Google no longer controls who sees content. We do!

Google now has a choice. It can either love steemit, or filter it out.  They should be careful though.

First of all, Google has one of the most difficult jobs, indexing and ranking the entire internet. They never get as much appreciation as they should.  I still use google, and will continue to use google.

The point I'm making, is that unlike Google (who controls how site ranks), steem posts and their ranking is done by the same users who use steemit!

The users control which content is popular on steemit!

I can already hear the mumbling in the background... "no the whales do".

Do they?  Whales don't always agree with one another. New whales are created all the time.  As I write this post, I'm becoming a whale too.  (A quick check of my public wallet will show you I'm no where near a whale yet).

I'm like a little embryo baby whale egg that just got fertilized.

With enough quality posts, enough curation time, enough days passing, I will grow up to be a small whale too.  All it will take is 10 people like me at that point, to upvote a decent post, and we'll outvote any large whale.

Google on the other hand, is already the largest whale on the internet.

I have no doubt in my mind, Google is already reverse engineering the steemit system and asking these questions:

1. How fast can we build our own steemclone.google.com?
2. How can we use the popularity of what steem users are attracted to, and get them using a google branded, and google owned product instead?
3. How can we dominate the steemit system? 
4. Can we send google developers over there to sway steem posts to a more google-dependent system?
5. etc.. etc..

Google basically bought Dejanews in 2001, the largest Usenet archive. Google then turned it into Google Groups. Usenet news is now almost dead.  The majority of internet users don't even know what it is..

Today, you can read stories from Usenet as "alt.stories" in the groups.google.com search bar.  But you can quickly see how [deliberately] clunky the interface is..

I believe this is done to circumvent Usenet news. This reinforces what google wants.. For people to find their information via Google's main search page.

If Google believes it can stomp out steemit, by lowering steemit ranking scores it probably will. This will occur either as a profitable business decision.  Or it may occur because of governmental suggestions that this is a good idea.

Understand that free speech on the internet is fine, in a nicely (ahem) corporately controlled, and government regulated way.

There is more to this story, and I know this discussion could go on and on, but my point is simply this:

Google no longer controls who sees content. We do!

...and here is my warning to Google:

Be very careful on how you support and rank steem posts.  If you filter us out, we'll catch on, and then a decentralized search engine will be coming too.

The internet is big enough for Google AND steemit.  Both can co-exist if Google agrees to play nicely.