Steemit is like Reddit but with money for upvotes. Bear with me. I’ll explain what I mean. Bottom line, it’s supposed to be a mechanism to get your content seen and then get paid for it.

Let’s start with upvotes, the Internet Points you can get on Reddit. The example could just as easily be Are Reddit upvotes worth anything? At first glance, no. They are fun to get. They validate our activities. They prove that we did/wrote/shared something that people like. But they can’t be easily exchanged for dollars. That would defeat the intrinsic value of “I got these internet points because people liked my fresh memes.” Right? Maybe…

A higly upvoted Reddit account can be sold to someone who wants to look like an experienced redditor (it’s against the rules, but possible). Maybe a content marketer wants to look more legitimate. He knows that a new Reddit account is suspicious. So he buys an experienced account to look authoritative. If he’s willing to pay $250 for an account with 15,000 upvotes, we could establish an exchange rate between upvotes and dollars. So, the idea that upvotes are “worth” money is not totally crazy.

How could Reddit monetize upvotes? Imagine if Reddit servers awarded redditors “influence points” when they got upvotes. Redditors could spend influence points to promote content in the page rank. But here’s the smart bit: redditors could also sell their influence points for cash to the highest bidder.

You can read more here:
http://bestthenews.com/article/what-steem-and-what-steemit-wed-07272016-1811.html