The intent of the article isn't a laundry list of complaints against Steemit or to imply it's a scam. I think it's a platform with promise, but it seriously needs to address some issues (and soon) regarding voting, curation, rewards and so on. Focusing on short term rewards will damage or destroy this platform. So far the decisions have been to maximize the short term rewards. The pool of people who are willing to soak up the STEEM from power downs are getting smaller and that's a sign of the rapidly decreasing value the metrics I highlighted are correct.

Looking at the charts, I would think that churn rate has to be in excess of 30% to justify the steep drop off of active users. Not good.