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People write articles and post them to article syndication websites in order to gain a lot of backlinks quickly.
But you're smart enough to look for a catch in this apparent free lunch, and there is one. The same article will probably be copied on multiple websites, but the search engines only want to index one instance of the same page. Therefore many of these articles will be subject to a duplicate content penalty, and won't give you any benefit in the search engines.
Another drawback is one of appearances. If your site looks to be nothing but a collection of other people's content, people will link to the source (ie, those other websites), rather than to your site. And your visitors will leave to check out those other sites as well.