If you listen to the haters they'll say "Steem sucks, it's a ninja mined pieced of shit, the witnesses don't do shit, steemit sucks, and look they can't even get a fork right. You're all idiots and morons for being here."
I'm not going to say this place is without problems, but I want to share some opposing views:
Steem is weak
Steem is incredibly strong. In 40 minutes we'll have completed 2 hardforks in 48hrs. Many chains can't even done one in years. That may be ok for now, but scaling is going to be a problem even for the bitcoins of the world when this tech finally pushes mainstream harder. When that happens the difficulty of making improvements is going to murder some alts. I'm extremely confidant in the ability of this chain to adapt.
Steemit sucks
Blocktrades has been in a game a long time and are generally seen as competent. They coded this last hardfork. It had a bug that was hard to catch. It halted the chain. Does that mean that Blocktrades is a fucking group of morons who can't code shit? No, it means that fixing a blockchain in production mode is hard to get perfectly on the first try. Steem can be iterated upon and as you can see it can get back to work.
What this means to me is that Steemit hasn't been the worst fucking blockchain coders in the world for the past 3 years. It means they are competent coders working hard to build an extremely challenging product to make function in the wild. I do think in the past their communications have sucked and their flipping priorities changing has been challenging... but these are separate from code. I have a lot of faith in Vande and Justin. They are talented people and two of the most critical people in the ecosystem and I'm grateful for their service to this chain.
Witnesses suck
We're competing two hardforks in 48 hours. It was a combined team effort of catching the bug and getting this thing going again. It's a giant team effort that given the circumstances of a bug could not possibly go better. Yes, it would be ideal if every piece of this was caught with 100% perfection each time, but that's not how code works. I do think there could be more effort to get more eyes on it to catch these things, but as noted this one is pretty hard to catch on the testnet.
The primary goal of a witness is making sure the chain runs. This group did very admirably. It increases my faith that nothing will stop this chain AND that improvements can keep coming!
Price sucks
This is true, but it also means means that it's one of the best times to buy this thing I think we'll ever get again. Right now there is giant asymmetry in what I know about Steem and what the rest of the world knows about it. I have faith more people will come here and that Steem will continue to function as one of the best blockchain projects in the world. What we lack in hype we make up for with a functional userbase, great chain, and good people. Marketing can be corrected for because of this fork and people may start hearing about us differently.
Low price with blood in the streets is very bullish. I don't think there will be a better time to buy for years.
My real answer is that hater's perception sucks
The dev team is great.
The projects are great.
The blockchain is great.
The witnesses are great.
The community is great.
Price is undervalued.
This to me is an exploding time bomb in the upwards direction, and I have faith in newsteem. Haters be damned. This project is incredible.