Steemit is a social blogging application, similar to Blogger or Tumblr. However, content, comments, and votes are stored and secured on the blockchain itself. Steemit is a DApp that has its own blockchain. The core is adapted from Bitshares v2.0, but substantially modified to be purpose-suited to the application.

In Steemit, users are rewarded tokens for submitting and voting on content. Each user's vote carries power equal to their shares in the network, called Steem Power. If a user attracts a large following, or a following of users with a large amount of Steem Power, then the rewards can be substantial. Rewards are typically small (from pennies to a few dollars), but some authors have been able to get payouts in the thousands because they attracted the favor of power users referred to as whales. In some cases, the vote of a whale can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars on its own.

As mentioned earlier, Steemit is not on Ethereum and cannot be programmed with Solidity. It does, however, have a growing ecosystem of apps that talk to the Steemit blockchain and are used to curate, display, and monetize Steemit content in different ways. Anyone considering blogging, social media, or a similar content app, should carefully evaluate Steemit and its code base. It is all open source and a few modified clones have already been created, such as Golos (for the Russian market) and Serey (for the Cambodian market).