I'm not really sure i see the difference vis a vis centralization on facebook and steemit, at least not yet.
Consider this steend quote from infovore's article on steemed.
>From my perspective, my bot serves the purpose of executing salary distribution to my author list... (in a comment) It is very much like an employee/employer relationship. In a good relationship, the employer (roughly equivalent to myself) trusts that the employee (roughly equivalent to the author) will produce good work
So in steem, we have just what we have in facebook -- a centralized power structure that remunerates paid employees for content.
Steemit is, obviously, much smaller than FB at the monent, so the authors that benefit significantly are greater as a percentage of the whole, but that gap seems to be narrowing as adoption grows.
Now, you can call it a meritocracy... maybe youre even correct. But you can also call facebook a meritocracy. The only real difference is that steemit lets the 99% of users whos vote makes no difference cast a vote anyway.
At the end of the day, facebook writers who get paid get paid because mark Zuckerberg and his inner circle like what they have to say. Steemit writers get paid because dan, ned and their innercircle like what they have to say.
Now you can look to the future and say it wont always be like this (though the numbers don't back you up), or you can laud the other differences in the platform. But representing it as "decentralized" seemsa trifle intellectually dishonest.
that said, upvoted for cool gold logo and analysis.