While Facebook steals your information and makes billions off of it, here are some social media platforms that give you part of the cut.

In the age of smartphones, we find ourselves more and more attached to social media. This new relationship with social platforms on the internet has quite a few large implications, the biggest of which includes privacy and surveillance.

In the passing weeks, Facebook has been under lawsuit for a breach of user agreement in which they sold users’ information to someone who shouldn’t have it. Facebook has been making billions of dollars off of this for a number of years in a process that has come to be known as data farming or mining.

Basically data farming is employed by a large portion of internet platforms that provide a free service. These platforms provide a free service and, to make money, they sell ad space on their site and they track their users’ activity to develop a profile on each individual user.

These profiles consist of each users’ likes and dislikes, the users’ political affiliations and beliefs, what brands the users prefer, etc. They sell this data to companies to then send each user their own individual targeted ads tailored the their preferences.

This is why when someone searches for a specific product, they start seeing ads for similar products everywhere they go on the internet.

Today, Facebook remains the biggest means of surveillance in the world, keeping tabs on over a billion people. In 2017, Facebook made 84.41 dollars off of each of its users in North America. So, what this seems like is that we are providing them with a commodity that is more valuable than the service that they are providing us.

This is why the future of social media lies not in free social media platforms, but in incentivized social media platforms. Incentivized meaning that they pay us to use their social media platform.

Why would someone use a social media platform that doesn’t pay them over a social media platform that does? It’s strictly better to get a cut of the money a social media platform is making off of its users.

Right now, we are seeing two major incentivized social media sights, Steemit and Lit. These are both based on blockchain technology, which for a multitude of reasons is great for the future of the idea.

Lit is the blockchain incentivized version of Instagram. It operates almost exactly the same as Instagram except for one key difference: users get paid for their content. How much they are paid is determined by a mathematical formula based on the amount of views, time viewed and amount of likes. So, for the people that have huge followings on social media, this can be very lucrative.

Steemit is another decentralized incentivized social media platform that pays based on likes and views. Steemit operates more like a blog like Tumblr or Reddit. The Steemit function is a little more complex, as well. It splits the money between the creater of a post and the people who upvoted it in the first place.

People that upvote a post before it gets popular are paid a pretty significant amount. Users can also be paid on Steemit for contributing to the conversation. So, people that make good comments to posts will also be paid. These are all based on the amount of upvotes they receive from other people.

Steemit also has a feature where users can pay to have their content promoted.

As previously stated, Steemit and Lit are both based on blockchain technology, the same technology that cryptocurrencies are based on. They are also centered around their own crypto tokens.

Steemit pays its users in 50 percent Steem and 50 percent Steem Power. Steem can be sold on most crypto exchanges and traded for bitcoin or pretty much any currency imaginable, including U.S. dollars. The other, Steem Power, cannot be sold for two years.

Lit pays in its crypto currency called Mithril, which can also be exchanged for the fiat currency of the user’s choosing.

In the age of social media, where people are becoming overnight millionaires for their social media presence, there is no reason not to be further capitalizing on your popularity.