in the form of a unique cryptocurrency that is peculiar to it, “Steem Dollars”, which can subsequently be trade into the cryptocurrency market place (I am aware that you can also monetise YouTube content and contents on some of the other listed platforms but none of them are as expansive as Steemit).
This is how it works, the platform provides you with the opportunity to upload videos, texts and images and it rewards you for the content that you have uploaded, the rewards are based on a democratised upvoting system, other users of the platform upvote your content depending on how they rate it and you are rewarded in Steem Dollars based on a complex set of parameters.

The rewards work based on a community curating system, you can be upvoted, downvoted (flagged) or ignored and the sort of responses that your content gets determines how high up you go in the hierarchy of the platform, this serves as an incentive to produce original quality content.
The content that you produce is stored on a blockchain in ways similar to how value is stored cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Ethereum, etc.
Steemit has an appended video sharing function called DTube; this is one of the most exciting functions that the platform has to offer. Dtube is a video sharing platform similar to YouTube, you can share original content on it and get rewarded via the upvoting system described above, and the most exciting part of DTube is
that it has the potential, if developed properly, to rival YouTube.
Steemit is probably the most exciting platform to have come onto the social media landscape over the last 1ten years or so, if developed properly it could subsume a lot of the giant platforms that presently loom large over the landscape.