You bring up the second branch of the discussion, which was, "With all that stuff out there, how can anyone possibly find anything?" to which the answer was generally accepted to be gatekeepers one chooses oneself. In other words, Cory Doctorow and the others at BoingNoing don't have a stranglehold on the net, they are popular because people like to read them. So if they recco a work, that work has a good chance of at least being tried.

One of the more interesting aspects of the fanfic world, I've found in my forays there, is how very sophisticated the gate-keeping is: people publishing picks of lists, often with various cryptic comments about type of story, which helds guide readership to what they like.

But all this, while being a great topic in itself, wasn't germane to the issue of "does free publishing hurt other writers." So I didn't post on it.