Being the true believer in Steem that I am, I often find myself trying to explain to friends or family why they should bother to change their habits and sign up at Steemit. Overcoming a combination of natural skepticism after a lifetime of seeing actual scams, and the inertia of habit can be a tough task.
You must forgive people their skepticism. In fact, you should applaud it. The truth is, I was pitched a multi-level-marketing vacation club scheme at a recent event that was pitched to attendees entirely as a "party". It was just enough of a party to qualify for the title (it had food and alcohol), but the entertainment were several people trying to recruit you for their downline in what amounted to a rotating vacation timeshare.
People are getting suckered everywhere they go, and don't ask about their pensions!
Add looming financial crises around the world to a financial and Wall-Street culture that Cartman eloquently sums up below, and you must expect to be forced to pass a high bar of evidence to pitch an idea as radical as Steemit, particularly to those that aren't even familiar with Bitcoin.
I'm not a marketer at all, and I tend to approach people purely one-on-one. However, thanks to a recent post by 
I tend to begin by explaining Steemit, rather than Steem, as that skips the step of immediately establishing the separation between Steem the currency and Steemit the platform. This lets you establish a connection between a website they will know, such as Reddit or Facebook, and can entirely sidestep a complete lack of cryptocurrency knowledge in your audience, at least until the cash-out questions.
So...What is Steemit?
Steemit is a social media platform that pays rewards to all users each day based on (theoretical) contribution of quality (determined by delegated-proof-of-stake) to the community from a shared reward pool created from a static and linearly-decreasing hard-coded inflation rate.
Derp?
OK, you know how on Reddit every upvote is worth 1 point (they're called karma)?
Yerp.
Imagine if every Reddit upvote was worth $1, and you could trade them, but you could only make 10 per day and you couldn't duplicate accounts. Now imagine that the more total lifetime upvotes (karma) you have on your account, the more your upvotes were worth. Your upvote could be worth $10, or $100, or $1000 if you had received many votes without selling them, and the more your upvote is worth, the more you receive back in rewards for voting, called curation. If you further imagine that you could cash out those upvotes into a free market of buyers and sellers, you have a good enough analogue of Steemit for conversation.
It's not a pyramid-scheme, it's a reverse funnel system.
From there, questions tend to revolve around whether or not Steem/Steemit is a scam or pyramid scheme of some type. We all know the ones – we've heard them anytime we try to explain Steem to someone. I think I will address some of them in a near-future post, such as:
How is Steemit not a scam or ponzi scheme?
Where does the money come from?
How do I get my money?
How do you know the price won't crash?
This sounds too good to be true?
follow 4 follow?
If you have any additions or errata for this post, please let me know! I will see that they are voted to the top of the comments, and will make the appropriate edits (if possible).
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Sources:
Copyright: South Park, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Steemit, Yerp Council (lol): http://yerp.yacvic.org.au/