In terms of time on blockchain as a social media entity, Steemit is the granddaddy and Trybe is a grandchild. Steemit launched in March of 2016 out of NY and Trybe is brand-new in 2018, out of Australia.
They both offer the potential to incentivize content producers by providing cryptocurrency to creators whose content is liked by others.
However, Trybe offers a unique factor, which is the ability to lose cryptocurrency via down-votes for low quality. Although they have established a rule against down voting content based on disagreement (as opposed to its quality) it remains to be seen how this will work out. Regardless, it’s at least a step in the direction of attempting to influence higher quality contributions.
Steemit is unique in that it’s created on its own Steem blockchain (and cryptocurrency), which powers other content apps, as well.
It’s also more challenging to sign up for Steemit and currently there’s a 2 week delay to become manually verified, unless you pay to be verified via a third party service.
Signing up on Trybe.one is straightforward.
Since Steemit is the granddaddy, it’s considerably well known in the blockchain community and at this point Trybe is not.
They both allow users with more cryptocurrency in the community to have greater weight in terms of up- or down-voting content. Steemit is already suffering from the fact that “whales” (those who have outsized influence in the community) are already a dominant force and largely inform the popularity of posts.
Trybe is at least trying to mitigate the issue of whales.
The concept of whales is antithetical to the notion of decentralized control inherent within the blockchain community and certainly its technology. Perhaps time may show such to be a temporary marketing initiative to drive more engagement in the early days, only to be phased out later when it will have outlived its purpose.