I love it when different and seemingly unrelated aspects of my life intersect - that usually creates a good story. I have a fairly short commute, usually about 30 minutes each way, which is just long enough for local radio shows to drive me insane. I can listen to a curated Pandora station in stretches, but the bulk of my audio entertainment comes from podcasts. The #Freakonomics podcast is one of the best, and their recent show asking if the internet is being ruined is definitely worthwhile; http://freakonomics.com/podcast/internet/
Of particular interest was the fact that there are just a handful of major tech companies that essentially control all the ways we interact with the information available on the internet. Depending on minor variations to algorithms, Google, Facebook, and Twitter can determine what we see in our feeds. (The word "feed" is an interesting choice in and of itself, as though we are being fattened for the slaughter.) In this paradigm, what constitutes censorship? And how much of what we consider our own "point of view" is actually crafted by which data ends up in feed?
Then I started thinking about how a platform like steemit is able to circumvent all of that. The "algorithm" that decides what is worth reading is crowdsourced and incentivized. The objective isn't to keep eyeballs on the page to satisfy advertisers, but rather to give the audience what they want to see and allow the audience to show their appreciation.
It's the little STEEM engine that could. . . and we'll see how high up the mountain it can take us.