When I first heard about Steem I thought it was a scam too, despite being in the crypto currency scene since it's early days, I don't remember when exactly but back when Bitcoin was worth cents (sadly I never mined it, or I'd be rich now!).

I think my main reason for thinking that Steem is a scam was that I saw people get thousands of dollars for posts I didn't feel are worth that much. It sounded way too good to be real. Now this is much more rare on Steem since there are so many more users compared to its early days, so the posts that get so much money tend to also be of a much higher quality compared to before. And more and more people talking about Steem then made me check it out again.

And with the now saner rewards for posts, it finally began to click in my head. Of course there is value in people writing posts. It's journalism. Journalists get paid. Of course writing articles is worth money. Facebook makes billions with people posting about their life. Why shouldn't you be able to create a system where that money goes back to the content creators and not the big company controlling all of it?

So then I finally signed up for Steem in April and I was still wary in the beginning, because it took me a long time to figure out how Steem really works (it's quite complex to understand, the witness system, the three currencies which made no sense to me until I understood the system behind it and why every single one of them has it's unique function), but I read as much as I could, started playing with it's programming API and now I could kick myself for not having been part of Steem way sooner :)