Related question, actually: Is it good form or bad form to reblog your own stuff from a personal blog elsewhere to Steemit or vice versa? (All my own work so no copyright issues.) I've long been adverse to blogging on not -my-own-site, for copyright control and "survives past the blogging host going out of business" reasons. Steem seems interesting, but I still like having my own control over my written archive.
(I don't know if I'm going to double post, but at least it's helpful to know if it's kosher or not.)
That's a great question, and it's one the community is still figuring out. If you do post content that exists elsewhere, cheetah bot will probably comment about it. Ideally, we're hoping for original content which can increase the SEO value here. Otherwise, I've seen people request that the original be modified to link to the content on Steemit both to ensure the content isn't being plagarized and to draw more traffic to Steemit (I did that with my Medium post here).
There are no hard and fast rules, and I do think there is value spreading great content to people here who wouldn't otherwise come in contact with it. So, maybe use your best judgement. Make it clear the content is not original for Steemit and maybe even link to the original. One of my favorite authors / developers / witnesses here is @anyx and he covered an aspect of this recently here: The Double Spending Problem on Steemit.
I also touched on related stuff briefly here: Why You Should Care About Plagiarism and Fair Use.
Does it make a difference if the "original" is here on Steem vs elsewhere? I agree reposting my old stuff from my blog here is kinda tacky; I'm thinking more about if I do some new cool article on whatever that I want syndicated to Planet PHP, for instance, through my blog:
I'm not sure what's best from either a marketing/reach or etiquette perspective there.
Good questions that I'm not entirely sure about. Most likely it makes the most sense to link to the steemit content as the original and just have other sources link to it. From an SEO perspective, that would bring the best benefit to Steemit.