When it comes to the crypto social ecosystem, many people think of Steem and DeSo, two early pioneers. Their approaches are actually quite different.

The Steem chain started out early on by incentivizing content creation. Its ecosystem now has over 1 million users and is integrated with 324 applications, covering everything from blogs to videos (like D.tube). Steemit itself is a flagship—posting articles and comments on-chain, with authors and reviewers earning STEEM, SBD, or Steem Power. The chain is designed to be quite practical: a fee-free model based on bandwidth allocation, with block times of about 3 seconds, suitable for frequent social interactions. The maturity of its content ecosystem is definitely a strength, although recent growth momentum has slowed, and governance and decentralization are still evolving. From a price perspective, it tends to fluctuate with the content ecosystem’s cycle. If it can further open up its social graph and attract more third-party applications, there’s theoretically room for expansion.

DeSo’s approach is somewhat different. It evolved from BitClout (launched in 2021) and also follows the social token + creator economy model. Both chains are exploring how to use blockchain to transform content production and distribution, but DeSo is experimenting with different economic models and ecosystem layouts—you can keep an eye on its future developments. Overall, Steem represents a more mature and stable content chain concept, while DeSo is more like conducting new experiments, each with its own line of thinking.