Something you wrote here made me think of something. You pointed out that FB's raison d'etre is to gather information about its users. It uses that information in order to get money from advertisers.
Now, it predominantly uses it for advertising on its own site, but I wonder if that information can be sold to other sites as well? Probably?
My point is this: in a lot of ways a site like steemit makes it possible for anyone to gather information about anyone. Since all actions are recorded in your history, if you wanted to, you can track who likes what and keep your own record of it. If a bot doesn't yet exist to do it, I'm sure it's not too far away.
It's like democratizing big data. :)
I'm not saying this to scare anyone away from steemit. And I'm not sure that anyone can leverage that information as easily into advertising as one could on Facebook or one of these other sites. But, any thoughts on this thinking? Am I way off?