People sometimes have a weird criteria for criticizing things as "not really decentralized" (like in general, not just with Steemit).

There's a difference between something that's fundamentally centralized (the US dollar for example is necessarily controlled by a few people and doesn't have any way of functioning otherwise) vs. something that's decentralized but where some people currently have more influence than others.

It's always possible that the imperfect arrangement is just the best thing that the world can handle right now and a natural progression towards something better. Often the naysayers conflate "decentralization" with "an equal outcome, immediately" and ironically actually would WANT centralization to make it happen.

I'm excited for whatever changes Ned is talking about and certainly happy for whatever would make Steem more useful for more people, but to criticize it as "not really decentralized" right now (like the comment you showed) isn't right imo.

To say something isn't decentralized, you need to offer a solution to compare it to. To just look at imperfect aspects like that SP is concentrated into a few hands isn't meaningful, because we don't know if there's any way to avoid that right now (like, if any other solution wouldn't have the same issue), so you don't want to be guilty of holding it to an impossible standard. If something is the most decentralized that we could possibly make, then it's decentralized. (even if you have to wait some time before it works better .. things being clunky when they're new is inherent to anything)