from a guy running a huge community myself:
there are so many details involved especially if you want to create a self-governing community and making sure its all fast enough and reliable enough. I have huge respect for the guys that started this platform. Its a massive amount of work. When I heard this would be a scam I told them its impossible to put so much work into it and so much love to just let it end for the money. Doesn't make any sense. I used to be 90% facebook 10% twitter. now i am 40% twitter 40% steem and 20% facebook with my online publishing time. One tremendous advantage that steem has over facebook and twitter or quora is that its extremely well indexed within google. Facebook is only well indexed for page names you create but not for the individual posts.. twitter only for profiles but the individual posts not at all. So anything that you put on here on steemit will in time get much more google traffic