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RE: Is SteemIt.com Turning Into Federated Media?
I think it's potentially a very bad direction to go in. Over the next few days, I'm going to try and run some numbers (using the principles outlined in this post) to see whether the "building an audience" argument holds water. My suspicion is that it doesn't help much compared to building an audience organically and that, in the long term, this kind of practice will lead to greater centralization and higher attrition rates.
Under the current system, the only way to stop it is for other big accounts to flag that kind of post, so really you need evidence that it's harming the network/users before people will take action.
Hi @sunjata and thanks for the thoughtful reply. I was a bit concerned that people would think I'm being anti-SteemIt but I'm not. Like you, I'm concerned about the direction this is going. See, it's not just "minnows" - we're talking about SteemIt users with $4k plus of SP with 100+ followers who are thinking about doing a featured article on someone else's blog because that seems like the best choice. That shouldn't be necessary (and no, I'm not just talking about me ;) ).
It's definitely not anti-Steemit to raise concerns about things that could derail a project that you care about or are invested in. I've been "pro" bitcoin for at least 3 years and I still think there's 100 things that could go wrong with it. And, although I thought the DAO was a cool idea, the groupthink around it was a huge red flag and I ended up staying well away from it. Friendly criticism is vital :)
So, yes, I agree with you that fairly wealthy accounts thinking about federating articles is a bad sign. The reason I had the idea to run the numbers on curation etc was, in fact, that I'd seen some federated fiction and considered whether I should do this myself. But when I looked at the author in question's stats, despite getting onto the front page and having a much longer posting history, they only had a third more followers than I did. Followers, and visibility in a particular community, are the key for anyone playing a long game, so that one-off payment in SBD seems to have a pretty limited value (although it would still be nice).