Why i'm ditching Facebook and moving to Steemit

Why i’m ditching Facebook and moving to Steemit. For my Facebook friends: I have moved over to Steemit, and sharing this steem post with you, so you’ll know what i’m talking about. I have been wanting to leave Facebook for a while, not because I don’t care about my beautiful friends, but because i’m tired of how Facebook make squillians from my personal data and give nothing back to me other than allowing me to use their platform. For me, that price is not one i wish to pay any more so i am voting with my feet. (although i will probably just leave my fb up so i can visit friends from time to time).

In case you don’t know, the hours you spend on Facebook writing posts and sharing good content is used by Facebook to collect every piece of information about you and sell it to advertisers. Ever bought something off eBay or looked up accommodation at the beach, and then get bombarded with ads about that in the Facebook sidebar? That’s how it works. Google do the same, following you around collecting valuable information they can sell to advertisers so when you’re on, for instance youtube, same thing happens. I admit, I profit from Youtube, but at least they give SOMETHING back to people who spend hours making all these free videos.

Steemit is ad-free, and when you join they give you a small amount of crypto-currency that grows as you write posts and people “up-vote” your post (which is the same as “liking’ it on fb). You can actually convert the crypto currency to Australian Dollars if you make enough. Although i still don’t really understand the ins-and-outs of it, i’m giving it a go for now, and sharing this post with my Facebook friends who may be similar-minded. At least on Steemit, you will share in some of the rewards, rather than just giving them all to Mark Zuckerberg and Google.

Internet 3.0 is here and growing, and although there are always drawbacks, to me it’s better than the 1% of gatekeepers like google and Facebook profiting off the 99% of the input of others.

Steemit rewards are transparent in that you can see what people have earned from their posts and comments. It has a robot that checks if you are plagiarising work from elsewhere on the web. They also encourage new users by upvoting your “introduce yourself” blog/post. There are some lovely people you may never have met elsewhere, and it seems it’s growing every day. There is a whole lot of information for newbies and when you ask questions, someone is usually happy to answer.

There are some definite drawbacks i see with Steemit, such as their video platform “Dtube”, is extremely slow and clunky at present. I’ve not been able to upload a video so far, but if they ever improve that, it will be a great rival to “Youtube’. They also reward you with crypto currency dollars and cents based on how good many likes your video gets.

I realise Steemit is not for everyone, and if a better alternative were to come along where you could have the concept of steemit (where value is shared among users), combined with the Facebook equivalent of ‘groups’ like the donkey owners group for example, i would again vote with my feet, but for now, this is where i’ll be. Hope to see some of you on steemit. You can find me at https://steemit.com/@peacedonkeys.