If you are in the crypto world for more than one year, you noticed a consistent trend in which people of all walks of life, from beginners to influencers, are taking their time to mock Steemit. "It's a Ponzi scheme!", "It's a scam!", "It's worse than a scam!".
I confess that I'm not discarding completely these people, as I truly believe that anyone is entitled to his own opinion on this Earth. And I respect people who stand by their opinions, especially when these opinions are rooted in facts.
So it's because I did listen to all the discarding comments about Steemit that I can make now some sort of an X-ray analysis of this trend. After almost a year of being on this platform (tomorrow it will be exactly one year since I joined Steemit), I think these are the top 5 reasons people are mocking this platform.
1. Ignorance - People Don't Understand The Technology
With all this FUD being spread about cryptocurrencies, it's easy to throw the blanket of "scammers, douchebags and thieves" over yet another crypto project. Add to this the highly inflationary specific of Steem, as a currency, and there you have it: "printing money out of thin air!".
But these people are ignoring the fact that fiat is printed out of thin air each and every day, and they don't have any control over the process. It's in the hand of governments and central banks, and, more often than not, this process hurts the majority.
Steemit combines content publishing, cryptocurrencies and consensus in a very, very different way. It's not easy to understand it, so ignorance accounts, in my opinion, for at least 80% of all the bad stuff written or said about Steemit.
2. Fear - People Understand The Technology, But Fear Its Consequences
This type of discourse comes from people who are usually well situated on the digital space - publishers, bloggers, influencers. Some of them are getting a glimpse of this technology, but, for some reason, they choose not to get onboard. Maybe it's too difficult for them to start over, maybe they already have a lot of assets in the traditional content business (big mailing lists, huge traffic, hundreds of thousands of subscribers).
Fact is, they fear, consciously or not, the disruptive potential of Steemit (and of any blockchain-based, consensus-enhanced publishing platform) and for this reason they are rejecting it. Their stance is usually more contained, but nevertheless discarding.
3. Competition - Yet Another Social Network? Oh, My!
Another source of discarding comments about Steemit is coming from social network themselves, which are implementing all sorts of "walled garden" practices. One of this practice is isolating Steemit links from their network and throttling them down. I witnessed this consistently on Facebook: links to Steemit are treated differently than links to internal posts or just individual blogs.
This approach snowballs into creating the false impression that "Steemit is a joke, it has no weight in the market". False.
4. Contingency - Somebody Said Somebody Bad About Something, Let's Jump In, 'Cause It Feels Good
Many beginners are just borrowing half-digested opinions from so-called influencers and then re-spread them, because it reinforces their social status. It makes you "cool" to retweet some stupid sentence pulled by some "influencer" who spat that out between two bites of his turkey sandwich, in a gas station. And that's how you create "viral" stuff about stuff.
Contingency is not related only to Steemit bashing, it's a deeply human trait which asks for social status reinforcement, no matter the facts.
5. Impatience - I'm Busting My Ass For Six Months, And I'm Still A Minnow!
A lot of well intended, educated and disciplined people are joining Steemit and doing their job day in and day out, for months. But, for some reason, they can't generate the revenue they're expecting - or the revenue they see at other content creators and they get bitter.
I have to remind them that, before Steemit, the minimum inception time for a decent blog was - and still is - two years. The first two years you don't even think at revenue, you just write. Write to hone your skills, write to generate links, write for SEO, write for sponsored posts, write, write, write. And you get nothing. On Steemit, at least, you get a penny or two. Don't mock that penny or it will go away from you.
Steemit is still in beta. It's largely an experiment and, despite the fact that it already generates a lot of wealth, it's not yet mature. It's by no means perfect, or even complete. It's changing deeply every few months and some modifications are good, some not so good. But it's a living product, based on a revolutionary technology and it's still kicking.
That's why I still choose it every day, while I do my best to listen to all the naysayers.
I just hope they're listening to what I write too. Otherwise, they miss out.
A lot.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):