Good day, and thank you to my friend and professor @yousafharoonkhan for a new opportunity to learn. This week, the professor brought us into the world hosting us all; Social media. He explained the decentralized and centralized aspects of it, and gave us homework tasks. This is my attempt at completing the task.

1. Decentralized and Centralized Social Media Concept

Centralized Social Media

Like the name implies, this is social media that has a central governing body. This type of social media makes rules that limit the flexibility of content, uploaded by their users, according to their own personal standards or government/investors influenced decisions. This means they censor words used, who can make comments, posts, and they have full control and can block your account at their own time, for any reason, and you cannot do anything about it. You can even christen it "Controlled Social Media".

Upon all this power taken from the hand of the users, these platforms still use their users to generate income for their owners, giving little or nothing to the users. How do they make this money;

1. Selling personal data of users to information agencies
2. Using their traffic to get advertisement deals
3. Charging users for special services.

Examples of centralized social media are; Facebook, twitter, youtube, whatsapp, etc.

Decentralized Social Media

This type of media has no owner and is in the hands of the community. As the name imples, there is no central power, and users control their accounts. There is freedom to post whatever content you feel like, and most importantly, everyone gains from the community’s growth. The power in such systems are decentralized and personal data is controlled by the owners of the information.
Examples of decentralized social media platforms are Steemit, Hive, Dtube, Minds, etc. asides keeping information safe, Decentralization also ensures safety of data funds and profile.

Decentralized social media	Centralized social media
Data stored on several independence nodes	data stored on the center server
Account is Safe from hacks	easily hacked
Personal data is safe	Personal data is acquired easily
Profile controlled by users	profile controlled by company
Freedom to post any content	censored posts
Consensus is required to effect changes	The owners can modify at anytime, as they please

2. Which One is The Future of Social media ? Decentralized or centralized Social media?

Innovations is the world's way of saying "We want better". As we all know, the centralized social media platforms have been around for long, and they get bolder daily. Recently Whatsapp announced their intentions to share personal information of users. This sort of boldness is sponsored by centralization. Decentralized social media were invented to tackle this problem, so obviously;

DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE FUTURE AND THE FUTURE IS HERE NOW!

I know growth is a gradual process and the concept of decentralized social media has not firmly rooted yet, Steemit is leading the charge to this revolution, and it is our work here as steemians to push this revolution.
We have to tell our friends, family and even "enemies" let us remove the shackles centralization is trying to place on us, and come to a free world.

The most beautiful thing about all this is, we all reap the rewards from the growth of the system. Steemit for example uses the Proof-of-Brain concept to allow its users to earn from creating content that adds value to the blockchain. This is hardly seen in centralization, as the CEO and others hug all the proceedings to themselves. Also, decision making is made by consensus, to favor the whole community and not at the whims of the owners.

3. Steemit Vs Twitter and Facebook

Well steemit is in so many ways better than twitter and facebook, but I will use a table to make this clear

Parameter	Steemit	Facebook and Twitter
Freedom of Speech	On Steemit, you are allowed to do what you want with your personal blog space, using the right tags	facebook and twitter censor what you post regularly, on your own personal space
Acccount Control	Your account belongs to you and cannot be affected under normal circumstances by other people	These platforms can easily block your accounts. Twitter personally closed my accounts thrice in a year.
Safety of content	Steemit is committed to ending plagiarism, you see accounts like @endingplagiarism, making sure your content is safe	Content is regularly stolen, and nothing can be done about it
Remuneration	Steemit rewards us for creating content and adding to the community	Facebook and Twitter use the content we create to make money for themselves

4. Steemit social media change the lives of millions of its users

I love this question, it gives me the platform to talk about steemit the way I want to. Steemit has changed lives, is changing lives, and will change lives. Who and who has steemit changed their lives?

1. ME;
   I am a student studying a course he does not want to do because his family believes he should be a doctor, but I have always loved three things; Technology, Teaching, and Finance. On steemit, I found all three. As a humble professor of this academy, I have achieved my dream of following my dad's footsteps of being a professor, I get to learn and live more in the world of blockchain technology and I have achieved financial independence from my parents, who are trying really hard to make ends meet in a country where salaries are owed for years, at least now I can lend a hand.
   So yes, steemit changed my life

2. That writer who does not have the funds to run a blog.
   Imagine being a writer for so many years, making little or no money, then steemit comes and provides a platform, you meed fellow writers from other countries in different communities, get better and also get rewarded for writing on steemit.

3. That photographer who always gets his images stolen before he can make money
   So jude is a photographer, he takes nice pictures, but has no platform to show his talent on till his friend Samson introduced him on steemit. Now he posts his pictures, they don't get stolen and he makes money from it. He also engages in photography contests

4. The regular guys and girls out there
   Steemit provided a platform for people to talk about their daily activities like cooking, sports, diary and all, which people do while spending electricity and mobile data normally. But steemit rewards them for making these posts, and they love the community.

There are so many others, but time will not permit me to talk about it all. Steemit is for everyone, young, old, scientist, artist, etc.

5. How can we make money with Steemit's decentralized social media?

This question has thousands of answers, I will stick with a few

1. Engage in contests
   There are so many contests that go on daily on steemit. The winners of these contests are well rewarded. All you have to do is compete well, some contests I have engaged in and won are spud4steem, writing contest, etc.

2. Diary Games & Town in 10 pics
   These contests are the most popular. All you have to do is talk about your day, and/or ost 10 pictures of your town, and you earn rewards from doing just these. I know most of us upload our daily activities and places we visit on social media every day, now imagine doing the same thing and earning. I used to do this a lot

3. Learn or Teach in the Academy
   The Steemit Crypto Academy is my favourite, they reward every user who creates standard posts as lectures or homeworks. Only professors create lecture posts and summaries at designated times, students all through the week complete homework tasks and get upvoted if successfully done. This has become my main focus of recent.

4. Curation
   If you are not so much of a content creator, just fund your account with a lot of steem, power up to SP and use this to vote on posts you like, and earn curation rewards from them. I curate content alongside a lot of my fellow steemians, when I find the content appealing.

6. How to create communities on Steemit social media

First open your wallet, then click on communities

Fill in the name of the community
Then say something about the purpose
click on next

The following information gets displayed, save all these, then click next

You are asked to pay 3 steem to create a community, select okay

Boom. Its done

Conclusion

We have seen the era of centralized social media rise, and we will witness the growth of decentralized social media just the same. I cannot wait for that to happen. Let us keep pushing to make steemit better