I'm pretty sceptical of the Steem project

Why are you skeptical? How many active users does Steem have? What is the account abandonment rate? What percentage of users earn anything near their time opportunity cost? What features does Steem offer which Medium doesn't which can make users sticky even if they don't earn that much? How many daily users does Medium have? Is Facebook testing adding in-app content such as blogging? Is a steady 1k daily signups an exponential (viral) growth rate?