Steemit in the press - Huffington Post article 9/7 - Is It Time For a Decentralized Social Media?

TL;DR

The article tackles current Social Media platforms and their centralised data management and monetisation of user data to their own gain, without any return for the user and most of the times in an abusive way, violating privacy:

“We’ve reached a situation where just a handful of corporations such as Google or Facebook control large part of the flows on the internet especially concerning our private data,” Katharina Nocun said.

The article goes on about AKASHA, built on Ethereum and compares it with Steemit in terms of freedom of expression, rewards etc, mentioning that for Steemit you either sign up with a Facebook/Reddit account and give up on personal information privacy or you need to pay a signup fee.

The article conclusion is an encouraging view over Steemit and decentralized SM plaftorms in the future:

Several multiple new decentralized social media initiatives, including those mentioned above, are introducing competition as an engine for improvement in the social media market. They sure proffer a solution that would attract huge user base in coming years.

Here are just a few major quotes from the article. You can read it fully by following the link.

Facebook has a license to use your content in any way it sees fit. Guess you’ve known that by now. Twitter can pass any of your content to any partner organizations for any reason. Dropbox can share your data with “trusted third parties” to provide their existing services. And the list goes on.
Facebook is about to start taking user data from WhatsApp, a backtrack on a pledge to not change its privacy policy when it was bought by Facebook in 2014. The move has been criticized by US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) as a violation of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consent order which forbids firms from “unfair or deceptive trade practices”.

Ethereum-powered AKASHA has been motivated by its creators’ belief that “freedom of expression, access to information, and privacy are fundamental human rights that should be respected on the Internet as well as in real life.”
Akasha shares several essential features with Steemit, a decentralized and incentivized social media platform that rewards users with its own cryptocurrency. However, unlike Akasha, SteemIt is built upon its own blockchain and rewards users with its own cryptocurrency.
It focuses on the freedom of speech, elimination of advertising from social media and rewarding of users who create high-quality content, or act as curators, and thus ensure that the platform offers its readers a worthwhile experience.
The authors of Steemit 101 also criticized corporate-owned and controlled centralized social media and singled out Facebook as the most notorious example of all.
A major difference between Steemit and other decentralized social media projects such as Diaspora and Synereo concerns privacy. At the moment, to sign up for Steemit, one needs an existing Facebook or Reddit account. The backdoor method to create a Steemit account without being a Facebook or Reddit user requires payment of a small registration fee.

Synereo proposes a spy-proof platform that protects users’ data being tracked and monetized for someone else’s financial gain. It operates on the view that users’ attention is worth money hence a next-gen social network that operates in “the attention economy” that cannot be blocked or restricted by centralized powers such as governments or Internet service providers.