I was on the fence about joining hubski, but this post made me a convert. I've been saying a lot of the same things for a long time and it's a gasp of relief to know that other people feel the same way.

Two observations I have on this 'Not Mine' mentality:

1. No one seems to know what "blog spam" actually is. I chalk the kind of person who misuses the term "blogspam" up as the same kind of person who uses "travesty" when they mean "tragedy", or "conflate" when they mean "equate." Actual blog spamming is where one blog acts as a click-through to another blog, making the first blog merely a middleman to a second blog. But a huge portion of people seem to think that "blogspam" is constituted by simply posting your own blog period. This is both baffling (in the sense that I don't know how they drew that conclusion) and infuriating (in the sense that it's so absurd.)

2. I'd like to amend "this favors large commercial outlets" to "this favors large commercial outlets and hobbyists or ultra small-time creators, while screwing anyone in-between." Are you a hobbyist on the verge of being okay? Great, we'll upvote your small-time effort to the front page. And commercial content makes it to the front page anyway, because of the 'Not Mine' policy you cited. But if you're somewhere in the middle? If you're a neither a hobbyist nor a huge? You can go jump off a cliff, apparently.