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Recently I've been thinking long and hard about the value of the STEEM blockchain, primarily in terms of userbase, contentbase, and communities. 

Other than being a currency-backed social platform, what makes the platform so different from the likes of Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc?

All information on the STEEM blockchain is secure and can be accessed by anyone for their own research and analysis. Is this the case with the regulars like Reddit, Facebook, etc? I don't think so. Not all information collected by these platforms are readily available. 

This is why I think STEEM is something quite different. Anybody will be able to study the network in-depth and have anybody else propose solutions and even design narratives for different communities and perspectives. I think this is pretty damn valuable - it's just so difficult to make a good guess at the numbers since this is quite a different ballgame.

Information is growing, thanks to STEEM's 3-seconds transaction time and zero fees - which supports frequent social transactions, much more than any other blockchain-based platforms in existence. That said, there will be a time when more users start finding ways to make good sense of things by studying the blockchain. 

I think such a feat is impossible to do for Reddit, Facebook, etc (in this case, they're the ones telling you the story of their platform, and you have no easy way of knowing it at all). The trick now is to find those who know about online community-building and ways to evaluate them.

So recently I came across Richard Millington's works under a community consultancy firm called [Feverbee](https://www.feverbee.com/consultancy/), and his works seem to resonate with what I'm trying to find out about.

Pretty excited that I've got plenty of studying ahead of me, but here are the links. These are highly recommended reads, especially if you're into understanding blockchain communities and plan on operating in them with confidence:-
- Building Buzzing Communities - http://course.feverbee.com/wp-content/uploads/HalfBuzzingCommunities.pdf
- Evaluating the value of online communities - https://www.feverbee.com/roi/executive-summary/

Here's an interesting page taken out of the [Buzzing Communities pdf](http://course.feverbee.com/wp-content/uploads/HalfBuzzingCommunities.pdf):-
<center>https://s24.postimg.org/5ao2lh6k5/buzzingcomms.png</center>

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