There has been much talk from the Steemit team about the coming Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) and also about Steemit Hives and Communities. What I find the most curious is in everything I’ve read so far, they completely ignore Steem Engine tokens and tribes. The Steemit team acts like all of these thing are new ideas that have never been available to Steemit users before, even though they’ve been available through Steem Engine for a while.

The new SMT and Hive / Community implementations will be built into the Steemit network instead of being a third-party network that’s tacked onto Steemit like Steem Engine is, however it would still be good for the Steemit team to acknowledge Steem Engine and all the work that project has done, and everything the Steemit team has been able to learn from it.

It just seems rather disingenuous the way the Steemit team talks about SMTs and Communities without mentioning Steem Engine tokens and tribes.

Either way, even with the integration of SMTs and Communities Steem and Steemit still tend to be a closed platform, not in source code but in the way it works, as opposed to other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Doge. If Steemit could find a better way to open Steem to everyone that would certainly be a step in the right direction.